URGENT: Only Hours Left to Make Tax-Deductible Gifts for 2020

The clock is ticking and we urgently need your help to save the lives and livelihoods of the wildlife and rangers. Here are the specific programs and emergency needs on the ground that your tax-deductible gifts will be going towards.

Anti-Poaching Technology Solution & Operations Center to protect some very lucky wildlife who will soon roam 84,000 acres in Zimbabwe. Once used as a hunting concession, the land is now overseen by the Wild is Life Trust which aims to create a safe haven for the animals by combining a combination of field intelligence from some very amazing rangers and forest scouts with state of the art anti-poaching tech. They are starting from the ground up and we are here to help them deploy the fundamental infrastructure and provide the necessary day-to-day equipment to weather the challenges ahead.

What appears costly now will actually save lives and future expenses later as these investments have been deliberately and diligently chosen to be scalable and built upon for the future:

• Secure Communications Network - $50,000
  This is the digital mobile radio network - both the hardware and the internet coverage - that enables the entirety of the 84k acres to be covered using fancy terms like gateways, data transfers, microwave links, and more. This system enables seamless integration of many of the other cool tools you will read about below so that the moment the proverbial switch is flipped, countless lives will be instantly saved.
• TrailGuard AI Cameras - $10,000
  About 22 AI cameras costing $450 each are needed to detect humans from animals day and night.
• Acoustic Sensors - $25,000
  These sensitive resources further facilitate the identification of poachers, from recognizing gun shots to errant vehicles, and encourage field research by monitoring elephant trumpets to hyena calls. Ten are required at a minimum at $2500 each.
• Smart Collars - $10,000/elephant and $5,000/lions
  Not the most expensive of jewelry, yet not the cheapest. It adds up as the animals start to feel comfortable re-entering the area, but these GPS-enabled units are lighter and are more durable than anything ever before seen thanks to the ingenuity and passion from our innovative friends at Smart Parks.
• Training - $25,000
  What's awesome is that men and women on the ground locally will be trained to install, maintain, and provide informative feedback to advance the systems. Money well spent to train the engineers of tomorrow in a growing economy like sub-Saharan Africa.
• Joint Ops Control Room - $10,000
  This is the main command and control room for all the monitoring, where rangers can see everything visualized via software called Earth Ranger that brings together all the real-time activity thanks to that secure comms network ;)
• Elephant Learning Project - $10,000
  The spiritual and literal successor to the revolutionary Elephant Listening Project, we will leverage the work done with forest elephants and apply it to savannah elephants by laying the technical infrastructure for a larger study for the purposes of further understanding of elephant herds, their migration, and detection of poaching due to their communications.

The crucial continuation of a rhino repopulation program currently underway in Tanzania. You can read more about the adventures of Eric the Rhino and learn more from the segment in the telecast available on the home page, but this program is at risk due to the current COVID restrictions limiting resource fulfillment and constraints on protective ranger resourcing. We are beyond happy that Eric is safe and thriving with his new girlfriend, but the program must scale and not languish. Thus, the next phases require significant support totaling nearly $250,000. This is for the protection, research, monitoring, and more of this species. You can also sponsor a rhino for $10K!

And everyday, it is an emergency where the daily needs of the rangers on the front lines need your help from ensuring they are well fed, sheltered, and equipped. 

• Vehicle - $15,000
  Many rangers monitor by foot and will be complemented by the AI cameras, drones (a future expense), and more, but when there is a situation that needs an immediate response they need to rush to the scene. In addition to a SUV recently replaced do the affectionate stomping of an elephant, a second 4x4 is much needed to fit multiple rangers.
• Canine Unit - $6,000
  Tracking and detection dogs are proving to significantly reduce poaching incidents. A unit of 6 dogs, their training, shelter, food, and veterinary can be covered for a year for this amount. You can learn more about the role the dogs play here and watch the telecast for some amazing K9 segments introduced by the iconic Loretta Sit.
• Helicopter charter flights - $1,000/each
  When an hurt animal or orphaned one needs immediate care or a ranger needs to be brought in or removed from a situation quickly, at these times having a reserve for such use is crucial.
• Patrol handheld devices - $2,000
  Don't worry, these aren't for the rangers to make Tik Tok videos, rather they are portable mobile devices that replace the recording of incidents in a notepad which only later get transcoded into another handwritten log into immediate data captured and sent into a database which can instantly be utilized by the team at large.

These are just some of the key buckets where your generous help will go, but these are our priority buckets. We look forward to sharing the impact you have as we head into 2021 and wish you all the warmest of wishes as we together plan for a better world for all its inhabitants.

Happy New Year from the ER team around the world and in the bush.
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