sapient sapiens

It’s fascinating to see how a brilliant mind arrived at an idea that would utterly change the known world.

The Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe had no telescope (they hadn’t been invented) but he knew the night sky intimately. On 11 November 1572 he looked up and saw a bright star that didn’t move like a comet or meteor.

It shouldn’t have been there because, according to accepted Aristotelian orthodoxy, celestial bodies were fixed for all time by creation, ‘always remain(ing) the same, like unto themselves in all respects, no years wearing them away’.

Brahe pondered deeply on this bright new object and his heretical conclusion struck him like a thunderbolt: this was a nova stella (new star) ‘one that has never been seen … in any age since the beginning of the world’. The heavens were not a fixed Biblical creation but, he realised, ever unfolding. What he saw was a supernova, an incandescent stellar explosion in an ever-expanding universe.

Born 18 years after Brahe, Galileo Galilei was to cause the Papal orthodoxy even more trouble. He constructed a telescope and, looking at a ‘wandering star’ – Jupiter – he saw shiny specks in its vicinity.

He realised they were moons and that Jupiter was a planet. Then he made a mental leap that was to get him tried for heresy by the Catholic Church. Earth was not the centre of creation around which everything turned, but, like Jupiter, merely a planet.

Another Italian, the Dominican friar Giordano Bruno, then proposed that the sun was a star in an infinite, probably populated universe. That got him burned at the stake for dealing in ‘magics and divination’.

These profound insights are, today, so self-evident they hardly seem worth mentioning. But in their time they shook human imagination to its very foundations. But there others, less well known, perhaps, who have taken our understanding of the world to new levels or are just extraordinary in the way they live in harmony with it. Here are a few.

Darwin’s worms

Between 1831 and 1836 Charles Darwin sailed around the world in the Beagle. In those five years he gathered experiences, material and notes which were, eventually, to lead him to the notion of natural selection. The trip, however, exhausted him and caused his health to deteriorate.

He bought himself a small estate in Kent and, in the following decades, never moved. By 1877, after 40 years of battling against an often hostile church and general public over his evolutionary theories, Darwin – then famous beyond his humble expectations – considered himself a spent force.

For the next six years, until his death in 1882, he disappeared into profound contemplation of his lawn. Beneath it was an unimaginable number of worms.

Until then, earthworms were considered to be garden pests. He discovered (by shouting at them) that they’re deaf but (by breathing on them) extremely sensitive to touch and have enough perception of light to distinguish between night and day. They’re hermaphrodites, have five hearts and at night they close their holes by dragging leaves down them or rolling small stones over them.

On October 1881, to the astonishment of those who thought Darwin a has-been, he published a book entitled The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms with Observations on their Habits. To write it he had hardly left his lawn and adjoining field. His conclusions were, as usual, controversial.

Weighing their castings brought to the surface, he discovered that earthworms were the planet’s prime earth-moving equipment, bringing an annual average of up to 30 tonnes of soil to the surface across each hectare. In a million years, he calculated, they’d covered Britain in around 320 billion tonnes of earth.

The planet’s entire soil, he speculated, had passed through the alimentary canals of worms. Without this process, almost nothing on earth would grow and we humans would never have existed.

A year after the book’s publication, Darwin had joined his beloved worms beneath the ground. His study is today considered to be the first work of ecology and the foundation of both invertebrate ethology and soil science. Not bad for an old stick-in-the-mud.

Man of the trees

This is the story of one of the environment’s near-unknown heroes. His name was Richard St Barbe Baker and his goal was in the realm of fantasy: to protect the planet’s existing trees, to reforest the Sahara and to save earth from environmental destruction. He took this goal very seriously.

He is no longer with us and his story has become lost to all but a few who cherish his name. St Barbe was born in a country house in Hampshire, England, in 1889 and at some point it came to him that he loved trees.

He studied forestry and was posted to Kenya with the Colonial Service. On arriving, he found forests being decimated and the desert closing in.

St Barbe discovered that the Kikuyu, when they cut down forest, left giant fig trees to collect the spirits of their felled companions. So he dispatched runners all over the country, inviting warriors to a dance of the tree spirits. Thousands came, all decked in war paint.

