Drone Project

For over 30 years, STE’s understanding of elephants has come from the ground, through collars, tracking data, and thousands of hours of patient observation. Today, that understanding is taking to the air.

Save the Elephants’ Drone Project explores what aerial technology can reveal about elephants that ground-based research alone cannot. Flown high and carefully above Samburu’s landscapes, drones give researchers a quiet, non-invasive vantage point from which to observe elephant families as they move, interact, and rest, without disrupting the behaviour being studied.

This aerial perspective opens up entirely new avenues of research. It allows the STE team to study social dynamics within elephant families, track movement across the landscape in far greater detail, and, fitted with infrared cameras, observe elephant behaviour after dark, a side of elephant life that has long remained largely out of reach.

As the project develops, it is beginning to reshape what’s understood about elephants, from how they behave as a family unit to how they rest through the night.