Elephants Can’t Look Up: Wesley Hartmann on Drones and Elephants

For his MSc, Wesley Hartmann spent months flying a small drone at wild elephants in Malawi to answer a question almost nobody had properly asked: does it stress them out? The answer came down to anatomy. Five years after the study was published, drones have become standard kit in conservation and a headache for park authorities. We asked Wesley what he found, what has changed since, and what it means for anyone thinking of packing a drone for safari.

25° SOUTH: Before we get to drones: you once ended up in a tree because of a rhino. What happened?

Wesley: In an unfenced research camp in Majete Wildlife Reserve, Malawi, checking your surroundings before you walked to the shower was routine. Animals moved through camp constantly. One afternoon, after retrieving camera traps, back in what we thought was the “safety” of camp, a colleague and I nearly walked straight into a black rhino. She charged. We climbed two different trees, fast, and stayed there a while, with no way to tell, from up in the branches, whether she’d lost interest or was still coming.

25° SOUTH: What does a charging rhino have to do with drone research?

Wesley: That kind of not-knowing, what a wild animal is about to do and why, turned out to be more than a story from the field. It’s close to the whole reason the research got done at all. I have always been interested in how things work, and the field of animal behaviour looks at exactly that. It requires clever ways to interrogate species who can’t simply fill out a questionnaire when asked the question “why did you do that?”

25° SOUTH: Drones were already common in conservation back then. So what was missing?

Wesley: They were everywhere: surveys, anti-poaching patrols, tracking and early warning systems, even pushing wildlife away from human infrastructure and fields. What almost no one had asked was what the presence of a drone was doing to the animals being watched.

25° SOUTH: How do you actually test that? Fly at elephants and see what happens?

Wesley: More or less, but systematically. Over the course of a year, across two reserves in Malawi, Majete Wildlife Reserve and Liwonde National Park, we flew a small quadcopter at wild elephants, nearly 150 flights in total. We varied the speed, the height and the angle of approach, and recorded how the elephants reacted on a simple scale: calm, alert, agitated, aggressive, or running in the opposite direction. If they stayed calm or just alert, the flight counted as a success. Anything from agitated to fleeing was a failed flight.

25° SOUTH: Let us guess: the faster the drone, the bigger the panic?

Wesley: Speed mattered in the way you’d expect. Slower approaches often resulted in calmer elephants. But it wasn’t the biggest factor.

25° SOUTH: So what was?

Wesley: The angle of approach mattered more than almost anything else. An angle between 30° and 60° was tolerated well. Anything steeper, where the drone was descending almost right above them, agitated them quickly, regardless of speed. Understanding why took longer than finding the pattern itself.

25° SOUTH: Why would the angle matter that much?

Wesley: When elephants grew uneasy at an approaching drone, they’d tilt their heads back and up, tracking it, visually assessing the object, and in most cases settling once they’d worked out it wasn’t a threat. An approach steeper than 60° denied them that option entirely.

25° SOUTH: Because they can’t look up?

Wesley: Exactly. Elephants can’t tilt their heads back far enough to look straight overhead. Coming in from above, all they had was an already loud sound closing in that they couldn’t see and couldn’t place. That’s what triggered the agitation. Not the drone itself, but the inability to visually and mentally resolve what was approaching. A physical constraint in elephant anatomy, not a behavioural quirk, was doing most of the work in explaining the data.

25° SOUTH: You published the findings, and the first guidelines for flying drones around African elephants, in 2021. Has anyone picked up the thread since?

Wesley: Yes, and it’s an encouraging sequel. In November 2025 a team from Save the Elephants and the University of Oxford published a study in Scientific Reports that picks up more or less exactly where our work left off. Working with elephant families in Kenya’s Samburu and Buffalo Springs National Reserves, they exposed 14 individually identified groups to a drone across 35 trials, flying high (120 metres or above), launching from at least 500 metres downwind, and holding a steady approach. Those protocol choices track closely with the guidelines our study set out.

25° SOUTH: And what did they find? Do elephants get used to drones?

Wesley: Roughly half of the trials showed no disturbed behaviour at all. Where elephants did react, it was mostly mild signs like raised trunks or a pause in what they were doing, and that reaction dropped off within minutes on a single flight, and dropped further, and faster, on repeat exposures spread out over months. Elephants appear to be able to learn that a carefully flown drone isn’t a threat, and to hold onto that lesson for a long time.

25° SOUTH: So that’s the all-clear?

Wesley: Not quite. Even in groups that showed no outward distress, the researchers picked up smaller shifts, less feeding, more moving around, that persisted after the obvious signs of agitation had faded. “No visible reaction” and “no effect” aren’t quite the same thing. Anyone using drones for long-term behavioural monitoring still needs a genuine pre-exposure baseline to compare against.

