wild creatures

‘In a universe beyond our imagining, where our world floats like a mote of dust in the vastness of night, our expanding knowledge has made us increasingly lonely. The burden of consciousness has grown heavy upon us.’ So wrote the American philosopher Loren Eiseley, contemplating the possibility of life beyond earth.

He had a point. Darwin had seen that the succession of life on this planet was not a formal, predetermined pattern. It is ever adjustable, constantly modified and then, if necessary, modified again along paths through sea, forest and desert that could never be retraced. Life is the evolutionary product of a strange wandering. So great are the chances of failure and so deep is the time it has taken, that nothing precisely and identically alive today is likely to come this way again.

Are there others like us? We uncover bones of the past and seek for our origins. We watch the stars, but the signs are uncertain. ‘Out there,’ Eiseley wrote in an essay called Little Men and Flying Saucers, ‘there may be wisdom, there may be power. Somewhere across space great instruments handled by strange, manipulative organs may stare vainly at our floating cloud wrack, their owners yearning as we yearn. Nevertheless, in the nature of life and in the principles of evolution we have had our answer. Of creatures elsewhere and beyond, there will be none like those on earth forever.’

Each living creature on this extraordinary planet is unique, not only here, but in the entire universe. Every one is a treasure beyond imagining.

The secret life of cats

About 10 000 years ago they arrived unrequested, with no contract, no obligations. Attracted, possibly, by rats in our bone piles or mice in our grain stores, they were useful. Eventually we needed them, but they didn’t need us. They warmed themselves by our hearth fires, but kept their silent paws firmly in the wild.

They were superb hunters – and beautiful. We admired them and credited them with many lives. They always landed on their feet. In Siam, they guarded our sacred places. In Egypt, we worshipped them. We feared them as witches’ familiars and worried when they crossed our path. Occasionally we ate them. We called them silly names, which they deigned to answer. They seldom came when we called. They purred when we stroked them and when they’d had enough of that, they bit us without restraint.

Dogs are pack animals and can be trained to do our bidding. Don’t try that with a cat. For this reason, debates have raged about whether cats are too dumb or too smart to take our instructions. But to be caught in the intense, green-eyed gaze of a cat leaves you in no doubt of the latter. The truth is they do what they damn well like, whenever they like and with whomever they please. They accept our food and shelter, but can live perfectly well without it, from the frozen latitudes to the hottest deserts. They use us for their purposes and have done so for thousands of years. And mostly we adore them. If that’s not being smart, then intelligence needs a new definition.

The poet TS Eliot noticed their mysterious self-possession. In a poem, The Naming of Cats, he writes: ‘But above and beyond there’s still one name left over/ And that is the name that you never will guess/ The name that no human research can discover/ But the cat himself knows, and will never confess.’

The cats to whom I will introduce you have the sort of misguided names of which no self-respecting felis would approve. They include Truffles, Stompie, Bengie, Lulu-Belle, Smudge, Peanut, Scamp and, heaven forbid, Drooler. They were induced to take part in a study by University of Cape Town researcher Sharon George of the Percy FitzPatrick Institute in 2012. She used a high-tech approach to find out what cats do when their owners aren’t around. Do they curl up on the lounge cushions and await the return of their chosen humans? Do they perch on the porch licking their paws and washing their pert noses? Where do they go when we’re out of sight? Upon what unsuspecting creatures do they pounce?

What Sharon found was a testament to how little we know about our moggies. Take Scamp of Vredehoek, an inner-city Cape Town suburb. He was fitted with a small GPS recorder and tracked for 168 hours. He covered an astounding 42 hectares, roaming many kilometres a day. Truffles, Bengie and Stompie weren’t far behind. Drooler outdid them all in straight-line stakes, having been logged nearly a kilometre from home. Speeds were nearly a kilometre an hour, so what you’re looking at is seriously dedicated prowling.

What were they doing out there unseen? Apart from yowling, sniffing and checking the neighbourhood, they were killing. With deadly efficiency. It turns out that in sheer numbers of prey captured, Truffles, Lulu-Belle, Drooler and co – Felis catus to be precise – are among the most successful killers on earth.

In this, the first African-based study into the impact of domestic cats on wildlife, Sharon recorded 31 species caught by 78 cats over about 10 weeks. Nearly half were small mammals (mainly striped mice), a quarter were reptiles, 17 species were birds and 10 were amphibians, particularly rain frogs. Of invertebrates, more than half were moths and stick insects. All the felines were well fed by their owners, but caught prey anyway because, quite simply, cats have never really been domesticated and catching things is what cats do. They’re recreational hunters.

Now here’s when it begins to get scary. There are about 986 000 households in greater Cape Town with 12 cat own­ers per 100 houses who average 2.3 cats each. That gives you 272 000 moggies, excluding feral and township cats. The study conservatively estimated the number of creatures caught in the city at more than 3.6 million a year (excluding what was eaten before being found by owners or wasn’t returned home for proud display).

There are nine million households in South Africa from which, each year, 2.5 million cats emerge to kill more than 47 million wild creatures. The number of domesticated cats in the world is estimated at around 500 million, which means 9.5 billion wild creatures are dying in their sharp-pointed clutches each year. And that’s a conservative estimate. Your eyes are rolling. I’ll stop there.

Why are domestic cats among the planet’s top predators? We feed them, we pay their vet bills, we keep them safe and warm, they have no predators other than motor cars and the occasional dog. They’re remorseless killers protected by the most successful predator of all – us. They’re the piranhas of the urban landscape. Put them on an island and they’re a recipe for avian extinction. Don’t ask the flightless Stephens Island wren. It was eaten to extinction only a few years after its discovery in its home, one of the islands at the northern tip of New Zealand’s South Island, as were several hundred other species.

Okay, don’t shoot the messenger. I love cats. But just in case you’d like to know, according to the Chinese who eat around four million a year, they taste a bit like rabbit. It takes about 24 of them to make a fur coat.

Birdsong

The first music our species ever heard was undoubtedly the songs of birds. Feathered mini-dinosaurs have been trilling from trees for much longer than there have been human ears to hear them – and the songs they sing still inspire us.

The melodies of many great composers were filched from birds and, today, with recording equipment or a good musical ear, their violation of avian copyright can be detected. The famous opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is a direct crib from the white-breasted wood wren and the beginning of his Violin Concert in D, Opus 61, is from a blackbird. At the end of the second movement of his Pastoral Symphony a clarinet does the perfect imitation of a cuckoo. In fact, his music is littered with birdsong.

The thrilling cascade at the opening of Chopin’s extraordinary Etude in C Minor is, note for note, that of the canyon wren. Olivier Messiaen’s flute piece Le Merle Noir was based entirely on the song of the blackbird. His orchestral work, Réveil des Oiseaux, is blended from the dawn bird chorus in the Jura Mountains of the composer’s native France.

Messiaen began this focus while interred in a Nazi prison camp in 1940 and composing The Quartet for the End of Time, his first piece to make use of birdsong and one of his greatest. Years later he wrote: ‘In my hours of gloom, when every musical idiom appears to me as no more than admirable painstaking experimentation, what is left for me but to seek out the true face of music somewhere off in the forest, among the birds.’

Composer Jonathan Harvey has combined recordings of bird songs, their pitch and rhythm lowered and slowed down, in his Piano Concerto with Birdsong.

In Stravinsky are patterns that match a bird from the region where he worked. Mozart used the song of his pet starling in a concerto (birds reportedly like listening to his music). Vivaldi wrote a concerto to a goldfinch and birdsong can be identified in the works of Mahler, Delius, Ravel, Wagner and many others.

Our debt to birdsong may go deeper than this, however. In Kerala, southern India, Brahmans teach their sons sacred mantras that are not in any known language and are said to go back to ‘before time’. A researcher from Berkeley University in the USA, Frits Staal, found their sound patterns related to birdsong and nothing else. He proposed that the mantras come from a pre-language era and that human speech may have developed in imitation of birdsong.

At least 20 per cent of birds are what’s termed open-ended learners – they innovate. The blackbird, for example, starts his song at the beginning of spring with a number of simple phrases which he elaborates over the next three months, by which time he’s composed a substantial musical piece. The following year it will be a different song. There’s no scientific explanation as to why he does this, other than because he can, and because he enjoys singing.

Birds, however, also imitate our sounds – and are changing their tune because of us. Some do it by direct mimicry and top of the class is not the parrot but the Australian lyrebird. They can seemingly imitate any sound in their pursuit of a new tune to attract a mate: the clicking of cameras, chainsaws, drills and car sirens.

In 1969, ranger Sydney Curtis heard a lyrebird producing flute sounds in New England National Park on the coast of New South Wales. After some sleuthing, he discovered that in the 1930s a neighbouring farmer had played the flute for a pet lyrebird which had then escaped. When ornithologist Norman Robinson studied the call, he discovered that males in the area were singing two popular songs from the period: The Keel Row and Mosquito’s Dance – 70 years later.

But we’re also limiting birdsong with our noise. Biologists at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, Hans Slabbekoorn and Ardie den Boer-Visser, found that birds in cities are changing their songs. They’re speeding up their tunes by shortening the first note and pauses while dropping the low notes.

The reason, they found in 2006, is that the sonorous dawn and dusk mating song of the red-blooded male broadcasting his readiness to breed is being lost in the deep growl of rush-hour traffic. What’s getting the attention of females is instead the geeky peeps of a new generation of hipsters with an ear for the right pitch. This has happened in the past 30 years and the new dialects are trickling back into the countryside.

Male birds sing to defend their territory and demonstrate their breeding fitness to an attentive female. The more varied their repertoire, the greater their chance of luring a mate. Low notes are lost in the traffic but frequencies that are too high bounce off the hard surfaces of buildings and confuse. So urban sexual selection favours the mezzo sopranos.

Which brings me to the hadeda. In almost any southern African city these days, dawn breaks to their high-pitched shriek. They were once heard in only the forested areas of the Great Rift Valley but are now everywhere.

I was high in the Simien Mountains overlooking the Rift in Ethiopia one day when the hadeda’s closest relative, the wattled ibis, landed in a tree near me. But instead of going ha-eek-ah it went aah-grr very deeply and looked around, as these birds do, for applause.

Now the wag’s version around where I live is that hadedas go ha-eek as they fly because they’re afraid of heights. But a more likely reason is that all they’re trying to do is be heard above the roar of traffic. It’s not music to our ears, but who can blame them?

The artful reverse navigation of moonstruck poo rollers

The distinguished British evolutionary biologist JBS Haldane was once asked by an Anglican bishop what, from his study of creation, one could conclude as to the nature of the Creator. Haldane answered: ‘An inordinate fondness for beetles.’

He had good reason. More than 360 000 species have been described by science, but there are thought to be several million yet to be discovered. They far outnumber any other species.

‘I show my students a beautiful beetle,’ said entomologist Marcus Byrne when I tracked him down at Wits University in Johannesburg, ‘and I tell them: ‘This is the body plan for this planet. If you want to be a successful organism, be a beetle! You can fly, you can hide, and when you tuck away your wings you’re as tough as an old boot.’

Among the thousands of possible bugs that could keep an entomologist in business, Marcus has an inordinate fondness for dung beetles. There are 800 species in South Africa, around 2 000 in Africa and 5 000 worldwide. This leads to behaviour more normal folk may consider strange.

‘The way to see them,’ he confided, ‘is to get a beer, choose a nice spot in the bush and a big piece of poo, switch on your headlamp and you’re in for an evening’s entertainment.’

What makes them fun to watch is that they’re all ball thieves, so competition at the dung pat is fierce. And they have to work fast. Flying heats them up and increases their apparent energy. A cooled beetle is a loser. So the best strategy is to steal a ball and run for it. The next best is to make a ball as fast as you can and deter all comers.

‘An invader will shove his head under the owner of the ball, flip him into the air and hurtle off with the ball. Hot guys win more fights,’ said Marcus.

‘When I was a kid back in Britain, I hated insects. If a moth got onto my bedroom curtain I’d yell for my mum to save me. When I started my MSc at Wits I needed a job, and was given one as a technician in the dung beetle research unit. We’d be eating our dinner under a fluorescent tube in Hluhluwe Game Reserve with a gazillion insects on the ceiling. You either had to get on with it or get out.

‘I fell for dung beetles. They’re such enigmatic animals. They don’t bite, they don’t sting, they’re doing something you can identify with. It’s not just that they’re up to their eyeballs in shit and having a rough time. They work so hard making dung balls and they’re such determined, honest little fellows. They’re an African icon, like the lion or fish eagle.’

The really interesting part, though, is what Marcus and fellow biologists have found out about how dung beetles navigate at night. Most work by day and use the sun for dead reckoning. But a particular species, Scarabaeus zambesianus, does its ball-working after sunset.

Why, you may ask, does a dung beetle need to navigate? ‘They have to get the ball away from the dung pat as fast as they can,’ Marcus explained. ‘The fastest way to do that is in a straight line. That way they’ll never come back to where they started and they’ll put the maximum distance between them and ball thieves in minimum time.’

Now, you can imagine, keeping a straight line while rolling a ball over rough terrain backwards is not easy, especially at night. So zambesianus uses the moon. But not only the moon. If it’s behind a cloud or just below the horizon, they use its light halo. They’re the only creatures, as far as we know, that can do this.

The question remains, though, how does Marcus know this? His research requires antics he hopes nobody ever watches.

‘On a farm near Vryburg we’ve cleared an area to give them roll space. We plonk a dung ball in the middle and release some beetles. Then one of us crawls along behind a beetle in the moonlight sticking kebab sticks into the sand to mark its path while someone walks alongside it counting off seconds. Sometimes there’s another guy walking on the other side holding a circle of hardboard over the beetle blocking direct moonlight. You’re on your knees with your bum in the air hoping only other entomologists can see you. The beetles go in a straight line for a long way.’

And the reason for all this rolling? ‘They eat it. But it’s also like a box of chocolates to lure a female to mate and lay eggs in the ball – a nuptial gift of poo.

