Cinta was first collared in July 2012 and was re-collared in January 2014, August 2015 and July 2019. Cinta and her herd used to have their core home range in an extended lowland forest patch which directly connects to the southern part of the Bukit Tigapuluh National Park. However, since 2014, Cinta and her family often joined with other female groups in the area, forming a large clan of more than 60 elephants. For several years it looked like that she had entirely switched her home range to the southern parts of the landscape, joining with Anna and Ginting most of the time.
However, since May 2018, Cinta is up north again, roaming through her ‘old’, and much safer home range. This is an interesting behaviour as elephants are otherwise known to be quite traditional concerning their home range, and rarely (if ever) switch. A possible explanation would be that before the construction of the WKS corridor road in 2008, Cinta’s home range included areas both south and north of the road. Her movements would then be an adaption to the disturbances caused by the road that split her original range into two.
Cinta and her family continued to roam north of the WKS corridor road from October 2019 - March 2020. They only attempted to cross to the south once in the last six months, probably to meet other groups that were close to the road at that time. Cinta spent most of her time within conservation areas managed by private companies, PT LAJ and PT ABT. ABT is mostly forested and thus the potential for Human-Elephant conflicts are very low. However, the herd did frequently raid crops on illegal farms within LAJ, making it necessary to deploy the ECMU teams for conflict mitigation and elephant safeguarding. Cinta’s herd did occasionally join other female groups, but not as frequently and never consistently over longer periods of time, as other groups do. The ‘meetings’ were often limited to only a few days, and overall Cinta’s herd has shown itself to be quite independent and solid.
The photos show Cinta as well as the Elephant Conservation and Monitoring Units closely monitoring the elephants and working with the local community to protect the elephants in the Bukit Tigapuluh ecosystem.
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