What followed became the stuff of legend. He told them they needed to replace the trees they cut. They told him they thought planting trees was God’s business. He told them the spirit of the trees lived in the seeds and these could not make new forests without their help. There was, it seems, a collective ‘aaha!’ and, right there and then, Watu Wa Miti (Men of the Trees) was born. It was an organisation that required people (not only men) to protect and plant trees.

It caught on like wildfire. Within a year Watu Wa Miti had nurtured and raised 80 000 trees. Then, under St Barbe’s guidance, the idea began to spread like the arms of an oak. At last count the organisation had branches in eight countries and these had planted more than a billion trees. His gravestone in Saskatoon, Canada, reads:

Richard St Barbe Baker, OBE

9 October 1899 – 9 June 1982

Founder of Men of the Trees

Pioneer of desert reclamation

through tree planting

Crusader of virgin forests worldwide

Clouds

Each cloud is a small catastrophe, a vapour that dies as we watch it. They write, erase and rewrite themselves with endless fluidity. To the poetic imagination they have stood as ciphers of a desolate beauty, gathering randomly, brief signs in the sky.

At six o’clock one evening in December 1802 all that changed. As a young man named Luke Howard untied his bundle of notes in the basement of Plough Court, London, and began to speak to a Quaker group, the skies were never to appear the same again. When he finished the place was in uproar. Clouds had ceased to be the exclusive domain of poets and lovers.

Luke was a Quaker and a chemist who had a habit of staring at clouds for hours. Until that moment the nature of clouds had been in contention. Aristophanes claimed them to be the patron goddesses of the layabout. Pliny the Elder attributed weather to the stars, early Christians said it was divine intervention.

Clouds, said Howard, were none of these things. They came in three basic types: cirrus (Latin for fibre), cumulus (Latin for heap) and stratus (Latin for layer). A fourth form, nimbus (Latin for cloud) was a rainy combination of all three types. He described their creation, their action, their transformation and dissolution.

When he finished speaking, his audience found itself in a state of mounting excitement. Not only did clouds have fixed properties of their own, but their form and their action could now be described in a few types ‘as distinguishable from each other as a tree from a hill, or the latter from a lake’.

Howard had turned clouds into something we can view in a way so simple and self-evident that many must have wondered why it had taken so long for someone to understand them.

He is regarded as the founder of modern meteorology.

The Titular Bishop of Titiopolis

Small aquatic things at the edge of time have had a large impact on more than merely evolutionary biology. Shark teeth come to mind.

The teeth have to do with a Dane named Nicolaus Steno who, in 1677, became the Titular Bishop of Titiopolis (now part of Turkey). Titular bishops ‘presided in areas in pagan hands and therefore unavailable for actual residence’.

More importantly, Steno was given some fossils known as glossopetrae from a quarry while he was dissecting a shark’s head and found them to be identical to shark’s teeth. This posed a problem: if God in his perfection had made the earth in seven days around 6 000 years previously, as calculated from the Bible, why did He place sharks’ teeth inside rocks? It also raised a more practical problem: how did solid bodies get inside other solid bodies?

So as not to deviate too far from the Scriptures of his employers, his answer came in two parts: deposition of matter since the time of the ‘original void’ and from the time of Noah’s universal ocean.

Steno recognised that all the troubling objects of geology were solids within solids, and an answer to how they got there might be a key to the unravelling of the earth’s structure and history. Sedimentary rocks, he reasoned, must be the deposits of rivers, lakes and oceans because they ‘agree with those strata which turbid water today deposits’.

The sharks’ teeth, therefore, were inside the rock because they had solidified before the rock enclosed them. So the rocks must have been moulded before God’s Creation – formed, rather, by deposits from rivers, lakes or oceans. And because fossils were often found on mountains, the processes that got them there spoke of great movements of the earth’s crust and great bouts of time.

The genius of the Titular Bishop of Titiopolis lay in his insight that the proper classification of solids within solids could be the conceptual framework for the formation of all things on earth. He is today, quite rightly, considered to be the father of modern geology.

For the sake of an egg

One hundred years ago three men, in the name of science, went in search of an egg. The conditions were horrendous, the men nearly died, the outcome was apparently of no use to science and the whole crazy affair dropped from view and was largely forgotten.

This story is about redemption.