How did beetles work all of this out? Nobody knows. JBS Haldane, a man who puzzled about the ways of bugs for most of his life, got it just about right when he said: ‘My suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we imagine, but queerer than we can imagine.’

Inventing the wheel

There’s a degree of cultural arrogance about the invention of the wheel. First evidence of it is around 400 BC in Mesopotamia, the Caucasus and central Europe. From that standpoint there are those who might say we in Asia, Africa and the Americas just weren’t smart enough.

And animals? No way! No creature other than a human could have come up with the idea of a circular disk rotating round an axil to roll a load. Could they?

There’s a practical reason. Wheels are only effective because we’ve modified our habitat to accommodate them.

Once you move off roads and paths and try to traverse rough, wet, muddy, boggy, rocky, sandy, snowy, icy, steep or forested terrain that cover most of the earth’s landmass, our brilliant invention becomes little better than useless.

So there wasn’t much evolutionary pressure among animals or even humans to come up with the idea.

But there are other kingdoms, and in one of those the wheel – and a non-polluting electric motor to drive it – was invented millions of years before Homo sapiens walked on two legs. In terms of sheer volume, the number of wheels in human hands is miniscule compared with the zillions in daily use just out of sight.

Invisible aliens? No, bacteria. Around half of all known bacterial species move using a tiny motor which rotates a flagellum – rather like a corkscrew – hundreds of times a second. It even has a reverse gear.

This sophisticated piece of nanotechnology generates electricity by rapidly changing the charge in a ring of proteins attached to membrane surrounding a wheel. Positively charged hydrogen ions are pumped from the cell surface using chemical energy. As they flow back they complete the circuit, providing magnetic power to rotate the wheel at the base of the corkscrew.

The real mystery is how the unattached flagellum develops. The suggestion is that proteins are somehow injected into its base and work their way to the tip from which it grows.

So, far from nature not having invented the wheel until we smart apes came along – and given the vast numbers of bacteria – wheels are the most common form of locomotion on earth. Most, of course, are not serving our purpose.

Flying peanuts

My quest was prompted by a flying peanut, otherwise known as a Christmas beetle. It zoomed around our outside table one evening – fast, madly, precariously as they always do – then hit the wall up near the gutter and fell to the concrete with a sharp crack.

There it paused momentarily, seemingly surprised or merely thinking, after which it flipped over and took off … to do it all over again.

I got to musing that its fall would be like us plunging to the pavement from a 20-storey building. We’d break every bone in our body. So the next obvious question was: do beetles have bones? Turns out they don’t – not in the way we understand bones. Instead they live inside a bone made of chiton, the same sort of stuff as beaks, whiskers and fingernails. So beetles (and most insects) are like us turned inside out – or are we like them turned outside in?

A big problem wearing your skeleton like a crash helmet is how do you grow? Being an ancient species, beetles have had 265 million years to work it out. Basically they pop by growing a soft replacement exoskeleton underneath the old one and puffing it up like a balloon. When the new armour sets, they un-puff and eat like crazy to fill the gap between their old and new selves. We grow fat much more gracefully.

A bit of digging around made me realise I really couldn’t tell what species my flying peanut was – there are around 50 genera and a multitude of species in South Africa alone. Let’s just call mine Peanutus stupidus.

For flying peanuts, living in a crash helmet seems a good idea. As navigators they’re utterly inept.

The donkey war

History, they say, favours those who write it. This little slice of history was so bizarre, nobody ever claimed it. But it needs to be told …

A war suggests an opposition, so the events that took place in the apartheid-era Bophuthatswana homeland in 1983 could more accurately be described as a massacre.

Given that the shoot-up – in which more than 20 000 died – occurred only a few hundred kilometres from Johannesburg, the virtual absence of reportage about it was remarkable. But then, depredations against dirt-poor peasants seldom make headlines.

For one old man, the massacre began while on his way to collect building sand in his cart pulled by four donkeys. A troop carrier roared towards him and soldiers opened up with automatic weapons at his donkeys, killing them in their harnesses.

In the little village of Ncweng, people had gathered their donkeys together for counting. Soldiers arrived and shot the lot. They then fanned out across the veld, searching river valleys and grazing areas, pumping bullets into every donkey they found. People who resisted were bullied. A few, realising the danger, hid donkeys in their houses. The soldiers then moved to the next village, then the next … .

‘They didn’t take aim,’ one person told a history researcher, Nancy Jacobs. ‘They shot animals anywhere, as often as it took to kill them.’

The reasons for the Great Donkey Massacre are obscure. One story was that the Bantustan’s then president, Lucas Mangope, nearly collided with donkeys on a highway and had turned against the species. Others said that, given opposition to apartheid’s Bantustan system, it was an attempt to terrorise people and pre-empt opposition. Some speculated the slaughter was a move by the upper class of cattle keepers to reduce pressure on grazing.

The official decree simply announced that ‘surplus’ donkeys were to be exterminated, but trigger-happy soldiers soon turned the cull into mass slaughter. The estimate of 20 000 dead donkeys is probably conservative. As history goes, it was an ‘oops’ that everybody but the peasants wished to forget.

Bat space

The problem undoubtedly began with angels. If God was in heaven and humans were on earth, some monkish Biblical illustrator must have reasoned, then the only way to commute between the two must be to fly. And the only flight he could imagine was the type birds did. So angels were drawn with light-filled frocks and white avian wings.

However, the trouble came with Lucifer, God’s fallen angel. He had to have wings too, being an angel, but not the nice feathery kind. What was needed was a black, silent, night-shrouded, leathern-winged, goat-horned embodiment of evil. It was to be very bad news for bats.

European peoples have, for thousands of years, associated bats with graveyards, witches, the underworld and the devil himself. Shakespeare had his witches in Macbeth stir in ‘eye of a newt and toe of frog, wool of bat and tongue of dog’.

The real wool of bat, however, is the guff which seems to have stuck to these little mammals over the years.

Bats aren’t blind, they wouldn’t be so stupid as to tangle in your hair, there are only three species of vampire bats (all in South America), bats are about as evil as Labradors and less likely to carry rabies than your Pekinese.

What bats do is far more interesting. Up to 90 per cent of Africa’s tropical forest trees and many savanna trees are pollinated by fruit bats. A colony of microbats (the ones that eat insects) can consume more than 100 000 kilograms of crop-eating insects a night. That’s the equivalent weight of around 20 elephants.

The truth is, a crash in bat populations could give us a foretaste of the hell so many people fear that bats represent. So let’s give the little guys some space, okay?

The curious puzzle of big white propellers and drowned bats

We are, by temperament, day-living animals with a suspicion or fear of creatures that inhabit the night. For this reason, nocturnal big cats and bats, hyenas and owls have not fared well in our mythology.

Each night all over the planet except the polar regions, unaware of their dire reputation, bats fill the skies to forage for insects, fruit, nectar, seeds, frogs and fish. Without them we would be in deep trouble.

A little brown bat can eat more than its body weight each night in insects that destroy crops upon which we depend. Their estimated annual value to the North American agricultural industry has been estimated at around $23 billion.

While birds defecate while perched in trees – not much good for seed propagation – bats let loose in flight over forest gaps and fields, allowing trees to quickly re-colonise these areas. A brief list of the foods you would not readily have without bat pollination or dispersal includes cashew nuts, mangos, royal palm nuts, tequila, papayas, almonds, persimmon, breadnuts, many species of fig, bananas, guavas, passion fruits, loquats, coffee, star apple and wild grapes. More than 70 per cent of forest trees are bat pollinated, including baobabs and balsa wood.

So the large number of bats being killed by wind turbines is deeply worrying to scientists who understand the value of these small creatures to our own well being. And it’s all the more puzzling because bat echolocation is better at detecting moving objects than stationary ones.

The turbines are big machines, many over 100 metres high with blade lengths of up to 50 metres, with their tips moving at around 300 kilometres an hour. They are essential to the future of renewable energy and they’re sprouting up around the world like daisies after rain.

Environmental impact studies of these installations originally focused on their hum and their impact on birds – particularly raptors – which do fly into them. But just recently scientists noticed that in many areas bat fatalities were outnumbering dead birds below their blades by as much as 10 to one.

High rates of bat fatalities are troubling because bats reproduce slowly for mammals of their size, bearing only one or two young a year. This means bat colonies are slow to recover from population declines.

‘Nobody expected bats, with their amazing echolocation abilities, to fly near or be killed by turbines,’ said Erin Baerwald, a bat researcher at Calgary University in Canada. ‘We were finding an average of 18 bats under every turbine. Really strange – it was a surprise to researchers and the turbine industry.’

She began looking for reasons. Why were bats even flying near the towers? Maybe they were in the flight path of migrating bats. Perhaps they were looking for roosts and thought the towers were tall trees. Did the clearing around the tower, the heat of the engine or the light atop it attract insects? Could it be that the bats were attracted to audible or ultrasonic sounds produced by wind turbines? Maybe they miscalculated blade velocity or their flight behaviour was distorted by electromagnetic fields around the motors.

Then Erin made an even more puzzling discovery. Large numbers of the dead bats had not been hit by the turbine blades and around 90 per cent showed signs of internal bleeding and damage to their lungs.

‘We found they were haemorrhaging inside and that the blood vessels in the lungs had actually burst,’ she said. ‘Their lungs were filled with fluid. It’s a condition called barotrauma, similar to the bends divers get when they come up too fast.

‘What we think is that bats are missing the blades, but contacting an area behind the moving prop where the pressure drops dramatically. Their lungs over expand, which causes breakages in all the small blood vessels around the lungs. Essentially, they drown.’

Over 80 wind farms have been built or planned for South Africa, some covering thousands of hectares with hundreds of turbines. I asked bat specialist Jonathan Aronson whether bats were being taken into consideration in their construction.

‘We’re doing pre-construction monitoring with bat detectors and we’ll be doing a lot more,’ he said. ‘But we know very little about the migration and activity patterns of most bats in South Africa. We learned from research that turbines on ridge tops kill more bats and it’s probable that we should avoid siting in riverine systems. But, until we monitor, we don’t know for sure. And we need to come up with information before the turbines are built, not afterwards when it’s too late.

‘We are getting wind turbines so there will be fatalities, but what’s considered tolerable? We can’t save every bat. But the point is not to kill all of them.

‘The trouble is that bats are nocturnal – out of sight, out of mind. Often when you talk to developers or government about the problem their response is: ‘Bats? Who cares about bats?’

The ant-hill tiger

South African IT whizz and one-time astronaut Mark Shuttleworth was once asked what struck him most when he gazed down at earth from space. ‘Great beauty,’ he said, ‘and human-made tears in the fabric of life. From up there you can see what we’re losing. Humans have changed the planet.’

We share with elephants the ability and seeming need to alter the world around us. They turn forests into grassland and make paths for others to follow. We tame wild lands, make farms and build cities. Human terra-forming has been hard for all wild creatures – even for elephants.

Some have adapted to the new environments and niches and learned to live with humans. Some have bred for our consumption or pleasure and prospered. Many have backed into the declining wilderness areas.

But there are those that adopted a strategy that has served them well – secrecy. Like all apes we have seized the day and sleep by night. They have become nocturnal, silent with eyes that drink moonlight and penetrate the dark like sharpened daggers. One of those is the leopard, and you have probably been watched by one and never known. Another is the African black-footed cat. And it’s furry dynamite.

African folklore will tell you it can rip the jugular out of a giraffe. While certainly not true, the smallest feline in Africa is extremely ferocious for its size – a cat with attitude and the highest kill rate of any feline in the world. This leopard-spotted ball of intent catches, on average, one prey animal every 50 minutes, chomping countless birds, reptiles, insects and around 3 000 rodents a year. Lions, cheetahs or leopards are slouches by comparison.

Felis nigripes, to give the cat its proper name, has a head size about the same as a regular moggy, but is around half the weight – between one and two kilograms. If it were the size of a lion back when humans lived in caves, I probably wouldn’t be around to write this, having become extinct.

This is definitely not a cat you want to mess with. According to Peter Comley and Salomé Meyer, who studied them in Namibia, even if reared from young in domestication, the black-footed cat never loses its wildness and will frequently attack its keeper or withdraw, growling, into a corner. When cornered, it will launch itself, spitting and snarling, at its adversary, regardless of their size.

Alex Sliwa, one of the few researchers ever to study the cat, found that they don’t shy away from prey that bite and sting like scorpions and snakes. He’s seen a black-footed cat jump with bared claws and fangs into the face of a black-backed jackal, an animal eight times its size, stalk springbok lambs and go for blue cranes and even bigger birds.

He tracked a cat he named Aris in the Kalahari and described its hunting skill. ‘Every muscle in the small, wiry body tightens. He’s is now 50 minutes into a night-time stalk, his snakelike tail swishing violently as he closes in on a white-quilled bustard bedded down, chicken-like, in the brick-red sand. I hold my breath. A bright moon bathes the arid landscape in a natural spotlight, enabling me to observe the cat’s hunting behaviour quite clearly.

‘The bustard opens one eye warily. For a fraction of a second, it looks as if it’s about to erupt skyward and emit its insultingly loud scream. But the cat moves fast. Planting his tiny black feet into the ground, he leaps and snags the bustard as it attempts to take off. The bird, almost half the cat’s weight, struggles for a few seconds before needle-sharp teeth break its neck.’

In fact, the black-footed cat doesn’t have black feet but furry black pads, and has accordingly been renamed the rather less dramatic small-spotted cat. It’s found in the drier parts of South Africa, Botswana, Namibia and western Zimbabwe – one of the few carnivores across that wide region. It can go without water, gaining its entire moisture requirement from its food.

Its Afrikaans name is miershooptier – ant-hill tiger – as it often sleeps and raises its kittens in hollowed-out termite mounds. It has a formidable sense of hearing and large eyes that make full use of available light and can easily see by star shine alone. At night its sleek fur, marked by bold, black spots and black leg rings, allows it to melt into the background, rendering it invisible to prey.

