Poachers, beware: Illegal hunters are becoming the hunted through technology developed by an electrical engineer-cum-visiting scholar at the State University of New York (SUNY) College of Environmental Science and Forestry.

Having studied African elephants since 1992 and seen firsthand the ravages of the bushmeat trade and other poaching activities, Steve Gulick, a self-described "biologist wannabe," has designed a metal-detector system to pick up the presence of poachers’ weapons and send a silent electronic alert via satellite to law enforcement and game authorities.

Though the areas in need of protection may be vast, the trails into the wilderness typically are relatively limited to human access.

Marketed under his Wildland Security brand, Gulick’s miniature TrailGuard device — a magnetometer similar to but much smaller than airport security detectors — can be buried alongside trails used by animals and their human predators to pick up the presence of, and even count, any machetes or AK-47 rifles. Depending on geography and vegetation, a short-range radio link can be shared between a number of subterranean detectors and a common gateway hidden, say, high in the canopy quite a distance away.

"This gives real-time situational awareness over satellite connections and sends the alert back to the ground within minutes of poachers being detected so that they can effectively send patrols to where the problem is occurring," he said, rather than merely into a killing field after the fact.

Gulick explained that he simply applied existing technology — similar to what has been used by the U.S. military to track enemy troop movements — toward conservation. "It was purely a transfer of technology," he said. "There’s nothing novel about the technology and it’s not risky."

False alarms are eliminated when authorized armed personnel or scientific researchers are equipped with identifiable transponders set to call off any mistaken alerts.

Gulick said he considers the detectors a cost-effective means to increase the effectiveness of human resources, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has agreed: As part of its Great Ape Protection Program, the service is funding expanded implementation this month of the TrailGuard system in the Republic of the Congo.

Similar programs are underway to protect snow leopards in the Altai Republic of southwest Siberia, jaguars in the Osa Peninsula of Costa Rica, and giant tortoises in the Galapagos Islands.

— J.J. McCoy