斯里兰卡：Wild Elephants In Sri Lanka

Lean In

I like running and cycling. Everything about me seems so common, however, I am crazy about one thing that most girls in this world hate, which arebugs or insects.

Making friends                                                                 A Bug！

I am going to graduate from my university soon. So I wanted to do something different before that. So l chose a volunteer journey to Sri Lanka and it was my first time going overseas. I stayed in Sri Lanka for two months and I came back to China on December 13th 2015.

Others look forelephants, and I look forbugs!

Here

■The project that l worked on for is about elephant-human conflicts, which is most interesting to me.

There is an excellent pilot project that is being done to test a new method to protect crops and villagers houses from being destroyed by wild elephants. It is called a beehive fence.

l was aware that using honey bees as an elephant deterrent is already been used in Africa, and it does work for African wild elephants. But nobody has done the same thing to Asian elephants, and there is still no evidence to justify that Asian elephants are afraid of bees. Therefore this project is anexperimentin progress.

An Australian lady namedKylieis in charge of designing and conducting this project. l have to say that she is one of thecoolest ladiesI ever met and she is also my new idol. I admire her attitude to academia and life which is fresh and has inspired me.

Car

■Another activity was doing transects which is always exciting to me. The reason is that we will search for any evidence, like elephants dung or footprints that shows elephants had been around. And we probably could run into wild elephants and other wild animals as well. It was such an adventurous and exciting thing to do. Actually if you do not interrupt them, the elephants won't chase or attack you.

“What is most amazing for me is that l always can find so manyinsects!

I had never expected that I could find elephant beetle here, because it is typical insects in southern china.

Ps.Heading to the jungle

My favorite, Dung Beetle