Secrecy, hunting prowess and a wide range, however, doesn’t ensure invulnerability. It is threatened by farm-dog hunting packs, having its habitat ploughed up as fields – thereby reducing the rodent, bird and insect populations – and by locust spraying, which kills an important food source and can poison the cat.

The species is listed as vulnerable to extinction on the World Conservation Union Red Data List and its population is shrinking. It is estimated that fewer than 10 000 ant-hill tigers are alive in the wild. In captivity, where it could be bred for re-introduction to the wild, it dies easily and is subject to cage boredom – basically depression.

Near Cradock in the Eastern Cape, however, farmers Richard and Marion Holmes have taken up its cause, establishing the Cat Conservation Trust and successfully breeding Felis nigripes for movement to zoo breeding programmes or reintroduction to the veld.

You’ll probably never see southern Africa’s most secret cat in the wild but if you’re in the Cradock area and want to have a look at this atomic kitten, drop in on the Holmes and you’ll be welcomed. They have a lodge and a bush camp where you can stay.

Time frogging

Five million years after a tiny bone became detached from its frog skeleton, Zelda Stephanus plucked it from a mound of sifted gravel with her silver tweezers and placed it with a number of others labelled ‘ilium’. It was less than a centimetre long and as thin as a pin, but Zelda has exceptional pattern recognition skills and knew it to be the upper leg bone of a prehistoric croaker.

Around it on her sorting tray were similar clusters tagged ‘tibia’, ‘fibula’ and ‘femur’. Sorting is painstaking work. Above her desk in the laboratory are hand-sized packets of fossilised bones from small mammals and amphibians, each representing about two months work. She and other fossil sorters were trained by West Coast Fossil Park palaeontologist Pippa Haarhoff, who’s overseeing work on one of the most prolific and astonishing sources of Tertiary Period mammals on earth.

But Zelda was focusing on frogs. I pointed to the bone she’d just found and asked if I could borrow it. She obliged, placing it in a packet with a label and wrote out a receipt. Every fossil bone is unique and therefore priceless, so I had to promise to care for it and deliver it to the Iziko South African Museum in Cape Town for closer identification. And so began my five-million-year-old frog adventure.

The fossils on the site near Langebaan were discovered when the area was quarried for phosphates from the 1940s, and it’s now a protected provincial heritage site. These days the terrain is fynbos between mine dumps covered in scrubby flowers, but it was not always like this. In layer upon layer, the bones of sea creatures are mixed with those of land animals, birds and freshwater denizens – often in bewildering numbers – suggesting a world just before the dawn of the human species which we can only dimly imagine. But the ilium in my plastic packet was a key.

‘It’s a Xenopus ilia, ancestor of the modern platanna,’ said palaeontologist Thalassa Matthews without hesitation when I delivered it to the museum, ‘but the species hasn’t yet been described so it doesn’t have a species name.’ Thalassa is a specialist on fossil micro-mammals, but her new project is the identification of around 11 species of frog found at Langebaan.

‘Everyone studies the big things,’ she said, ‘so the small creatures that stamp and scurry and hop have been neglected. Frogs can answer questions about the environment that other animals can’t. They live in water, they have small ranges and don’t migrate. Some species lay eggs in still pools, some in leaf litter, some on the ground or in burrows, some in deep water. They’re good bio-indicators, so we can begin to understand the environment by knowing their genera.’

Coupled with what they know about the modern living world, scientists like Pippa and Thalassa are putting together a surprisingly detailed puzzle of prehistoric life on the Langebaan shores. Orchestrated by the freezing and thawing of the polar ice caps, sea levels rose and fell hundreds of metres. Death from floods, inundation or dry periods created boneyards, but mostly the climate was temperate.

Three species of elephant (including mammoths) shared browsing with short-necked giraffes called sivatheres, while giant pigs, rhinos, hippos and buffalos grazed beside the shallows. These were predated upon by fearsome sabre-tooth cats, wolverines and a massive species of bear. Undescribed owls hunted nameless mice under a prehistoric moon and left their bones in neat pellets for the descendants of ape-like hominids – us – to puzzle over. And under the stars frogs sang their love songs and left their bones in the mud.

‘Why do we need to know all this?’ I had earlier asked Pippa as we watched Zelda patiently sorting tiny bones.

‘The past is the future,’ she said. ‘This is one of the best sites to study climate change in the more recent past. And what it tells us is that the only constant is change itself and life’s ceaseless adaptation to it. We’re heating up the planet and causing habitat loss and species extinction – the planet’s sixth great extinction, in fact.

‘We shouldn’t be doing that, we’re sterilising the planet and it will cause immense problems for us and everything else. But looking back, you realise that we don’t live on a stable planet. It’s constantly changing and fossils are hard evidence of that.

‘Maybe, controversially, what we’re doing is bringing about the next extinction to clear niches in which new species will form and colonise. Instead of a comet or an exploding volcano it’s us, all part of the earth’s natural cycles of change. But I hope not.’

‘That’s a big story from a small bone,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘humans can be clever. But in environmental terms, also pretty stupid.’

Here be dragons

There are still real dragons on earth. They even have an official name: Varanus komodoensis. They can grow longer than three metres, kill with their tail and, although they don’t breathe fire, their saliva is so lethal that the tiniest nip produces massive septicaemia.

Of course, they eat people – dragons are supposed to – as well as almost anything else. They hunt by stealth, keeping deathly still beside a jungle path and pouncing with a godawfully quick lunge. Their methods have been likened to that of a jumping spider.

Komodo dragons live on the islands of Flores, Rinca and Komodo in the Indonesian archipelago and what’s puzzling is not that they exist, but how they managed to survive into the modern age.

The only things for V. komodoensis to eat on the islands are pigs, rusa deer and people. These only arrived within the past 2 000 years, so what did the dragons survive on for millions of years before that?

Predator size in nature is linked to prey size: the larger the prey, the bigger you need to be to bring it down. The dragons are BIG and the only other snacks on the islands are cockatoos, grasshoppers and each other.

Here’s a possible answer: V. komodoensis ate elephants and hobbits. A scientist named Jared Diamond has argued that both elephants and lizards could swim long distances, but that elephants would not find enough to eat on the islands. So natural selection favoured smaller elephants, and indeed the skeletons of pigmy elephants around a metre and a half tall have been found. Natural selection favoured bigger lizards to eat them.

In 2003, on the island of Flores, palaeontologists unearthed the skeletons of Homo floresiensis, hominids nicknamed Hobbits, which stood at less than a metre tall. For the same reasons as the elephants, selection favoured dwarfism.

Eventually, V. komodoensis probably ate them all. And just when the dragons were reduced to cockatiels, grasshoppers and cannibalism, humans arrived with pigs, deer and themselves as sustenance. That’s why today we still have a big, flesh-eating dragon that once ate elephants and hobbits and behaves like a jumping spider. Tolkien would approve.

The wonder of elephants

In the golden silence of late afternoon, Botswana’s Tuli woodland seemed to be holding its breath. Then it exhaled elephants. A large matriarch appeared from behind a towering nyala berry tree and the air pulsed with the sort of subliminal rumble you feel rather than hear. Following her, in orderly file, came Africa’s grey ghosts in all shapes and sizes: mothers gently caressing youngsters still trying to work out what to do with their trunks, bulls not yet ready to leave the herd, teenagers testing their head shaking and ear flapping.

‘Therese’s group,’ said researcher Jeanetta Selier as they swung out across the valley. ‘She’s a great leader.’

I counted 40 before they disappeared, as elephants do, into the shadows of sunset, making hardly any sounds we could hear. ‘Aren’t they simply magnificent,’ asked Jeanetta, who’d been studying them on the Mashatu concession for 10 years. ‘I can’t understand what drives a hunter to shoot a creature like that.

‘We killed off the mammoths, the dodos and much more. But a world without elephants would be a lonely place. They’re so sensitive, so wise, so caring. And the survival knowledge of centuries lives in the minds of the trophy bulls and old cows we see fit to kill.’

My quest to find out how Loxodonta africana was doing in southern Africa had begun nearly a month earlier, thousands of kilometres further west on the edge of Namibia’s Skeleton Coast. There, in the Kaokoveld, tall, thin elephants generally inhabit dry valleys, dig for water and eat sparingly in the crisp desert air. The trouble was, just then, there were no desert elephants to be seen.

The reason was the highest rainfall in living memory. Grass everywhere, water all over the place and happy elephants wandering far from the waterholes where people usually view them. Droughts are good for game viewers and bad for elephants. This year – 2011 – it was the other way round.

It was fortunate that I was travelling with incurable optimists – psychiatrist, naturalist and writer Ian McCallum along with our wives, Sharon and Patricia. We began by driving up to Purros in Namibia’s northwest corner, where you normally find elephants looking for water in the river beds. To get there, we forded 12 flooded rivers, water sometimes coming over the bonnet of my Land Cruiser, and soon realised the beasts had no reason to scrounge for fluid. They’d taken to the hills.

‘Beautiful scenery,’ remarked Ian, ‘who needs elephants?’

‘I do,’ I replied, ‘and I’m not sure I like the idea of drowning in a desert.’ He gave me one of his penetrating looks and said: ‘In life you need to be willing to be disturbed.’

Our guide was legendary game ranger and author Chris Bakkes, notable for his knowledge of the desert region, much of his left arm having been bitten off by a croc and for his one-eyed dog, Tier, who lost a few bits to a leopard. That evening he offered me a beer with the warning: ‘I never trust a man who doesn’t drink beer or a land without rocks.’ I took the proffered can and asked him why, in more normal times, elephants chose to live in a desert.

‘It’s all about the geology,’ he answered. ‘When South America separated from Africa millions of years ago, great cracks appeared and liquid basalts bled out of the earth’s crust just here. Basalt is dense and holds water. So in these hills are natural aquifers that leak water into the river beds. The Hoarusib, Hoanib, Uniab, Huab, Ugab. There’s food and water if you know where to look. Elephants do, so do black rhinos and other game. But right now elephants are all over the place. Hard to see.’

We spent the day in the beautiful campsite at Purros, then backtracked to Palmwag and up to Etosha. The pans in the park stretched to the horizon, the grass was hippo high and shimmering silver, springbok were leaping like deranged rabbits but the elephants were elsewhere. So we headed for Kaudom on the Botswana border.

The park has beautiful leadwood forests, sand roads from hell and, just then, no elephants. Along the way were some heaps of dry elephant dung over which we became unreasonably excited. We asked the warden when last he’d seen elephants. ‘Before the rains,’ he said. ‘Maybe four months ago.’ So we headed further east, leaving the park to hornbills and tree squirrels.

The first elephant in 4 000 kilometres of travel appeared in the Bwabwata National Park and turned his back on us. But we heard that there were herds in Mudumu – possibly from the Savuti marsh and Linyanti floodplain in Botswana – gathering for their winter migration into southern Angola. They emerged dramatically from the Kwando River one hot afternoon, right in front of my vehicle like breaching whales, black, wet and dangerously close. We had finally found the elephants.

When we arrived in Kasane, Botswana, Michael Chase and Kelly Landen of Elephants Without Borders were putting the final touches to a weighty report on animals in the vast area about to be consolidated into the KAZA (Kavango-Zambezi) Transfrontier Conservation Area, one of the world’s largest wild reserves. The TFCA, about the size of Italy, contains Africa’s largest elephant population and spans five countries – Namibia, Botswana, Angola, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

‘Pick up any publication,’ said Michael, ‘and it’ll tell you elephants are increasing and that it’s a problem. But are they really? We wanted to find out. We flew transects two kilometres apart over huge areas of Botswana, Caprivi and southern Angola and found that the population was up in some areas, down in others but basically stable. One reason is that they’re returning to Angola.’

In that country’s interminable civil conflict, Jonas Savimbi’s rebel troops are thought to have slaughtered around 150 000 elephants for meat and to finance the war by selling ivory. All the rhino went the same way. When Michael surveyed strife-torn Luiana National Park in 2001 there were 38 elephants. In 2005 it had jumped to 3 000 and by 2008 the count was 8 000. How did they know it was safe to return to Angola?

‘The country’s remembered by a generation of elephants still alive today,’ said Michael, ‘and an elephant never forgets. They still recognise the pathways to food and water and the timing of seasons. They remember where the hunters are. In a sense, they’re Angolan refugees returning home.

‘The bulls are the scouts, leaving the vicinity of Botswana’s conservation areas on exploration journeys. They move from the Okavango Delta up the Kwando River, streak across the Caprivi at night and into Angola. They find it’s pristine with few people. There are thought to be millions of landmines in southeast Angola. I don’t know how they avoid them – probably by smell – but they do. Then they return and fetch the family herds.’

The distance elephants walk is staggering. Michael and Kelly have tracked a collared elephant that covered 32 000 kilometres in two years – the greatest distance ever recorded for the species. ‘They look for food and water,’ said Michael. ‘But they’re also searching for peaceful sanctuaries far from humans.

‘So how are elephants doing in Africa?’ I asked.

‘President Ian Khama’s passionate about wildlife, which translates into great protection in Botswana,’ said Michael. ‘In our area they’re doing okay. In Tanzania, Kenya and Mozambique they’re not so well protected and poaching is increasing. They’re also losing habitat there faster than we can think. Calf mortality is high. In the Congo, the elephant population is going down fast. Soon they’ll be locally extinct.

‘For elephants to survive we need to identify safe corridors, linkages between areas, networks, dispersal areas, transfrontier parks. We need to let their movement draw the lines which define wildlife ecosystems. There’s not much time left. Their future is in our hands. We have to get it right and do it now while we still have the opportunity.’

We left Botswana and entered Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park at its northern gate near Pandamatenga. The camps were dilapidated but faithful staff were doing what they could to keep them going. From Sinamatella, high on a hill, we watched two large bulls grazing companionably, and a large tusker in the campsite surprised my wife as she headed for the bathroom at sunrise. Hunting is allowed in Hwange. Add that to the poaching, and a disaster could be on the way in one of Africa’s truly great parks.

