Kampala- It may not be quite as bad as the Three Bears returning home to find Goldilocks sleeping in one of their beds, but Ugandan villagers returning to the villages they abandoned during the East African nation's civil war are being met with a rather large surprise.

"Elephants are moving into the villages," says Sam Mwandha, operations director for the state-owned Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA).

Much of Uganda's northern region lies in the so-called elephant corridor, a vast tropical flat terrain that adjoins southern Sudan.

Now some of the elephants that populate this area have moved into abandoned and overgrown villages in the districts of Gulu and Apach, which straddle the Murchison Falls national park.

Murchison Falls contains roughly two thirds of the country's estimated 5,000 elephants, which have increased in numbers following their decimation during the chaotic regime of the late dictator Idi Amin in the 1970s.

In the past, tens of thousands of elephants used to migrate across the elephant corridor in search of grass and water.

Even though there are now fewer elephants, ecologists say that human settlement and increased land use in the elephant corridor has disrupted the movement of herds, leading to confrontations with people.

Mwandha says that often the appearance of humans is enough to make the animals flee, but there are plenty of stubborn elephants that won't budge.

These elephants are complicating a resettlement programme aimed at helping the nearly 2 million people displaced by the two decades-long civil war waged by the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) return home.

Battles between the rebels and government troops have tapered down during the past four years, despite the hesitancy of LRA leaders to sign a final peace agreement in a peace process that began in mid- 2006.

A multi-million-dollar donor-supported project aimed at helping the civilians to return to their homes is under way, and nearly 40 per cent of civilians have left the camps they had been forced into by the conflict.

The UWA is mobilizing returnees to help them drive the elephants back toward the Murchison Falls conservation site.

"We have liaised with people on the ground," he says. "We have people who sound drums to drive them away and if this fails, we shoot into the air."

Mwandha says that the marauding elephants can trample villagers' gardens and destroy their homes.

"A number of elephants, not more than 30, at times break off from the main herds and move into the villages," he says. "This is happening once every two weeks. As we drive them back, other groups return." (dpa)