On 27 June 1911, just after mid-winter, Edward Wilson, ‘Birdie’ Bowers and Apsley Cherry-Garrard pushed out their hut at Cape Evans into the eternal night of Antarctica, dragging two heavy sleds piled with supplies. Their goal was the emperor penguin rookery at Cape Crozier, 107 kilometres away, in pitch darkness, across some of the most nightmarish terrain in the world. Nobody before them had dared to travel in the winter blizzards of Antarctica.

This was a journey for science. It was thought that the embryos of emperor penguins, creatures just recently discovered, might indicate a reptilian origin of birds.

The temperature was -44°C. By the time the egg party camped that ‘night’, it was -49° and three days later had dropped to a mind-numbing -77°. At those temperatures trekking became bizarre. Their clothes froze until not even two men could bend them into the required shape. ‘Once outside,’ wrote Cherry-Garrard, ‘I raised my head to look round and found I could not move it back. My clothing had frozen hard as I stood – perhaps for 15 seconds. For four hours I had to pull with my head stuck up, and from that time we all took care to bend down into a pulling position before being frozen in.’

Their sleeping bags turned to ice around them as they slept and getting in or out took hours, thawing them bit by bit over the Primus stove. ‘The day’s march,’ remembered Cherry-Garrard, ‘was bliss compared to the night’s rest, and both were awful.’

They steered by Jupiter, which provided just enough light to avoid some crevasses – but not all. Often they fell in. ‘The ice bridge gave way and down I went,’ he wrote of one such incident. ‘Fortunately our sledge harness is made with a view to resisting this sort of thing and there I hung with the bottomless pit below and the ice-crusted sides alongside.’ He was hauled out and they continued.

When they reached Cape Crozier, they had to abseil down an ice cliff to get to the penguins. They gathered five eggs from the outraged birds, but two broke on the way back up. While huddled in a hastily erected igloo at the foot of Mount Terror, a hurricane carried away their tent and they lay for days without food as snow piled on top of them. ‘I have never heard or felt or seen a wind like this,’ wrote Cherry-Garrard. ‘I wondered why it did not carry away the earth.’ They sang songs and told jokes. They drank snow. When the wind abated they found the tent – a miracle indeed in that terrain and a death warrant had they not.

Their fuel supply – and therefore their ability to cook and get warm – was running out on the way back. It was a race against time by three men too weary to do more than plod in hope. But finally they made it and stopped, staring at the door of the Cape Evans hut. It opened and someone shouted: ‘Good God! Here’s the Crozier party.’

Edward Wilson and Birdie Bowers were selected to accompany Scott on his expedition to the Pole, and died with him on the return journey. Cherry-Garrard returned to England in 1913 and brought the three surviving eggs to the Natural History Museum. His reception is not what he expected:

‘Who are you?’ a curator demanded. ‘What do you want? This ain’t an egg shop. Do you want me to put the police on to you?’

When he finally got through to the Chief Custodian, the eggs were received, but Cherry-Garrard had to wait half the day for a receipt. When Captain Scott’s wife later went to see the eggs, a curator denied that they existed.

They were ultimately found, but were put aside and only studied 20 years later – and declared to be of little scientific interest.

But here’s the redemption bit. Recent research has established that birds are the descendants of dinosaurs and, therefore, probably do indeed have reptilian origins. And at the Natural History Museum, in an exhibition which commemorates Scott’s journey to the South Pole, one of the eggs was put on display in memory of the worst journey in the world – the title of Cherry-Garrard’s book about the expedition. The final paragraphs of that book are one of the most lyrical invocations to adventure ever written – and possibly the true discovery of the Crozier egg party:

‘And I tell you, if you have the desire for knowledge and the power to give it physical expression, go out and explore. If you are a brave man you will do nothing: if you are fearful you may do much, for none but cowards have need to prove their bravery.

‘Some will tell you that you are mad, and nearly all will say, ‘What is the use?’ For we are a nation of shopkeepers, and no shopkeeper will look at research which does not promise him a financial return within a year.

‘And so you will sledge nearly alone, but those with whom you sledge will not be shopkeepers: that is worth a good deal. If you march your Winter Journeys you will have your reward, so long as all you want is a penguin’s egg.’