Our last stop was Mashatu in Botswana’s Tuli Block, east of Musina. There I asked Jeanetta Selier about elephant communication, intrigued by something I’d witnessed back in Chobe. Guided by the park’s honorary vet, Clay Wilson, I’d watched an old bull, at the rear of a line of elephants rumble and step forward. Each one in the line, without looking round, began walking simultaneously as if he’d said, ‘Go!’ Do elephants have a language? Jeanetta seemed the right person to ask.

‘Elephants have a very complex communication system,’ she said as we watched a mother fondling her baby with a tender trunk. ‘There’s body language, audible and subsonic sounds and seismic waves transmitted through their toes. When a female is ready to mate, she sings – in multi-layered cadences – what I call an oestrus song to signal ovulation. Quite beautiful.’

Standing near a herd, we could catch the upper frequencies of their conversation. Sensitive recording equipment has recently shown its complexity. Elephant ears detect the lowest frequency sounds in the animal kingdom. Researcher Caitlin O’Connell-Rodwell of Stanford University discovered that at certain times an entire herd will freeze and lean forward on their toenails. At such moments she recorded groundwaves conveying complex sounds at around 20 hertz with harmonics from 40 to 80 hertz.

She found that seismic waves travelled through their feet and up their legs and shoulders to their middle ears. Different signals elicited specific behaviours in the herd, suggesting a form of language with structured syntax. Seismic groundwaves can travel immense distances, which explains how bulls on expeditions to faraway Angola unerringly reunite with the herd to lead them northwards.

This ability is aided by pathways between waterholes remembered and communicated over generations by older bulls and matriarchs. It is likely, according to Michael Chase, that their intellect and ability are still beyond our imagination.

Infrasound and seismic communication is an ability shared by whales, dolphins and some insects. The biologist Lyall Watson once witnessed an elephant and a whale in what appeared to be rapt conversation near Knysna.

‘The throbbing was back in the air,’ he wrote. ‘I could feel it and I began to understand why. The blue whale was on the surface again, pointed inshore, resting, her blowhole clearly visible. The matriarch was here for the whale! The largest animal in the ocean and the largest living land animal were no more than a hundred yards apart, and I was convinced that they were communicating.

‘In infrasound, in concert, sharing big brains and long lives, understanding the pain of high investment in a few precious offspring, aware of the importance and the pleasure of complex sociality … matriarch to matriarch, almost the last of their kind.’

From Mashatu we turned homeward through the seemingly endless hunting concessions of northern Limpopo. Jeanetta was right – without elephants around we felt strangely lonely. On the long, straight road through the bushveld, Michael Chase’s question kept demanding an answer: ‘Elephants are a flagship species. If we can’t save the African elephant, what hope is there for the rest of Africa’s wildlife?’

Elephantastic

There’s a rule of the wild, often fatal if broken, that you don’t get in the way of a wild elephant. You give it all the space it needs. And if the tusker is a matriarch in charge of a breeding herd, you keep well away. These warnings were flashing code red as I stared up at the huge grey creature only metres away which had impaled me with her stare.

The situation could have been avoided if I’d checked the stairs into the hide before the game-drive vehicle moved off. But now it was too late.

What happened next requires a context. Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe is an extraordinarily beautiful wilderness area, but because of the political and financial situation in the country visitor numbers are not high. This gives it a feeling of uncluttered freedom – kilometres of woodlands, wetlands and sandveld simmering with wild creatures and devoid of humans.

That isolation had been used to devastating effect by poachers who’d poisoned salt licks and waterholes with cyanide. A rough count turned up around 100 dead elephants with their tusks removed as well as other predators and raptors poisoned through feeding on them. I’d been asked by an environmental trust to see what was going on in the park and, as one does, I checked into a lodge because, well, why not have a bit of luxury in Paradise?

The routine from the lodge stoep seemed to be baboons at dawn, zebras and antelope during the morning, elephants in the midday heat and buffalos plus more elephants each evening. As the night deepened – and with a good torch – the eyes of prowling cats would reflect back yellow points of trouble.

There’s poaching and ration hunting in the park, and elephants deemed ‘problem animals’ are shot for foreign revenue. In such circumstances you cannot bank on a friendly reception from a herd.

The plan had been to head slowly for a distant waterhole in the afternoon and have sundowners at a ground-level hide. With any luck there’d be a few elephants.

My guide dropped me off at the hide and headed off to not disturb wildlife that might arrive. It looked like a pile of logs but had an opening that led down into a chamber a few metres below ground. From inside, if an elephant walked close by, all you’d see would be its toenails.

I stuck my head through the doorway and discovered the wooden stairs had collapsed. Perhaps I could jump down, but it would be a hell of a job to get out again. So I leaned up against one of the logs facing the waterhole and hoped for the best. As the sun dipped westwards, elephants began arriving across the water. Slowly the full moon rose like a huge golden coin, silhouetting pachyderms in its rippling reflection.

I was transfixed but, as it turned out, a little too transfixed to notice a breeding herd led by a huge matriarch coming up behind me. They were so silent on their spongy feet that I could hear the call of a distant fiery-necked nightjar and the soft thump of the water pump 100 metres away. But not them.

There was nowhere to hide and running would have been suicide, so I made myself as small as possible and, I think, stopped breathing. The matriarch led her herd to the water’s edge and the soft twilight was filled with the sound of slurping, sighing and the happy squeals of youngsters.

I fervently hoped she hadn’t seen my crouching form but, it turned out, for the moment she was ignoring me. When the drinking was done she turned towards me, raised her trunk and sniffed. With her ears flared in warning she seemed to fill the sky.

We looked at each other for an uncomfortably long time. Then something extremely strange happened. I generally avoid attaching human intentions to animal actions, but she did something so human I couldn’t help it: she lowered her trunk and nodded. As she did I felt an inexplicable wave of acceptance wash over me. I relaxed and smiled at her.

Then she put her ears back in their at-ease place, stepped forward in a trajectory that would take her only a few metres from where I was sitting and led her family past me. I could hear their stomachs rumbling. With two steps to one side she could have caught me with her trunk, dashed me to the ground and stomped me flat. But, despite the hunting, poisoning and cruel mistreatment of her kind by my species, she continued to beam calming assurance. I kept grinning like a kid with a new friend.

Later that evening I tried to figure out the nature of the inter-species communication that had taken place in that magic moment, but gave up. We humans simply cannot yet comprehend the astounding capability of these extraordinary creatures.

Caring a fig

There were chimpanzees all over the fig tree like fat brown fruit ripe for the picking. They were eating, arguing, posturing, playing and one couple, unconcerned by a cluster of admiring youngsters, were copulating.

Bits of discarded fig and the occasional scat or stream of pee were raining down. I had hiked to the huge fig at the heart of the Kibale Forest in Uganda and, staring at the Pan troglodyte performance, I became aware of the side shows – countless birds and raids by nervous red-tailed monkeys. The tree was aswarm with life. The ground below was covered in rotting, marinating figs and buzzing with intoxicated insects.

There’s just something about fig trees that, like baobabs, sets them apart. They have presence. Because they fruit all year round, fig trees are the very foundations of tropical and subtropical life. They’re more than mere trees: they’re entire ecosystems.

Depending on its size and type, a tree can yield up to 100 000 figs twice a year (we’re talking tonnage here) and each fruit can contain up to 1 000 seeds. This makes for some serious eating by an extraordinary range of creatures.

In a 30-minute stakeout of a Stuhlmann’s fig tree, a researcher ticked off 16 trumpeter hornbills, 10 African green pigeons, eight purple-crested louries, eight white-eared barbets, seven black-bellied starlings, six speckled mousebirds, six yellow white-eyes, four black-eyed bulbuls, two black-collared barbets, a golden-rumped tinkerbird and a solitary sombre greenbul.

You’ll invariably also find several species of lourie and hornbill. Patient observation might also turn up African pygmy geese, white-backed ducks, twinspots, canaries, firefinches, francolins, guinea fowls, geckos, agamas, arborial snakes, tree frogs, dragonflies, wasps, damselflies, fig-tree moths, spiders, ants, termites and the beautiful fig-tree blue butterfly.

Depending on the tree’s location, add fruit bats, samango and vervet monkeys, galagos, baboons, chimps, gorillas and, of course, humans.

At ground level you may find elephants, duiker, bushpigs, African civets, dassies, squirrels, mice and other rodents, tortoises. If the tree overhangs water, banded tilapia and silver catfish which snap up floating fruit.

They call palms the king tree. Against a fig they’re mere foot soldiers.

Flying cats

Cheetahs greet by rubbing against you and purring loudly. It’s a deep, throaty rumble that leaves you with a warm, fuzzy feeling and in no doubt that you’re accepted.

A cheetah at speed, though, has more in common with a bird than a purring beast. Long before a speckled cat hits its top-speed burst (they’ve been logged at 120 kilometres per hour), its stride is in excess of eight metres and it seems to touch the ground so briefly as to appear permanently airborne.

This became clear to me as I tried to keep a hurtling cat in the viewfinder of a high-speed camera at Cheetah Outreach near Cape Town. To exercise their ‘cheetah ambassadors’, they use a moving cord on pulleys which whips a favourite toy round a large enclosure. If it moves, cheetah chase instinct kicks in and off they go.

‘It’s both exercise and a game for them,’ said Diane Glover, who’s spent many years working with the cats at Outreach. ‘It’s thrilling to watch a cheetah at speed. See how they use their tail for turning? It’s long, deep and flat, like a rudder. And the way they use their back to accelerate … ’ The cat we were watching blurred past and then, deciding the toy wasn’t going to be caught, bounced to a halt and sauntered up a mound to sit and look utterly regal.

In evolutionary terms, its presence was an enigma. In the business of survival of the fittest, its line should have disappeared into species oblivion ages ago. Cheetahs are non-aggressive and will retreat rather than defend their catch. They have small jaws and a weak bite. Out on the savanna their cubs are heavily predated, with fewer than five per cent reaching adulthood.

While sprinting, they overheat in mere seconds and take more than half an hour to recover from a burst of speed. In a chase, their breathing rate shoots from 16 breaths a minute to nearly 160. Unlike other cats, their claws are blunt and no good for climbing trees to escape danger. They’ve sacrificed muscle mass for leanness like any good sprinter. And instead of a hearty roar, they cheep like a bird.

But the most astounding feature of all is their skeleton. If it wasn’t on four legs, you’d think you were looking at the bones of a bird. They’re long, frighteningly thin and clearly fragile.

Yet, genetically cheetahs are the oldest of the cat family – perfect in their savanna niche and unchanged for around three million years. They’ve outlived ice ages and sabre-tooth cats. Their narrow waist, long legs, deep chest, large nostrils, enlarged heart and lung, special pads for traction and long tail for balance are all designed around the one thing that has given them an evolutionary advantage: speed.

‘They can get to 80 kilometres per hour in three seconds,’ said Dawn as we headed for another enclosure. ‘A lion’s success rate in hunting is between 10 and 20 per cent. For a cheetah, it’s around 50 per cent. They’re magnificent stalkers so they get close to prey. Then with a burst of speed, they trip it and crush its windpipe. Elegant, quick, efficient and thrilling to watch.’

Human fascination with cheetahs goes back a long way. Early humans probably scavenged their kills. They were worshipped in Egypt and thought to be escorts for pharaohs into the afterlife. Cleopatra is said to have had more than 1 000. In the 16th century, Mughal emperor Akbar of India kept hundreds for hunting (the name ‘cheetah’ is a Sanskrit word meaning ‘spotted one’), as did royalty in Russia in the Middle Ages and France in the 1100s. Their association with humans is thought to be longer than that of house cats and almost as long-lived as dogs’ history with humans..

This hasn’t saved them in the modern world. There are fewer than 10 000 adult cheetahs in the wild (fewer than a thousand in South Africa) and about 2 000 in captivity. Their numbers are declining and they’re listed as threatened.

‘The problem is that a captive-bred cheetah can’t survive in the wild,’ said Dawn. ‘The females are very fussy about mating and it takes two years for them to teach their cubs how to hunt and avoid predators. You can’t put a pair in a pen and hope they’ll breed, or expect a hand-reared cat to know how to hunt. And out there the habitat is crucial. The Kruger National Park is not good because there are too many predators and on the Serengeti in Tanzania tourists often interrupt their kills. The best place for wild cheetah is Namibia, followed by Botswana and South Africa.’

The biggest cheetah population in South Africa is on farms along the country’s northern borders. But because of big stock losses, all predators are being targeted. ‘You can’t blame farmers,’ said Dawn. ‘They’re just trying to make a living. We breed Anatolian dogs and give them to farmers as a conservation measure. They can bring down stock predation by 100 per cent.’

Hope for the future of cheetahs has to do with range conservation and reducing conflict with humans. And in this work the great champions of the spotted cat are women. In southern and central Africa, most cheetah conservation projects are run by women and most of their handlers are female. I asked Dawn why.

‘The cats are independent,’ she said. ‘You can’t dominate them or tell them what to do. You work on a relationship and build an emotional bond. It’s not like a dog, which looks to an alpha male. Men seem to prefer handling pack animals, but women are more likely to understand the emotional nature of relationships with cheetahs. When new staff are hired, the final interview is by the cheetahs, not management. And most of our volunteers and staff are women.

‘It’s always the same: the cat accepts you, you fall for it and the bond changes you forever. Few people who’ve worked with cheetahs can ever leave them. It’s a life calling. And they so badly need our help.’

Why giraffes have short necks

There’s a wonderful web service called Environmental News Network, which prowls research on the natural world and sends almost daily summaries. Most of the papers have abstruse and, for us ordinary folk, boring titles. But one caught my eye: Why giraffes have short necks by Michael Taylor and Mathew Wedel. They had to be joking.

I downloaded the paper and, no, they’re weren’t joking. In comparison with what’s wandered the planet before, giraffes are, it seems, practically bulldogian.