And it isn’t only about elephants: a 2023 study on ungulates in African savannas found similar habituation patterns, and a 2025 review treats drone disturbance as a live question across species. The core idea holds: test the tool on the animal before scaling it up, because the answer isn’t the same for every species, or even guaranteed to be the same twice on the same individual.

25° SOUTH: Away from research, how are drones being used to protect wildlife today?

Wesley: Anti-poaching and monitoring drones have moved from promising pilot projects to something close to standard kit. Thermal and multispectral cameras, once a novelty, are now routine for night flights, which matters because most poaching happens after dark. AI-assisted detection is increasingly layered on top, flagging unusual movement for human review rather than relying on an operator watching a live feed for hours. Kruger National Park and the Grumeti Fund’s partnership with Singita in the Serengeti both run drone surveillance as part of broader anti-poaching systems, and researchers in Botswana have been trialling night-flying drones to detect animal and human movement near reserve boundaries.

25° SOUTH: Does that mean fewer rangers on the ground?

Wesley: None of this replaces rangers. But it has changed what’s realistic to monitor, and how quickly a threat can be flagged, in landscapes too vast to patrol on foot alone.

25° SOUTH: A lot of our readers travel with a drone. Can they fly it on safari?

Wesley: Here’s the part that has shifted most since 2021, and not in the direction you might expect. As drones have become more trusted and more capable in the hands of researchers and protection units, they’ve been locked down harder for everyone else. Even the Oxford and Save the Elephants study needed specific permits from the Kenya Civil Aviation Authority and the Wildlife Research and Training Institute before a single flight went up.

In Kenya, a civil aviation permit alone won’t get a drone into a park. The Kenya Wildlife Service requires its own authorisation, and reserves like the Maasai Mara also need county permission. It isn’t written as a ban, but for a tourist that combination is, in practice, out of reach. South Africa’s SANParks has a zero-tolerance stance across every national park; in Kruger, simply having a drone in your vehicle can get it confiscated, and fines and bans for tourists caught flying were still making headlines in late 2025. In Tanzania’s major parks drones are banned by default, with permits granted case by case, almost exclusively for vetted research or filming.

25° SOUTH: Trusted in the field, banned at the gate. Isn’t that a contradiction?

Wesley: Not really. The pattern is the same everywhere: the more a drone operator knows what they’re doing, flight protocol, altitude, distance, purpose, the more likely they are to be flying legally. The tourist with a consumer drone and no local knowledge is, understandably, exactly who these bans are aimed at.

25° SOUTH: Five years on, what’s the one thing you’d want people to take away?

Wesley: The physical limit we found in Malawi, that elephants can’t track something coming from directly overhead, is still doing the same work it did in 2021. It’s the reason careful protocol matters, and the newer Kenyan research shows what happens when that protocol is followed consistently over time. Any new technology entering conservation deserves to have its welfare impact tested before it’s scaled up, not assumed.

That testing has largely happened now, and the results are reassuring for drones used properly. So the question worth asking isn’t whether drones belong in this landscape, because they clearly do. It’s who is flying them, and how carefully.

About Wesley

Wesley Hartmann is the Conservation and Wildlife Ambassador for the Zambia Luxury Lodge Collection, where he is directly involved in the organisation’s conservation and community outreach work. He also helps communicate these efforts to a broad range of audiences, including local stakeholders, government partners and international supporters.

He holds an MSc in Applied Conservation Biology, with published, peer-reviewed research on drone-based elephant monitoring. He shares wildlife photography on Instagram at @wildlifewes, and explores this story and others on his YouTube channel, Wesley’s World, and on Instagram at @wesleysworld_ig.

Sources

• Hartmann, W.L., Fishlock, V. & Leslie, A., 2021, ‘First guidelines and suggested best protocol for surveying African elephants (Loxodonta africana) using a drone’, Koedoe 63(1), a1687
• Carey-Douglas, A., Jasperse-Sjolander, L., Kokiro, P., Ilterewa, G.G., Lolchuragi, D., Scrase, J.E., Pope, F., Vollrath, F. & D’Ammando, G., 2025, ‘Elephant habituation to drones as a behavioural observation tool’, Scientific Reports 15
• van Vuuren, M. et al., 2023, ‘Ungulate responses and habituation to unmanned aerial vehicles in Africa’s savanna’, PLOS ONE 18(7), e0288975
• Afridi, S. et al., 2025, ‘Impact of Drone Disturbances on Wildlife: A Review’, Drones 9(4), 311
• SANParks, media statements on drone use and enforcement in Kruger National Park, 2025–2026
• Kenya Civil Aviation Authority, Civil Aviation (Unmanned Aircraft Systems) Regulations, 2020