Tyrian purple

When antagonised, a particular Mediterranean sea snail, spiney dye-murex, secretes a smelly substance that gave birth to the words you are now reading. Small beginnings sometimes seed surprising outcomes.

Around 1500 BC, the area now known as Lebanon consisted of a number of insignificant city states surrounded by forest and wedged between high mountains and the sea. They had wood to trade but not much else. Then, so the story goes, a dog was playing with a shell on the beach at Tyre and ended up with a purple mouth.

Its owner gathered a bucket of the shells, boiled them and ended up with the finest dye the world had ever seen. In it, cloth turned an astonishing colour that didn’t fade but deepened in sunlight.

It became known as Tyrian Purple and was so sought after it would become more valuable, weight for weight, than silver. Only royalty was permitted to wear the colour and their children were said to be ‘born in the purple’.

With their plentiful cedar trees, the people of Tyre, Sidon and Byblos built magnificent ships for trading and war. With an ingenious underwater ‘beak’ that cut water ahead of the hull and spiked enemies, their vessels were faster than any other.

They advanced westwards, establishing trading ports at Cyrene (Libya), Carthage (Tunisia), Tingis (Morocco), Sardinia, Crete and Sicily, powered by the sale of Tyrian Purple. For more than 1 000 years they were lords of the sea and the greatest traders the world had ever seen, growing immensely rich.

Such complex trade needed records and their merchants adapted a clunky Canaanite script into a simple, 22-letter alphabet to do the job. Its system was phonetic, based on sounds and not objects, unlike cumbersome Chinese.

This writing spread across the Mediterranean, giving rise to Greek, Italic, Anatolian, Paleohispanic and the script you’re reading. But for that lowly snail on a Tyrian beach, you might be reading this in complex hieroglyphics.

Under threat from envious, warlike neighbours, the people of the seafaring city states relocated to Carthage where, in 146 BC, they were crushed by Rome. They are remembered today by the name given to them by the Greeks: Phoenicians – meaning People of Purple.

The beautiful machine

Alexei Kniazev watches the birth of galaxies and the death of stars. For him, home is not South Africa or his native Russia, but a minute speck near an average sun at the rim of a regular billion-star galaxy swirling among trillions of others.

At the click of his mouse, 91 hexagonal mirrors lock onto an object beyond human sight and focus the light into a camera 26 metres above them and onto his computer screen. Every now and then, compressed air feeds into hovercraft-like feet beneath the telescope, bodily lifting and swivelling tonnes of machinery and complex technology to watch a piece of sky.

I arrived to the incongruent scene of wild springbok grazing beside sci-fi domes perched like smooth white barnacles atop the silent emptiness of a Karoo mountain. Alexei, just then, was sharpening the focus and watching the dew point in the dome 30 metres above him. You don’t want to get one of the world’s most powerful telescopes wet.

Nearby the star-struck Karoo town of Sutherland would soon be slumbering. Despite cosmic restaurant and B&B names like Halley se Kom Eet, Galileo, Andromeda, Jupiter and Venus Sisters, it’s a dorp lost in time which, I discovered the next morning when I wanted a shower, had no water in the taps.

Modern telescopes are not the largest scientific instruments in the world, but they’re up there near the top – and they have a romance few can match. These huge structures on lonely mountaintops or silent deserts slide open their domes each starry night and peer back into deep time at strange objects, often never before seen. Inside them some of the most intelligent people on earth puzzle over the origins and existence of everything – and where we’re headed billions of years from now. To the ordinary person their deliberations and formulae are as arcane as calculus to a cave man.

One of Alexei’s interests, he says, is planetary nebulae. I have no idea what he means so he walks over to a whiteboard covered in calculations and diagrams to explain.

‘When stars run out of hydrogen and heat up, they begin to lose their outer shell, blasting it off into space as a cloud. The heat of the core causes the expanding cloud to glow for a very short period – only about 20 000 years. After that the star becomes a white dwarf and will live forever, but very small. Planetary nebulae are some of the most beautiful things in the universe and so bright we can see them in other galaxies.’

Alexei checks the dew level. It’s rising and he may have to close the dome. But he decides to wait a bit longer and returns to his subject.

‘The reason I’m interested in planetary nebulae is because we can analyse their light for chemical elements. That way we can begin to assess the age of galaxies.