There are two reasons the giraffe developed its neck: to get to the tasty bits atop trees and – because it grew long legs to run fast – it then needed to reach down to drink. But that logic doesn’t hold for a group of now extinct beasties called sauropods. They’re those creatures with elephant-like bodies, short legs, whiplash tails and snaky necks beloved of children’s toy boxes. From shoulder to head they were five times longer than the largest recorded giraffe.

The mechanical problems of such an outrageous neck extension are considerable. But whatever mechanical barriers to the evolution of truly long necks in other vertebrates there were, sauropods didn’t just break that barrier – they smashed it.

The biggest sauropod named, appropriately, Supersaurus, had a neck 16 metres long (there’s a still-to-be-verified claim of 21 metres). To do it, evolution had to solve some tricky problems. One solution was a tiny head with few teeth, limited bone and a cat-sized brain. It was merely a cropping device.

The length of the air passage was another problem, solved with lung-like air sacks down the neck length. To lighten the vertebrae (some sauropods had up to 19) they were constructed like foam, with more space than bone.

Sauropods died out, but nature never wastes a good experiment. Long necks, compact bodies and balancing tails just happened to be streamlined. Millions of years, considerable shrinkage and much experimentation later, the forelegs became wings and the skin grew feathers. If you want to see a Supersaurus in action take a look at one of its glorious descendants – the swan.

Swarm

We came out of Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania in low range and headed along a dusty track towards a small granite koppie. There we stopped and, keeping a lookout for snakes and Serengeti predators, we climbed the gritty boulders. I knew what we were looking for, but when I saw it, the sheer scale took my breath away.

From the base of the koppie across the flat plain to the distant horizon were wild animals, hundreds of thousands of them in tightly bunched streams, a mass in motion. The Great Migration had arrived on the Ngorongoro plains.

Early next morning we drove north towards central Serengeti and stopped among the moving creatures. Wilde­beest, zebras and Thompson’s gazelles were everywhere, but it was grunting wildebeest that were constantly on the go in numbers that defied imagination.

With a sun-spangled urge to move, these animals follow the storms in a 480-kilometre annual cycle of migration that takes them from the Gol Mountains in northwest Serengeti through Mwanza and the crocodile-infested rivers of the western corridor. From there they turn northwest to the Maasai Mara in Kenya, then down to southern Serengeti and the Ngorongoro plains. It’s the largest mammal migration on earth.

The odd thing was that they weren’t going in the same direction. Some of the streams were heading towards the sunrise, others across it, still others west. What did it mean?

As best I could in the mass of dark bodies, I kept my eye on the leader of a stream. It held its position for a while then relinquished it to others, though the stream held purpose and direction. I had a feeling I’d seen this behaviour before, then remembered: it resembled African army ants. The wildebeest were swarming.

Instead of ending up in a tangle of horns and legs, as logic suggests they should, they were flowing as one, a super organism with purpose and direction. It’s something shoaling fish manage, so do some birds, bees and even minute krill.

It turns out swarming is extraordinarily complex behaviour that’s been puzzling animal behaviourists, mathematicians and computer modellers for ages. The big question isn’t why creatures swarm but how they manage to avoid collisions despite changes of direction.

In 1986 swarm behaviour was replicated on computer by American 3D animator Craig Reynolds in a program he called Boids. From it he derived three rules that individuals in a swarm need to obey:

Separation: steer to avoid crowding your neighbours.

Alignment: steer towards the average heading of your neighbours.

Cohesion: steer to move towards the average position (centre of the mass).

Later other sub-rules were added such as obstacle avoidance, goal seeking, smell and fear. The core principle is what’s called emergent behaviour, which is dynamic, ever changing but has coherence over time. Because individuals obey simple rules, central co-ordination is unnecessary.

This works well for wildebeest. The triggers are storms, the goal is fresh grass and a collective intelligence hardwired into their genetic code keeps them on track along ancestral paths.

But what shapes these paths? Each new cycle begins with dung beetles burying balls from the previous pass of the migration, fertilising the soil and providing compost for grass awaiting rain to feed millions of moths.

Trees cannot easily take hold in the shallow soil of the plains, but bushes can, providing cover for predators and scavengers, which also have the migration clock etched into their genes. If wildebeest spread across the plain evenly and widely, they would be easy pickings, a cookie jar with food wherever you look.

But by clumping together and moving on different trajectories but with a similar overall goal, the wildebeest create ‘holes’ in the pattern that keep the predators guessing.

Lions have territories and await the thundering feast. But they never know exactly when the herds will be there or quite where they’ll move. Get your calculations wrong and you’ve lost the herd. And, of course, a mass of animals that act in unison is also a great many wary eyes, ears and noses alert for trouble.

Still, there’s always enough food on the hoof to go round. In an amazing biological synchrony, the wildebeest give birth to their calves almost simultaneously. Five out of six youngsters never make the migration cycle, many ripped away from the herd by huge Nile crocs as they cross the Mara and Grumeti rivers, the rest picked off by lions, cheetahs and hyenas. What is logical for the many can be folly for the few. And the predators know their business.

All migrating animals make dangerous bargains in their search for food – and risk becoming food themselves. They have to surmount formidable barriers, chasing rains that may not fall, grasses that may not grow. When nature doesn’t hold up her end of the bargain they are stalked by starvation. But the courage of numbers and a swarm intelligence born of millions of years of trial and error whispers: ‘If you want to live, move.’ And, in their millions, the Serengeti wildebeest obey and thrive.

How the zebra got its stripes

Giraffes have interesting blotches and leopard rosettes are beautiful, but nothing in the animal world equals the showy dazzle of a zebra. It’s frankly outrageous. In the slow, remorseless workshop of natural selection, every part or process of every living thing is there because it gave that species a survival advantage. What on earth selected a horse with striped pyjamas?

There’s an old African folk tale that tells it this way: long ago, when animals were still new on earth, the weather was very hot and what little water there was remained in small pools. One of these was guarded by a proud old baboon.

‘I am the lord of the water,’ he said when other animals came to drink. ‘You may not have my water.’

One day, a pure white zebra came down to the pool to drink (in those days all zebras were white). The baboon, who was sitting by his fire, jumped up. ‘Go away,’ he barked.

‘The water is for everyone, not just for you, monkey-face,’ said the zebra.

‘Oh yes?’ said the baboon. ‘Then you’ll have to fight me for it.’

The baboon rushed at the zebra and soon they were locked in fierce combat. Finally, with a mighty kick, the zebra sent the baboon flying high into the rocks of the cliff behind them. He landed with a smack on his backside and today it’s still hairless from the abrasion.

But the zebra, dazed from the battle, staggered and fell into the baboon’s fire. Being too tired to get out quickly, the sticks of the fire scorched him, leaving stripes across his white fur. The shock sent the zebra galloping away to the plains, where he has stayed ever since. The baboon and his family, however, remain high up among the rocks where they bark defiance at all strangers and hold up their tails to ease the smarting of their bald patches.

There have, of course, been other explanations for the stripes, though not as dramatic. One has been camouflage, the idea being that zebras can’t be seen in tall grass or in bush. But other than mountain zebras, most of the species are plains animals and spend much of their time in short grass away from trees where predators hide.

A rather better explanation is that, since zebras are herd animals, the stripes might confuse predators. A lion would have trouble picking out a single zebra from a herd fleeing in front of it. Another possibility is that zebras are like snowflakes, each with its individual pattern. This is how they recognise each other, and particularly how foals can find their mothers in the herd. I guess you could call it natural bar-coding.

Finally, though, a team of biologists decided to stop speculating and run some scientific tests. They came up with a completely different hypothesis: the stripes appear to be a bug repellent.

Horseflies are appropriately named. They’re noisy, extremely agile and if you’ve ever tried to swat one, you’ll know they’re as tough as boot leather. They simply straighten their antennae and fly off intact.

Their razor-sharp mandibles slice the flesh, allowing the female horsefly to sup on blood, which is necessary for her reproduction. The bites often become itchy, causing discomfort and distraction to the grazing herbivore. Horseflies are also vectors for blood-borne pathogens such as equine infectious anaemia virus, parasitic filarial worm and even anthrax.

If an animal is attacked by a swarm of horseflies, it can lose up to 300 millilitres of blood a day, weakening it and possibly causing death from blood loss.

Gábor Horváth, Susanne Åkesson and colleagues from Hungary and Sweden didn’t have zebras in mind when they began a study on the annoying insects. They simply wanted to know what colours attracted them. To do this, they painted fibreglass horses in various colours, coated them in oil and insect glue, then placed them in a field to await results. Every two days they plucked the trapped flies from their ponies and counted them. Some scientists have funny day jobs.

It turned out that dark colours attracted most flies, white attracted fewer, but to their surprise a model they’d decided to paint with zebra stripes attracted fewest of all. They discovered that horseflies respond strongly to polarised (single-plane) light – many insects do – and that the stripes confused the light waves.

‘We started off studying horses with black, brown or white coats,’ said Åkesson, from Lund University. ‘We found that from black and brown horses we get horizontally polarised light. This effect made the dark-coloured horses very attractive to flies. But striped horses weren’t attractive. That was a surprise because, in a striped pattern, you still have these dark areas reflecting horizontally polarised light. But the narrower (and more zebra-like) the stripes, the less attractive they were to the flies.’

Selection would have gradually favoured semi-striped pre-zebras, which remained healthier – and perhaps the semi-striped quagga was a way station that survived until humans shot it to extinction. It’s a less lyrical reason for stripes than a battle between a white zebra and a grouchy baboon. But if stripes also deter the horsefly’s nasty cousin, the tsetse fly, then there’s an idea just waiting for a sharp entrepreneur. Safari clothing could see a shift from drab khaki to something more dazzling.

Yap history

If the yapping of your neighbour’s dog is driving you crazy consider this: there’s a good chance that you’re alive today because of barking dogs. Here’s why.

All dogs today are genetic descendants of the grey wolf. Exactly when domestication began is unknown, but there’s evidence that some human societies had dogs 15 000 years ago. By that time, dogs were being buried the same way as humans – and sometimes with humans.

Their main uses would have been for hunting and possibly fighting, but also as an alarm system against human and animal intruders, particularly at night. But here’s the puzzle: grey wolves don’t bark and are generally extremely silent animals, whereas dog are notable barkers.

Yuval Harari of Jerusalem University, who specialises in Stone Age societies, suggests an answer. If a band of humans had five puppies living with them, and four hardly barked at all, they would favour the pup that yapped. It would be given more care, more food and it would have greater chance to thrive and breed.

‘Over thousands of years’, he says, ‘this would have created a huge difference between wolves that don’t bark and dogs that do. So barking is a relic of the ancient role – and in many cases modern role – of dogs. They defended our ancestors against danger.’

But the favour didn’t go only one way. Over generations mutual bonds of understanding developed and both species co-evolved to communicate with each other. Dogs became adept at understanding human commands and emotions. And they also developed skills in manipulating humans to their own advantage.

They were adorable, listened attentively, responded to commands and were demanding of food. So cute, manipulative, barking dogs were the ones that survived 15 000 years of human association.

This survival tactic has been spectacularly successful. There are estimated to be more than half a billion dogs on earth, 148 million in Africa and nine million in South Africa. By comparison there are only about 150 000 grey wolves, 500 Ethiopian wolves and 250 red wolves. There’s a lesson in this: being useful to humans is a smart genetic survival strategy. So when dogs yap, cut them some slack.

Bone up your tone

Apart from people in lands of fire and ice where they never see dogs (or China where they eat them), the world is divided between folk who are comfortable around hounds and those who aren’t. The reason isn’t whether or not we like dogs but, it seems, whether they like us. And it all depends on how we talk to them.

Researchers at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest trained dogs to lie still in an MRI scanner and watched how their brains reacted to talking. To their surprise, various tones stimulated the same areas in canines as in humans. The scans showed that dogs were sensitive to emotionally charged sounds like human laughter and crying as well as voice tones.

‘The location of the activity in the dog brain is very similar to where we found it in the human brain,’ said ethologist Attila Andics. ‘The fact that we found that these areas exist in a dog brain at all is a surprise.

‘We know dogs are very good at tuning into the feelings of their owners,’ he added, ‘and we know a good dog owner can detect emotional changes in their dog. But we now begin to understand why.’

This explains why dogs out-perform chimpanzees in social tasks. In 30 000 years of domestication dogs have learned (and we have selected those who learned) to be sensitive to what we say. They’re also capable of something no other animal but a chimp can do – to look at where we point. They can also read your facial expression.

Dogs have large vocabularies and can infer meaning in growls and can effortlessly figure out if other dogs want to play or fight. But their way with human words is extraordinary. A South Carolina border collie named Chaser, for example, was found to know the names of 1 022 objects.

So the way you talk to a dog determines how it responds to you. They like people who are polite to them. If you fear strange dogs, it’s probably because you don’t know how to address them.

The dark shadow with sharp teeth

I’m not afraid of dogs. They’ve been with me all my life and I’m very relaxed around them. I’ve never been bitten or even growled at. We instinctively understand each other. So the incident that took place years ago in a twilight lane in Noordhoek, Cape Town, continued to worry me.

I’d been visiting friends who had two young Alaskan malamutes – wolf-like sled dogs. A colleague was to pick me up so I suggested he do it at the gate rather than come all the way into the property down the long, tree-lined drive.

I strolled away from the house, listening to the silence of evening settle over the woods. Then, for some reason, quite far up the drive, I turned round and there behind me were the malamutes, padding on hushed paws. I let loose a yell of fear that surprised even me and dived for the nearest tree, seized by an instinct over which I had absolutely no control.

As I leapt for the lower branches my rational mind kicked in and I hung there, feeling stupid, my heart hammering. The dogs regarded me with puzzled expressions, wagging their bushy tails.

Recently, after listening to a seminar at the University of the Western Cape by Louise Green about wolves and werewolves, I remembered my panic and figured it was time to re-open the case.

About 40 million years ago canids – of which the wolf and the domestic dog are members – first appeared in North America. By the time my ancestors ambled across the land bridge from Africa into Asia and Europe, the grey wolf ruled the rich hunting grounds emerging south of the receding glaciers. Both species had a taste for flesh, but the wolf was better at bringing it down. There was bound to be trouble.

