The herd of wild elephants resumed their exodus in …

After a temporary stopover outside the city of Kunming in southwest China, the herd of wild elephants, who has already traveled 500 kilometers and holds the world in suspense, He resumed his journey north on Tuesday.

Drone photos taken on Monday by provincial forest firefighters showed the 15 members of the elephant herd sleeping in the middle of a forest in Jinning District, which was affected by heavy rains and thunderstorms.

However, this Tuesday they still walked, This sparked a new round of surveillance by authorities, according to the state broadcaster. Video surveillance.

Amid fears that elephants will invade human settlements, monitoring teams work 24 hours a day to monitor your movements, with a deployment of 410 people and 120 vehicles. Also, they commissioned 14 drones to follow and escort the herd and ensure the safety of the animals.

Chen Fei, director of the Asian Elephant Research Center of the National Forestry and Grassland Administration, said they were keeping a close eye on the animals, to see if they would resume their course north and to be able to evacuate villages if necessary.

In addition, local authorities They provided more than two tons of food and evacuated the streets to facilitate the passage of animals and prevent them from entering densely populated areas.

Exodus from the protected area

The herd, which began its journey north over a year ago, has already traveled about 500 kilometers from their home, a designated elephant protection area in Xishuangbanna, near the Chinese border with Myanmar, to Kunming, the provincial capital of Yunnan, Wednesday evening.

The space available for the last remaining indigenous elephant community in China has gradually shrunk over the years, as the rainforests of Xishuangbanna are replaced by banana, tea or rubber plantations or used for planting raw materials. lucrative for traditional Chinese medicine.

It is not known what prompted the herd to move north.But conservation efforts in Yunnan over the past decade have doubled the number of elephants, putting land and resources under increasing pressure.

With this improved protection, the wild elephant population in the province has grown to around 300, up from 193 in the 1980s.