‘All the heavier elements were produced in the superheated hearts of emerging stars. The first generation stars were mainly hydrogen and helium, very unstable, and when they went supernova – exploded – their elements were drawn by gravity into second-generation stars, and so on. But each generation star cooked more heavy elements and eventually,’ he sweeps his hand in a grand gesture, ‘we have all of this … and life.’

It’s time to close the dome. An eerie rumbling can be heard deep in the building as its huge metal eyelid shuts out the sky. Alexei sighs. ‘No more science. Now we do maintenance. But first some coffee, yes?’ Over a cup he gets more complex.

‘Really my passion is the evolution of galaxies. Each of them has hundreds of billions of stars, but I think of them as a single element in a complex unfolding pattern of creation. I want to understand their histories, what they’re made of. Are some parts still forming while other parts are dying?

‘The things I find out are just small pieces of a bigger puzzle that we astronomers are putting together. Each of us does our narrow part of science – observations, mathematics, modelling, theories. Most explorative astronomy is taking place in the United States. But SALT – the South African Large Telescope – is a big part of this work for the southern sky.

‘Astronomy is a very romantic science. Every observation is pretty unique, a discovery. There’s still so much to know and the universe is … endless.’

Before dawn I leave Alexei to do his maintenance and slip out into the icy air amid dozing springbok. Back in Sutherland I let myself into the dark B&B and tiptoe upstairs to have a few hours of sleep before our star rises in the sky.

A dog barks, briefly punctuating the Karoo night, then falls silent. Overhead, somewhere, stars are dying and galaxies are being born. I lie there feeling for the spin of our little planet and wondering why gravity holds everything together. I fall asleep clutching the sides of the bed.

How to vanish

Hugh Bamford Cott was born in Leicestershire, England, in 1900 and was schooled at Rugby. He attended Sandhurst Military College, studied at Cambridge and got a doctorate from the University of Glasgow. An impressive pedigree.

He then travelled South America and Africa, becoming fascinated by Nile crocodiles. But what’s really interesting is his abiding obsession with how not to be seen. This led him to develop the ground rules for camouflage.

The word probably comes from camouflet, a French term meaning ‘smoke blown in someone’s face as a practical joke’. In the natural world camouflage is no joke but a matter of survival.

Its dictionary definition is ‘a set of methods of concealment that allows otherwise visible objects to remain unnoticed by blending with their environment or by resembling something else’. Cott, whose skills included zoologist, wildlife photographer, writer and skilled illustrator, put it more poetically: ‘In nature the visible and invisible dance back and forth with each other, depending on how much we have learned to see. The science and art of this magic merge into one at the moment we grasp it.’

And grasp it he did in a lifetime of work and a 550-page classic called Adaptive Colouration in Animals, written in 1940. It remains one of the most comprehensive discussions of the subject ever penned. The tome made him famous, not only among zoologists and naturalists, but among soldiers in World War Two. It became probably the only book on zoology ever carried into the field of battle in the backpacks of military officers.

Cott categorised camouflage into concealment, disguise and advertisement. After years of staring at things he broke these down further into obliterative shading, disruption, differential blending, high contrast, coincident disruption, concealment of the eye (a big problem), contour obliteration, shadow elimination and aggressive mimicry.

The more he looked, the more he found interesting adaptive strategies, which might explain the 550 pages (he copiously illustrated all his categories). Polar bears merge, plovers disrupt their outline, stick insects disguise themselves (as, um, sticks), zebras dazzle, some fish and butterflies misdirect attention with big eye spots, angler fish use illuminated decoys, cuttlefish produce a smokescreen, some antelope bounce to look stronger than they are, lizards puff up. The root reason, said Cott, is to provide creatures with a reproductive advantage so they can leave more offspring.

One way to decrease the risk of detection is to look like the background, something Cott called crypsis (from cryptic). According to this principle, the more similar to the background the colours and geometry of a prey are in the eyes of a predator, the more difficult it will be for the predator to detect the prey – or be seen if you’re the hunter.

Another principle is disruptive colouration. Creatures (including humans) recognise objects by their outlines. If a surface is covered with irregular patches of contrasting colours and tones, these tend to catch the eye and draw attention away from the shape that bears them.