In much mythology the wolf is the traditional – if unfairly selected – representative of the dark side of humanity, though it was not always so. The Greek word for wolf is lukos – light – and Apollo was regarded as both the god of the sun and of wolves.

A full-grown wolf can weigh 75 kilograms and be as big as a Great Dane, though far more lithe and muscular. Their paws are the size of your fist. So they’re big and they’re smart. Intelligence is related to brain size and this, according to primatologists, is the effect of animals living together in groups.

Simply put, social animals have bigger brains than solitary ones. Both humans and wolves have intelligence born of co-operation within large families. They teach and care for their young, work together to acquire food, claim territories and have complex communication systems. We have, however, different specialities. Ours is rationality, for wolves it’s running. If you’ve ever seen a wolf, African wild dog, jackal or fox at speed you’ll know what I mean. They can glide effortlessly for hours, which is how they wear down prey.

Where I’m heading with this is the conclusion that Mark Rowlands came to after many years of living with a wolf named Brenin and beautifully captured in a book The Philosopher and the Wolf: the canid family understand us, because in so many ways they are like us.

This has led them in two directions. One is a path through the grey wolf to the dog, though it’s hard to imagine that fine ancestral parentage in a Maltese poodle. This is the path through understanding to trust and companionship for mutual benefit. The other was – though it is no longer – the path of implacable enemies. Wolves understand us, they’re hunters and deep down in the ancient part of our simian brain we know that.

If a lion or any of the cat family, or even an elephant, charges you and you stand still (you should), your failure to run puzzles them and generally they will stop, on the assumption that if we don’t fear them they should fear you. Never try that with a wolf, it will call your bluff.

There’s an old story about these different paths passed down from the forests of ancient Europe. Discouraged after an unsuccessful day of hunting, a hungry wolf came upon a well-fed dog. He could see the dog was having a better time of it than he was and he inquired what the dog had to do to stay so well-fed. ‘Very little,’ said the dog, ‘guard the house, show fondness to the master, be submissive to the rest of the family and I get well fed and warmly lodged.’

The wolf thought this over carefully. He risked his own life almost daily, had to stay out in the worst of weather and was never assured of his meals. So he figured he’d try another way of living.

As they were going along together the wolf saw a place around the dog’s neck where the hair had been worn thin. He asked what this was and the dog said it was nothing, ‘just the place where my collar and chain rub.’ The wolf stopped short. ‘Chain?’ he asked. ‘You mean you are not free to go where you choose?’

‘No,’ said the dog, ‘but what does that mean?’ ‘Much,’ answered the wolf as he trotted back into the forest. ‘Very much indeed.’

In a sense we’ve become that dog, but that which is wild in us has not gone, it is merely buried. As Mark Rowlands discovered in his love for Brenin, a wolf is part of the hidden story of who we are, a bright clearing in the ancient forest of the human soul or a dark shadow of all we fear. It can fill you with delight or scare you to death. At least I think that’s the reason I found myself hanging from a branch being regarded by two puzzled dogs all those years ago.

The baboon essence of photography

It’s something of a confession that, despite taking thousands of photographs in more than two decades of travelling the world as a photojournalist, I’ve never seriously considered the art of photography. One of the reasons is that vexing, much disputed, oversaturated term ‘art’. What on earth is it?

In the way things sometimes do, the beginnings of an answer came from an unexpected direction: my rather odd obsession with baboons. They’re not only fun to watch and almost uncomfortably human, they’re also damnably clever. But how clever? A friend who’d watched them harassing tourists near Cape Point said it was lucky they hadn’t worked out how to open car doors. A few weeks later rather hysterical reports were coming in saying they had. And once one had figured it out, within 24 hours the rest of the troop had got the trick. That’s not good news for baboons. The smarter they get, the less people tolerate them. But there are a lot of things they can’t do, like construct a sentence, use tools, alter their environment to their advantage – or create artistic representations of their world view.

On the tree of life, the survivors are those who developed skills appropriate to their survival. The converse is also true: skills that were not appropriate (if they ever appeared) soon saw their bearers disappear. Around 30 million years ago, all apes had a common ancestor. Some 20 million years ago chimps and orang-utans were still on our branch of the family tree, but between 5 and 7 million years ago we branched off. On our solitary evolutionary path to here and now, we learned to communicate through sounds, worked out tool usage, massively altered our environment to our advantage (unfortunately, for many other species) and developed a large cerebral cortex. And – considering the pattern scratched on a bone found in the Blombos Cave in the southern Cape – invented art. Those were survival skills.

Current research into baboon behaviour has some important things to tell us about how we got so far in the smart business. After closely observing baboons in the Okavango Delta for many years, behavioural scientists Dorothy Cheyney and Robert Seyfarth discovered that they (the baboons) spent much of their time gossiping and eavesdropping on others of their troop. While they had only 14 types of vocalising or ‘words’, their responses to these words and the movement of the troop indicated that they held in their minds many more concepts for which they had no words. They may have been ‘pre-language’, except in the most rudimentary way, but they clearly had a language of thought. Studies on baboons and other apes, including chimps, show that they all have considerable ability to have ideas and discern and remember sounds, but no ability to represent them.

You’re wondering where photography got to. Hang on, I’m coming to that. A language of mind has structure and requires that the thinker has a sense of self and of their separation from others and the world. Baboons have this, which makes them such a joy to watch, but they live in the present tense. They lack the insight to imagine a different world. Or to change it.

Baboons stopped right there and chimps got a bit further, but humans learned to imitate sounds in a way that associated them with objects and actions. There is much debate about why we did this, but it’s possible that social survival favoured those with empathy – which neither baboons nor chimps have because it requires a mental conception of the ‘other’. And empathy favoured a desire to communicate. A female baboon, hearing its offspring yelling in fright, more often than not completely ignores it. It would be like a mother in a supermarket ignoring her child howling in the next isle. Empathy requires introspection which baboons are seemingly not good at. We can sense what the other is feeling. The difference was captured rather well in a sermon by John Donne in 1682: ‘The beast does but know, but the man knows that he knows.’

If the desire for language followed evolutionary pressure for empathy, language itself required a prior language of thought. Such a language necessarily has rules. The image of an object, say a cat, is nested in the idea of cats, which in turn is nested in the context within which the cat is being observed. Now you may notice that this construction could be a way of describing sentence construction in spoken language, with nouns, verbs, prepositions and all the rest. There is a connection. Cheyney and Seyfarth suggest the reason is that language was constructed on the framework of a preliterate language of mind.

The reason for this framework is that, because of the complex societies – or troops – in which primates and certain other species lived, there was evolutionary pressure, advantage if you like, to understand complexity. Baboons are very good at this and clearly know much more than they can communicate. There’s the well-documented story of railway signalman James Wide and his baboon, Jack, from the late 1800s. James lost his legs in an accident in Uitenhage in the Eastern Cape and took a job at a small siding where he enlisted the help of his tame baboon. Each day – for years and at exactly the right time – Jack would switch signals, divert trains and push James around on a trolley when necessary. The baboon continued to throw the points even after James died – until the Railways discovered it.

There’s also the story of Ahla, a baboon on a Namibian farm who was employed as a goatherd. Her ability to recognise kinship relations was remarkable and lost kids were immediately scooped up and returned to their mothers.

In a troop of maybe 80 baboons, a single member recognises the individual calls of every one. In laboratory situations baboons and other primates (as well as dogs, dolphins and parrots) have learned to respond to hundreds of words and whole sentences, recognise colours and work out complex problems – none of which would be possible without an ordered conceptual language. They’re all much smarter than they sound.

Okay, now let’s get back to photography. An image is the representation of an idea that bypasses language. It’s a mental representation that requires a language of mind and the ability to express this language in the world. If a baboon had the ability to use tools, it could conceivably create a painting, because it has the mental ability to conceive it. But it doesn’t – we are the only species we know of that can.

When we paint or draw or sculpt, the result is the idea of something (an object or shape) nested in that thing’s context, nested within the confines of the materials using a structured process defined by the ability of the artist. Art, therefore, is multiply nested, representational visual syntax – in the same way that language is multiply nested aural syntax expressed in sentences. Poor baboons, they have the mental machinery but not the ability to express it.

Photography is a more precise form of art. The structured process of a photograph is an idea lensed through framing, colours, light and a camera of a mental representation of a moment in time. Its power (and what makes a good photograph) is not that it captures the moment, though it does, but that it communicates the photographer’s language of mind, his or her visual syntax. It’s the communication through technology of an idea which nests within a small rectangular, two-dimensional scrap of a near-infinite world. Photography is to snapshots what ballet is to skipping. It’s a language of the mind – even when taking a photograph of a baboon trying to figure out what I’m doing.

I’ve always detected in the gaze of a baboon a certain pleading to be understood edged with puzzled desperation. I’m beginning to understand why.

Whalesong

Humans have had a strange relationship with whales. We cheer as their great noses or tails appear above the water and point eagerly at their cloudy, hot breath.

We killed them in their millions, distilled oil from their heads to light street lamps and keep engines running. We made combs and stays for ladies’ suspenders from their teeth and sent their song into space aboard Voyager for aliens to puzzle over. We stare deeply into the universe with the Hubble Space Telescope lubricated by whale oil, because nothing else is as pure.

They have bigger brains than us and, despite our treatment of them, they have never intentionally harmed us. In his wonderful book Leviathan, or the Whale, Philip Hoare sings their praise in lyrical prose:

‘Whales defy gravity, occupy other dimensions; they live in a medium that would overwhelm us and which far exceeds our earthly sway, moving through a world we know nothing about. They are animals before the Fall, innocent of sin.’

They also have bad breath and shit reddish water. But from the excrement of sperm whales we extract ambergris, which has a sweet, earthy scent and highly valued by perfumers. A serving of eggs and ambergris was reportedly King Charles II’s favourite dish.

Sperm whales are huge and sometimes centuries old. We know that because whales killed in the Atlantic were found in 2007 with stone tips in them. The Native Americans who made these stopped producing them hundreds of years ago.

Whales don’t drink, can dive to thousands of metres and can go without food for months. They communicate across entire oceans and have brains that interact with their environment in ways we don’t understand.

On our small blue planet spinning around an insignificant sun in a vast galaxy among billions of others in the fathomless depths of the universe, elephants, dolphins, the great apes and whales are the only other life forms with similar intelligence our species is ever likely to encounter. Our thrill as the noses and tails of whales appear above the sea’s rippling surface confirms that, at some level, we understand this. If we become the cause of their disappearance from earth, we will be the loneliest species we have ever known.

The ant, the elephant and a tree that whistles

The tale of the world’s beginning, it seems, is a never-ending story. It depends on who you listen to. The Greeks begin with chaos, which became filled with the children of a union between earth and sky. The Norse legends have fire and ice which meet to create a giant and a cow to nourish him. From the giant comes the grandfather of men. In the Bible, God creates the world, including man and woman, in six days, then rests.

According to the Rig Veda, the Indian collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns, earth and sky give birth to Tvasrt, the ‘first fashioner’, who impregnates the world with life. The Chinese have a cosmic egg which breaks to form yin and yang and the polarity of the world. In Egypt the opposites are a Chaos Goose and Chaos Gander. The Yoruba have the divinity Obatala who creates earth from the mud he fetches from beneath the sea. For the Mande in Mali, the beginning involves seeds.

These stories are simple and beautiful. In the real world, however, the devil is in the detail. The creation story that follows concerns the ant, the elephant and a tree that whistles.

The tree is an Acacia drepanolobium, commonly known as a whistling thorn for reasons which will become clear in a moment. It’s native to East Africa, grows to around six metres tall and has the usual pairs of mean-looking thorns on its branches.

Thorns don’t deter elephants. They can turn a woodland into grass savanna in remarkably short time and have the ecological delicacy of bulldozers. But they mostly avoid the whistling thorns like poison chalices.

The reason is that these trees have bulbous spheres at the base of their thorns and dispense sugary nectar from the ends of their leaves. The result is food and housing for several species of stinging ant with Latin names far longer than themselves.

Some of these bore holes in the spheres, chuck out the contents and settle in. When the wind blows across the entrances, the spheres whistle like flutes. If an unwary animal attempts to browse off a whistling thorn, the ants attack with singular ferocity.

There’s an inverse proportion between an elephant’s size and strength and the sensitivity of the inside of its trunk. Once bitten, as they say, twice shy. The same browsing sensitivity goes for giraffes and other herbivores.

To test whether the ants were truly deterring elephants, University of Florida biologist Todd Palmer and University of Wyoming ecologist Jacob Goheen fed some young orphaned Kenyan elephants branches from whistling-thorn trees, as well as from other acacias. When there were no ants on the branches, the elephants were just as likely to eat Acacia drepanolobium as they were their usual tree food. But when the branches held ants, the elephants avoided both types of acacia.

The mutualistic relationship is more complex than just housing ants. If the A. drepanolobium could be said to have a preference, it would be for the Crematogaster nigriceps ant. And if the nigriceps could be said to have a plan, it would (and does) allow occasional herbivore browsing. This is because a bit of plucking stimulates leaf growth which increases the supply of nectar.

However, if one of the other acacia ant species such as C. sjostedti takes over a tree, its preference is not for the bulbs but holes drilled by stem-boring, long-horned beetles and – in ways not yet understood – it attracts them. They eventually weaken a tree and can kill it.

To prevent this, if a tree leans out too far in the direction of another, the nigriceps prune the twigs so there’s no contact, avoiding a possible invasion. Too great a variation in the balance between tree, ant and elephant would cause hardship for all three.

There’s no need to remind you that, while an elephant’s brain is larger than ours, a tree doesn’t have one and an ant’s is smaller than the point of a pin. We’re talking about something other than intelligence here and a synecdoche for a creation story far more astounding that those handed down to us from antiquity.