This can give the impression of separate objects instead of a repeated pattern on a single object. He called this mimesis (from masquerade). As Cott so aptly explained it, disruptive patterns work ‘by the optical destruction of what is present’, while continuous patterns work ‘by the optical construction of what is not present’.

Some colouration is so outrageous you’d think it would be an ‘Eat Me’ label. But camouflage, he said, works in mysterious ways. A zebra on a plain stands out like a burger joint, but in a moving herd, a lion (which is colour blind) sees a heaving mass and doesn’t know where to strike without getting kicked to pieces.

Many fish species are similarly camouflaged. Their vertical stripes may be brightly coloured, which makes them stand out to predators, but when they swim in large schools, their stripes all meld together. This confusing spectacle gives predators the impression of one big, swimming blob. Generally, this sort of camouflage doesn’t hide an animal’s presence, it merely misrepresents it.

Mimicry is a different approach. Monarch butterflies are as gaudy as you can get, but poisonous because they sup on milkweed. Birds soon learn the hard way and have been known to throw up simply at the sight of a monarch. Other species of tasty butterfly mimic monarchs and are left in peace.

Two dead giveaways, though, are shadows and eyes. If you’ve ever wondered why your cat flattens itself to the ground when hunting, its partly in order not to be seen, but mainly to hide its shadow by lying on it. Lizards do the same. A variation of this ploy is called ‘countershading’, where the body’s upper part is darker (so not to be seen from above) and lighter below (to be less visible from lower down). Many animals also have an uncanny ability to remain motionless, adding to the impression that they’re a part of the backdrop.

The roundness of eyes is a real problem as that’s where creatures (including humans) look first. It is probably for this reason, Cott speculated, that cats narrow their eyes when stalking.

He published his book in 1940, shortly after the outbreak of war, and its value to military concealment immediately became clear. He was drafted into the British Army as a camouflage expert. With a rag-bag team of artists, painters, potters, sculptors, film makers and even a stage magician, the Camofleurs, as they were named, formed the Middle East Command Camouflage Directorate.

Through a large-scale deception in Egypt code named Operation Bertram, they disguised 600 tanks as supply lorries north of El Alamein and created dummy tanks in the south, leading Germany’s Rommel to deploy substantial forces to the south. In the ensuing battle, Germany lost.

Cott designed camouflage schemes to protect large targets such as airfields and gun batteries from aerial detection using techniques such as countershading and disruptive patterning. His work also became the basis of camo clothing now used by all national armies. As a zoologist interested in how things in nature seemed to vanish, his unusual passion took him far beyond the quiet Leicestershire neighbourhood where it began.

What would he have given for Harry Potter’s cloak of invisibility?

Levitating frogs

This is a story about the power of play and a levitating frog. Its hero is a man named Sir André Konstantin Geim whose dictum is that it’s better to be wrong than boring.

After levitating the frog, he explained that, in his experience, if people didn’t have a sense of humour they didn’t make very good scientists. He has and he is: Geim’s the only scientist to win both a Nobel Prize for his discovery of the world’s strongest substance, graphene, and an Ig Nobel Prize awarded for experiments so outlandish they first make people laugh – then make them think.

When the story of the flying frog began making the rounds in April 1997, people assumed it was an April Fool’s joke. It wasn’t, and may result in cars that never touch the road. This is how it happened.

One evening, while employed at a university’s high-field magnet laboratory in the Netherlands, Geim set the electromagnet to maximum power and poured water into the expensive machine. He can’t remember why he acted so unprofessionally.

Instead of sloshing into the works, the water ‘got stuck’ and started floating. He had discovered that a ‘feeble magnetic response of water’ could act against a magnetic force, including that of the earth. He tried it with a live frog and it also levitated.

The evening prank evolved into what Geim calls the Friday Night Experiments where, after hours, researchers experimented on crazy, unfundable things simply because it interested them.

Out of the two dozen or so attempted Friday Night Experiments, three were hits, a success rate of 12.5 per cent. The flying frog was the first. The second was the creation of ‘gecko tape’, an adhesive that mimics the clinging ability of the gecko’s hairy feet. The third hit was the Nobel-Prize-winning isolation of graphene, which they found with the help of pencil lead and Scotch tape.