Every second of every minute of every hour of every day, year, decade, millennium, millions and even billions of years, the relationship between every insect, animal, bird, fish, plant, mountain, continent, planet, star and galaxy is in an exquisite, ongoing dance of this and every moment of time. Creation is a never-ending story so big, so small, so destructive and constructive, so beautiful and profound that, like the blind trying to describe an elephant by touching parts of it, we can hardly see it at all.

And the hardest of all is to understand the outrageously vast time it takes for an ant, a tree and an elephant to learn to dance together in mutual synchrony on the African savanna.

The bitter butterfly

Butterflies are the bimbos of the natural world. Their flight paths meander like pulses of idle thought, pure and seemingly unencumbered by direction from a brain as small as a full stop.

They’re prodigiously diverse – around 18 000 species – without being adventurous. All behave very much alike, flitting from flower to flower, there to sup on sweet nectars through a toothless tube that rolls out like a party squeaker. Their wings are covered in tiny prisms and mirrors that trick light into gorgeous iridescence – six-legged worms strung between outrageously coloured kites.

The ancient Greeks saw in their gossamer lightness a likeness to the elusive human soul and in their hesitant flight its reluctance to move to the next world. The Greek word psyche means both soul and butterfly – the Latin word anima has the same dual meaning. For toga-clad students of lepidoptera, the transformation of a caterpillar into a butterfly provided a model for their ideas of death, burial, and resurrection. In Java butterflies are thought to be the form your soul takes to dream.

Sweet, innocent, gentle, graceful, predictable, no wonder they’re so godawfully boring. But wait, there’s one that doesn’t fit the mould. Calculating in caterpillar, dangerous in colour, scornfully slow in flight, so poisonous it makes some birds vomit just seeing it, here’s a butterfly with character. And, like all species that tip the balance firmly in their favour, it’s everywhere.

Monarch butterflies are beautiful. Their orange wings are veined in black and edged with white spots which continue over their bodies; colours that are equivalent to a swagger and show a finger to caution. The males have black spots on their secondary wings which exude pheromonic perfumes that make females go moggy. And at the tips of their delicate feelers are little orange welcome lamps.

What gives monarchs their special character, however, is their universal obsession with a poisoned chalice called milkweed. There are 140 species of the weed and around 300 species of monarch butterfly, which ensures an abiding relationship between the two on every continent other than Antarctica.

The milkweed genus is Asclepias, named by Carl Linnaeus after the Greek god of healing. As is often the case in folk medicine, there’s a fine line between healing and killing. Medicinal Plants of South Africa lists the value of milkweed as snuff and a cure for tuberculosis, stomach ache, asthma, typhus, coughs and general pain. It adds, rather quixotically, that the plant contains poisonous cardiac glycosides, which can cause the death of livestock and humans. Bushmen used it to tip their poisoned arrows.

A medical dictionary lists the effects as nausea, vomiting, headache, anorexia, visual disturbances and heart slowdown and warns that ‘the dose range between therapeutic and toxic levels is small’.

All of this is good news for the monarch, which lays its eggs on milkweed. Their larvae hatch with a ravenous appetite and proceed to devour the plant with no ill effect – an achievement that no doubt took millions of years of natural selection to achieve, with untold zillions of dead larvae.

When the worms are fat and ready, they glue their tails to a leaf and form pretty blue and gold pupae that hatch into butterflies filled with cardiac glycosides. All this requires clement weather. In the United States, when winter sets in, hundreds of millions of monarchs head south to warmer sites in Mexico and southern California thousands of kilometres away where they literally cover trees with their quivering beauty. In Africa winters don’t bother them so they stay put.

But here’s a puzzle. Birds eating monarchs have been seen throwing up shortly afterwards, so they’re clearly not good to eat. And the survival strategy of poison-free butterflies such as mocker swallowtails and viceroys is to look like monarchs in order to deter predators.

However, there are also reports of monarchs being eaten with no ill effects. Lepidopterist André Coetzer was quite excited to photograph a praying mantis in a Johannesburg park chewing on a hapless monarch. And in Mexico certain birds, known to avoid the butterflies further north, have been seen snacking on hibernating monarchs down south.

A study written by Colorado State University researcher Kim Pike may have the answer. She found that as monarchs age, the toxins in their system fades to below the danger level for predators. Rather like the viper-tongued Kate in Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, the monarch’s poison dilutes, rendering it a gentle, harmless bimbo.

But in one of those delightful twists of nature, its colouring signals its former poisonous self. Predators don’t know the difference and only taking a chance will tell them. Most have learned the hard way and never do. But some, like André’s praying mantis, are prepared to have a go. Did the mantis get lucky or throw up? ‘It was getting dark,’ he said, ‘I didn’t stay to watch.’

The speckled cat that walks alone

Leopards don’t want to be seen. They’ve spent nearly a million years getting that right. If they had spots they’d be more visible, but they don’t. Cheetahs do.

Leopards have rosettes framing a yellow patch on a pale background. You’d think this would make them stand out like a neon sign, but it doesn’t. Strangely their Day-Glo colours render them almost invisible in grassland, rocky outcrops or dappled forest light. It is such good camouflage that it’s been copied by armed forces for bush warfare. At night they fade to black.

Leopards are the most elusive of the Big Five and bestow bragging rights if you see one flashing across a road or disappearing into the underbrush. Their coats are more subtle and striking than those of a tiger and they’re as lithe and powerful as dolphins. They are arguably the most beautiful animal on earth.

As far back as the paleoanthropological record goes, our species and theirs – both top predators – have been in competition for food and many of our ancestors fetched up down their gullets. So when we got to rule the neighbourhood, they were bound to be in trouble.

But despite massive persecution and being declared vermin in many countries, including South Africa, leopards have prevailed and, relative to lions and cheetahs, are evidently doing relatively well. They’re the most widely distributed and successful of the world’s big cats and occupy more diverse habitats than any animal other than humans and some associated rodents like rats. They’re survivors, but their range is declining and they are listed as near-threatened.

My goal was to find out how they were doing in southern Africa and where they could be found. I wanted to look into their golden eyes and not be eaten. The obsession began in a small, thatched cottage in the Cederberg in the Western Cape occupied by Quinton Martins and his wife, Elizabeth, who were then running the Cape Leopard Trust, dedicated to leopard conservation. In terms of seeing the cats, their information wasn’t too encouraging.

‘They’re here,’ Quinton said, ‘but even most farmers who’ve lived in these mountains most of their lives have never seen one. Existing around humans, they’ve learned to keep a low profile.’

The Trust uses movement-activated camera traps to photograph leopards to assess their population density. Quinton’s research has also involved trapping and collaring leopards to plot their territory. And he’s talked most of the farmers out of shooting them and into cherishing their noble presence. It’s been a long, hard road.

‘You should visit Andrei Snyman,’ Quinton said. ‘He traps, collars and follows leopards in Mashatu. You have more chance of seeing them there.’

‘Leopards have to let you into their world,’ said Andrei when I tracked him down in Botswana’s Northern Tuli Game Reserve. ‘You’re lucky to come across one. If they don’t want to be seen you won’t see them, even if they’re a few metres away from you in the grass. It’s awesome. They live among people on farms, in koppies and near towns. Maybe you notice their tracks and a dog goes missing, but you never spot them. They’re the freest, most amazing carnivore in Africa.’

Getting to Mashatu had been interesting and required being ferried over the flooded Limpopo River in a squeaky cable car, possibly the most novel way to enter a country. Andrei has been collaring and following leopards there as part of his research into the cats’ territorial patterns, habitat use and food preference. They evidently eat almost anything, including sheep, cattle, dogs, cats, mice, lizards, birds and the occasional human.

Before dawn the next morning Andrei, his driver, Fish Maila, and I were on a koppie looking over endless mopane woodland. With a blue tracking aerial aloft and receiver to his ear, Andrei was listening intently for the pip, pip, pip of a leopard’s radio collar. Finally he pointed, we leapt into the Land Cruiser and Fish took off through the bush with a skill that would make a 4x4 enthusiast weep with envy. ‘Don’t worry about the trees,’ he said over his shoulder, ‘they pop up behind after we’ve driven over them.’

After 20 minutes of wild tracking we stopped and Andrei whispered: ‘He’s right here,’ pointing the aerial down at a steep angle. All I saw was grass, but slowly, as if materialising from another dimension, it took on the form of a leopard. ‘It’s Bogale,’ whispered Fish.

The magnificent creature glanced at us, his eyes flashing, and continued stalking an impala. To his obvious disgust the antelope spotted him before he could pounce and bounded away. His coat rippling like golden silk in a breeze and his outrageous tail flicking with irritation, Bogale strode into a river course and was gone.

‘We don’t know how many leopards there are in Africa,’ said Andrei as we made our way back to the lodge. ‘They’re hard to count. They aren’t endangered – yet. But they’re getting isolated in a sea of humanity and are being hammered. Hunters lay bait traps along the borders of reserves and we can’t keep the leopards in.’

My next stop was Punda Maria camp in northern Kruger National Park from where researcher Nakedi Maputla was also counting leopards with camera traps. He had 90 cameras all over the northern part of the park. His previous research was counting mice. ‘Much the same process,’ he confided, ‘only leopards are bigger so the camera has to be higher.’

I asked him what he was going to study after leopards. He looked surprised at my question. ‘I want to do this for the rest of my life,’ he said – clearly another captive of the speckled cats.

I tagged along on his daily rounds of setting up cameras or downloading data. We followed a shallow watercourse for several kilometres through lion and buffalo country, a gun-toting ranger in front and Nakedi with pockets of cameras and armfuls of battery packs. For a period of about 30 days the traps photograph anything that moves in front of them.

He downloaded one of the camera memory cards and flipped through the photos: genets, elephant legs, impala legs, rhino legs, spurfowls, windblown grass until, finally, a leopard – then another. ‘Phew!” exclaimed Nakedi, ‘I thought I’d have nothing to show you.’

Kruger’s large-mammal specialist, Sam Ferreira, was up north with Nakedi to see how the research was going. I asked him how best to see a leopard without the aid of radio collars or camera traps.

‘Seeing leopards depends on you and the leopard being in the same place at the same time.’ It was so obvious I checked to see if he was kidding me. ‘No, I’m serious. Think about it,’ he said. ‘You need to know how a leopard uses the landscape. Leopards are mainly nocturnal so the best time in Kruger is closest to gate opening and closing times. Go to rivers with big trees where they’d have felt comfortable to rest during the day. And use the animal sighting boards in the camps.

‘Leopards are creatures of habit. Where you see them once you’re likely to see them again. They use cover to catch things so look in rocky outcrops or places with big trees. Don’t bother with grassland or times like the middle of the day. People actually see leopards in the park very often.’ But, as luck would have it, we didn’t see any.

I had a final stop on my quest – very expensive but probably the best place in Africa for leopards: MalaMala in the Sabi Sands area adjoining central Kruger. There are several elegant camps in the large reserve, which all have a colonial air and first-class cuisine. When a lady enters the room the rangers all stand up and offer her a chair. It’s all delightfully olde worlde.

Importantly, though, they’ve been tracking leopards since the 1960s and they know every one by name, region, koppie and favourite tree. MalaMala’s regional manager at the time was Nils Kure, whose book, Living with Leopards, is a big-cat bible. He set about dispelling some myths: ‘They’re thought to be nocturnal, but in fact they’re pretty active during the day as well – though they can see in what we consider pitch dark. Baboons aren’t their favourite food, they don’t spend most of the day sleeping in trees and they almost never drop on prey from trees.

‘At night, though, they undergo a complete personality change. Then they’re far more confident. Females are the best hunters,’ he added, ‘but young males spend a lot of time wishful thinking.’

Ranger Andrew Batchelor proved that he was as good a man of the bush as sophisticated host pouring wine and patiently answering questions. Within 15 minutes of setting out he’d found Kikilezi, a beautiful young female leopard that paid us not the least attention as she sashayed through the underbrush. ‘She’s got three cubs,’ said Andrew, ‘her brother was killed by a croc.’

The next day we found two more leopards, one of which was a large, battle-scarred male scent-marking down a track. He roared his importance as we stopped near him in the open game-drive vehicle. It was a breath-taking experience.

‘He’s big,’ whispered Andrew. ‘Much bigger than the leopards down south. They may even be a different sub-species.’ I looked at his rippling muscles and huge paws as he yawned, stretched and rolled languidly onto his back. My distant ancestors once huddled in caves while a creature like that prowled the night. Leopards may have provoked our first steps to co-operation as a species. Alone, we stood no chance. An Oom Schalk Lourens comment came to mind.

‘When you meet a leopard in the veld unexpectedly,’ he says in Charles Herman Bosman’s story In the Withaak’s Shade, ‘you seldom trouble to count his spots to see what kind he belongs to. That is unnecessary. Because, whatever kind of leopard it is you come across in this way, you only do one kind of running. And that is the fastest kind.’

As the leopard sat up and stared at me fixedly for a spine-chilling moment, I was inclined to agree. If you were to be its meal, you wouldn’t see what hit you.

The masters of speed

Right now I’m traveling quite fast. My transporter is a Boeing 737-400 probably cruising at around 800 kilometres an hour. Not bad. Airliners are built for speed.

But if I really want to measure speed, a much more useful way is by calculating body lengths per second (bl/s), which gives everything a fairer chance in the race. By that scale, my Boeing’s crawling. Even my cat does better.

Actually, my moggy outperforms a cheetah, the fastest land animal in kilometres per hour but not in bl/s – 29 against a cheetah’s 25. But let’s start at the other end.

A garden snail with my cabbage patch in its stalky sight motors along at a steady 0.3 bl/s, an orca at 2.2 and an Olympic sprinter gets to 6.1. A tiger beetle leaves them all in the dust at 125 bl/s.

At 350 bl/s, a swallow in a dive beats the Space Shuttle during re-entry by far (207). But they haven’t a hope against a humming bird, which can dart between flowers at 385. That’s better than a jet fighter with its afterburners at full blast. When it pulls out of a dive, the deceleration hits nine Gs. If a human pilot tried that he’d black out.

And now, ladies and gentleman, (roll of drums) I present the world’s speediest speed fiend of them all: the cocopod. It’s a shrimp-like creature that floats around the ocean in vast numbers – probably the most abundant multicellular animal on the planet. They’re only about two centimetres long, but everything wants to eat them (they’re at the bottom of the food chain, poor fellows). So they take evasive action at an astonishing 1 779 bl/s. Not only that, relative to their size, they’re the strongest creature on earth. So don’t mess with a cocopod.

Now let’s get back to where I’m sitting. The Boeing is booming along at the utterly insignificant speed of 3.2 bl/h. At that rate, it’s surprising that I get to my destination at all.

Creatures of the southern gyres

For reasons hard to explain, the word ‘gyre’ holds a mysterious allure for me. It comes from the Latin word gyrus and means a ring, spiral or vortex. It’s a small word which, in oceanography, describes vast pulses of water that flow to the heartbeat of sun, moon and earth and the spin of nights and days.

These ceaseless movements – ocean currents – can begin to be explained by a simple experiment. If you discover, with irritation, that the plate of gazpacho you just ordered is instead boiled cabbage soup and shove it away from you, the soup is likely to end up on your lap. The reason is that the liquid has an inertia that resists being pushed around and refuses to stay with the plate.

On a slightly larger scale, the continents on our spinning planet push against the inertia of the oceans, damming them along their eastern shores, raising levels and forcing the seas to flow north or south to regain equilibrium. This results in the movement of prodigious amounts of water, which everlastingly circles in five massive oceanic gyres. Add to this the gravitational pull of the moon and coriolis winds, and you have ocean currents.

It’s taken centuries of painstaking science to work this out and solve a mystery whose beginnings can be found on the northern beaches of KwaZulu-Natal in the iSimangaliso Wetland Park. This is the only major African nesting site of leatherback and loggerhead turtles. Near the beginning of November each year giant females appear in the surf’s wash zone at night and pause, alert for danger. Then they laboriously haul themselves up the beach, dig a hole and lay up to 100 soft-shelled eggs. They rest, exhausted from the effort, and finally lumber down the beach and disappear.

Until recently nobody knew where they went and whether they returned to the same beaches many years later. And if they did, how? But knowledge of ocean gyres together with radio tagging of turtles have revealed an astounding story.

Once the hatchlings emerge they’re driven by an urge to survive that promotes a dash to the sea and a frantic, continuous, four or five days of swimming from which nothing will deter them. They instinctively head for the gyre. At this stage they’re threatened by many predators, from cuttlefish to sharks, and there’s considerable evolutionary pressure for them to grow rapidly, as every few centimetres of growth reduces the number of predators able to eat them.

In the Indian Ocean, the Agulhas current reaches speeds of nearly 10 kilometres per hour and is the caretaker of each generation of turtles. It carries huge concentrations of upper-surface animals such as purple storm snails, bluebottles and jellyfish. These are all shades of blue and the colour acts as a guide to food sources for the hatchlings. In this current the great turtle journey begins.

A loggerhead turtle was radio-tagged moving 7 000 kilometres in a few months, sweeping down the eastern edge of South Africa in the current, turning south near Cape Agulhas and travelling for several hundreds of kilometres deep into the southern Indian Ocean. She very nearly entered the Antarctic convergence before turning east and heading for Australia. The cold didn’t deter her. She never stopped and covered well over 130 kilometres a day.

Huge vortices swirl off the Agulhas and find their way into the main gyre circulating in the southern Indian Ocean. This mass of water slowly spins, moving eastwards and then up past the west coast of Australia and back towards Africa in the South Equatorial current.

Sea turtles are truly pelagic and regard the world as their oyster. They’re thought to make course changes by the stars and an internal magnetic GPS system. But in general, wherever the currents lead, the turtles travel.

Bluebottles and other jellyfish remain their main food and they are impervious to the stings. They have been recorded in dives of well over a kilometre. Unlike all other sea turtles, the carapace of leatherbacks is not solid, but made up of thousands of small bones which come together under pressure, forming a compact box within which the sensitive organs are protected.

Sadly, turtles have been massively exploited for hundreds of years and regularly graced the tables of the wealthy classes as meat or soup. Until recently the Lord Mayor’s annual banquet in London served green turtle soup. In the United States you could buy turtle burgers.

Green-turtle oil was once a key ingredient in women’s toiletries, creams and balms. Hawksbill shell has been highly valued since the time of Cleopatra. And because they cannot tell the difference between jellyfish and plastic bags, these can kill them. This has brought most sea turtle species to the brink of extinction.

The southern gyre can take around seven years to make a complete cycle. It brings the turtles back to where they were born, now fully grown and ready to breed. How – and even if – they return to their natal beaches has not yet been definitely established, but they probably get very close to them.

Sea turtles can live for more than 50 years and it’s been suggested that some reach 100. They’re an ancient species, mysterious travellers of the ocean’s gyres, treasures of the sea. Take time to see them laying on the beaches of Maputaland but don’t disturb them. And never, ever, throw a plastic bag into a river or the sea.

Counting fish

It’s hard to imagine the world beneath the surface of the oceans, those vast areas of water like the Pacific, Atlantic and Antarctic where old maps proclaimed: ‘Here be dragons’. From land, the flat, blue-grey sea seems of minimal significance to our daily lives. But it is we who stand on the planet’s lesser part.

The science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke once said it would be more appropriate to name our home Planet Ocean and not Planet Earth. Moved by the moon and the spin of the earth and rucked by wind and storms, the vast mass of oceanic water covers 71 per cent of the globe’s surface. In volume that’s about 1.4 billion cubic kilometres of sea. It’s the amniotic fluid which nurtured the origins of all life. And it sustains us still, supplying food for more than a billion people who depend on fish for protein.

There is, however, a problem. As human population numbers grow, so does the demand for sea products. Along the shore and out beyond the horizon (and most laws), thousands of ships trail millions of baited hooks or lower huge nets that move like great mouths through the water column or drag along the bottom, causing untold damage.

I once thought that tuna were rather small fish, fitting conveniently into little round tins, until I saw some being hauled off a longline boat in the Hout Bay harbour in Cape Town. They were extremely large, sleek, beautiful aquatic rockets built for speed.

It struck me then that we tend to think of the creatures we eat by the packaging in which we buy them and not as sentient creatures with the misfortune of being caught or bred for our consumption. This makes it easier to order musselcracker, steenbras or kingklip without being aware that we are complicit, at best, in unsustainable fishing practices and, at worst, species extinction.

In the last catch count I could find, humans hauled 76 million tonnes of food out of the sea, which equalled about seven trillion individual creatures. That’s an awful lot of fish.

What got me chewing on this problem was a little blue label on a packet of hake that said Certified Sustainable Seafood approved by the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC). Very few packages carry the label. Did this mean that most fishing was unsustainable, running down and in trouble? And if a stock was sustainable, how did the MSC know? How, in the vastness of the oceans, do you count fish?

The answer to the first question is that the oceans are in trouble and we humans are the cause. Rupert Howes of MSC was emphatic about that. ‘Over the past 50 years there’s been a five-fold increase in the amount of fish taken out of the oceans,’ he said. ‘A third of fisheries are classified as over-fished or depleted. Around 85 per cent of fish for global consumption is at its limit or running down. Over-fishing is the second biggest sustainability challenge after climate change.’

Seafood, it turns out, is the one of the most traded primary commodities in the world, with more than half of it coming from the southern hemisphere and 80 per cent from the developing world. So many fish are being taken out that it’s not clear whether enough have been left in the sea to ensure a supply for future generations. So protection of wild stocks – counting fish – is one of our most important scientific endeavours. And it’s not easy.

According to MSC’s South Africa programme manager Martin Purves, the council uses third-party assessors who check the methods used by scientists to estimate the size of fish populations. In some cases government scientists go out in research boats and physically count fish hauled up in trawl nets. ‘If they do a trawl tract in the same area each year,’ he said, ‘they can pick up changes. These are used to model total stocks statistically. Of course, there are many opinions about model methodologies and the results vary a lot depending on how you go about it.’

Samantha Petersen, WWF’s manager for sustainable fisheries, says it’s very tricky to come up with reliable population estimates. ‘There are levels of uncertainty. The first is the estimations that go into the models. These carry inherent biases or errors because it’s difficult to estimate fish taken by predators, discarded or dumped fish, under-reporting of catch or illegal catches. So you’re using imperfect information to come up with a range of answers. Mathematical models try to take all this into account, but estimation techniques are as much an art as a science.

‘All this gets translated into a quota by way of political, economic and industry filters, which frequently result in quotas exceeding best scientific advice. This is especially true for species such as tuna and swordfish.’

The truth is, we know very little about the deep oceans. Around 99 per cent of the earth’s biosphere is under the surface and, according to a census on marine life by 360 marine scientists, less than 10 per cent has been systematically explored.

They estimated there to be 22 000 fish species, which constitute only a small fraction of the life beneath the waves. The rest are crustaceans such as crabs, lobsters, krill and barnacles, molluscs (squid and octopus) and huge algal and bacterial mats, one which was found to be about the size of Greece. Charismatic species such as whales, sea lions, turtles and sea birds account for less than two per cent.

So it’s evidently hard to count sea creatures and therefore to know our precise predatory impact on the oceans. But we do know that things are going wrong out there and that we are to blame. The only way to avert a crisis, according to Samantha, is for us, as consumers, to act responsibly and boycott unsustainable fishing. Organisations such as the MSC and the Southern African Sustainable Seafood Initiative (Sassi) are important guides. But in the end it’s up to us to ask the important question: ‘Where is my plate of fish coming from?’ And to get an answer.

The post-colonial trout

The question I’m about to ask was raised by a trout. A beautiful, silvery, yellow-brown one with red speckles and sleek as a rocket. The fish was perfect in every way except in its miscalculation and, evidently, its existence in that stream.

The miscalculation was to not notice that the delectable insect it successfully snared had a line attached that ran up through the eyes of my bent rod and around the reel in my hand. Its existence there wasn’t a miscalculation but, evidently, a problem – through no fault of its own. It had to do with a farmer named John Clive Parker who, in 1890, imported the eggs of its ancestors from Scotland and poured what he’d hatched into the Mooi River in what was then Natal.

The question it raised, as I held it in the moving water before letting it go, was by what process of nature or decision by humans was it both alien and invasive? And why were, say, some small creatures cast off from the mainland clinging to a pile of floating debris not aliens on the island upon which they luckily landed? Nor the 57 species now found on the Icelandic island of Surtsey, which rose out of the sea devoid of life in 1963 after a volcanic eruption.

The South African Biodiversity Act defines an alien species as ‘an indigenous species translocated … to a place outside its natural distribution range in nature, but not an indigenous species that has extended its distribution range by natural means of migration or dispersal without human intervention’.

So to ask the question another way, why are species considered alien only if they’re introduced by humans? Because what this implies is that we’re the ultimate terrestrial aliens and somehow beyond nature. I must confess there are times, particularly in shopping malls, when this thought occurs to me.

But the truth is we’re the noble descendants of the rat-like mammals that emerged out of the leaf litter following the cataclysmic asteroid event that wiped out the dinosaurs. Aren’t we part of the natural process? Wasn’t the asteroid?

I asked University of Cape Town zoologist Mike Picker, who’d just completed a book on alien and invasive animals with marine specialist Charles Griffiths.

‘The asteroid was natural in that it came from the sky and was part of the solar system,’ he said. ‘But it was unnatural in that it was a very rare, once-off event. Not part of the normal processing of ecosystems. And it wrought massive changes. The impact of humans is rather like that asteroid – the pace of change is too fast for natural systems to stabilise around it. We’re fast-forwarding species range extension. I call it the McDonaldisation of the global biota.’

It’s a very apt term, because much of what we’ve spread around is food. Where would we be without alien cows, sheep, pigs, potatoes, tomatoes, maize and almost the entire contents of a supermarket?

But let’s get back to trout. Duncan Brown is dean of the arts faculty at the University of the Western Cape and likes to fish. He’s well aware that trout are alien, to the point of writing a book entitled But are Trout South African? It’s a lyrical defence of fly-fishing.

He doesn’t sidestep the argument that trout have caused ecological damage, nor that the colonists who imported them were part of ‘a grunting, lowing, neighing, crowing, chirping, snarling, buzzing, self-replicating and world-altering avalanche’. But, with an ear to the quiet pleasure of a mountain stream, he asks how far back do we turn the clock of alien definition?

Trout have been in southern Africa for well over 100 years and are part of the everyday register of South Africanness, like mealies, bushpigs and pumpkins. There are more than 82 book-length texts on trout and fly-fishing in South Africa alone. It’s a huge industry and even some towns depend on their fishy presence.

Plant and animal species move, he writes, not only through direct human intervention such as transportation, stocking or planting, but through habitat and climate change, which complicates simple arguments about indigeneity, endemicity and the right to belong. And, anyway, after 100 years, whatever damage they did has long since been done.

So Brown suggests a different take on trout. Manage them, he says, make sure they don’t invade the wrong streams, agree they’re scientifically alien but declare them culturally endemic. Along with oak trees, vineyards and Nguni cattle.

Of course, the worst aliens of all are us. But when we deport ourselves from these shores in the name of conservation, let’s leave the guy with the fly rod. What he does isn’t really about catching fish.

‘To say that my identity is constituted at some fundamental level by being a fly-fisher,’ writes Brown, ‘is to say that I make time for beautiful places; that I am blessed by encounters with otters, dabchicks, fish eagles, malachite kingfishers as much as with people; that the world I see in two-dimensions must be imagined, and can only be imagined – rarely seen – in three; that I value solitude as well as quiet company; that I am frequently humbled by failure; that I know the places I love intimately, in all their moods; that there are trout which I know individually from their lies in the river; that with rod in hand I must modify my behaviour to encounter another species; that I am haunted by waters.’

If he’s part of a human-piloted extinction asteroid, he’s a very appreciative part.