According to Geim, playfulness lets us withstand enormous uncertainty. It’s all about what he calls beginner’s mind, ‘the useful wonder of the amateur’. But frivolous research techniques are something that serious science doesn’t easily condone. In his Nobel acceptance speech, he noted that the journal Nature rejected his paper on graphene twice on the grounds that ‘it did not constitute a sufficient scientific advance’.

Frogging

With his hands cupped to his ears, mouth open and his thick, long ponytail, Marius Burger looked, just then, remarkably like a surprised bat-eared fox.

‘You hear that?’ Marius demanded. Ping-ping-ping-pingpingpingping like a tiny marble dropped onto a hard surface? Dainty frog – Cacosternum platys. Over there. Hang on, I’ll find it.’

He squelched through the soggy wetland, his long-suffering jeans clinging to his wet calves, and crouched, all bewhiskered attention, seeking the single note in the wild symphony of sound.

Then he scooped up a tiny frog, no bigger than his thumbnail, and sloshed back, grinning widely, to reveal the marble-dropper.

The scene was surreal. Our horizon was studded with rows of lemon-coloured street lights and city sounds. All around us marched the ghost-white barrier posts of the Kenilworth Race Course. This dark centre of the busy city of Cape Town is a shrine to the Red Data Book of Endangered Species and a full orchestra of frogsong – heard by few and whose contract with the planet could soon expire.

The frog we were hunting, though, was not the dainty Cacos, it was smaller – a micro frog, one of the tiniest of its family in the world and dangerously rare. This speckle of biodiversity lives in the centre of the racecourse, with possibly a few more around Betty’s Bay and Cape Agulhas on the southern Cape coast.

Of course, they have no idea they’re that rare and, as I shivered in the dark, a declining number of males were bidding for a declining number of females in curious, scratchy tones.

Marius suddenly got a faraway look, cupped his hands to his ears, then squelched back into the pool. A moment later he was back with a tiny, utterly beautiful frog with a dashing racing stripe down its back.

‘Say hi to a micro frog,’ he said. ‘Not many people have seen it.’

It turns out the area has more than 21 Red Data species per square kilometre, certainly the highest of anywhere in the world. It’s one of the hottest spots for endangered creatures on earth. That’s one big gwaak for a small racecourse.

Living simply

I once came across a comment by Irven DeVore, an anthropologist, writing about affluence. The common understanding of it, he said, is a society in which all the people’s wants are easily satisfied. The obvious – and increasingly problematic – way is to produce ever more stuff to gratify our needs. But another way is to desire less. Want little, lack little. This seemed so alien to modern life that I filed the comment away and forgot about it.

Some years later, while sitting under a tree in northern Tanzania pondering whether to accept a piece of half-cooked baboon meat, I had reason to recall DeVore. The area is magnificent in natural wonders: Ngorongoro Crater, Olduvai Gorge, Serengeti and the lakes of the Great Rift Valley. But I was where few tourists venture – a wild plain encompassing shallow, salty Lake Eyasi and sheltered by the ramparts of the Rift. The people I’d come to find, the Hadza, are among the last of the true hunter-gatherers on earth. Without our guide and translator, Gitewi Surumbu, we’d soon have been lost in the trackless scrub of their homeland.

Earlier that day we’d met Sambargwa Domdu, a blacksmith time-warped in from the early Iron Age. His bellows were cowhide bags, his anvil was a rock and his only tools were a battered hammer and a beat-up chisel. With these he turned out lethal arrowheads for Hadza and had suggested it might be possible to visit them.

The Hadza were highly sociable and seemed to take our arrival as entirely normal. In their world, what happens simply happens. We sat with a group of about 12 men smoking cannabis under a tree near their domed grass shelters and were offered meat and a puff of the pipe.

Hunter-gatherers are people whose food is wild and they have to follow and find it. Around 10 000 years ago our ancestors domesticated plants and animals on the road to cellphones and paper clips. But our species is far older than that. In fact, for about 95 per cent of our time on earth we were hunter-gatherers. It’s also how our more distant forebears, Homo habilis, were surviving two million years ago. So sitting around me hacking meat off a carcass were, in fact, representatives of a long and noble tradition.

The Hadza were extremely laid back and, between bites, were very keen to chat. They hunted when they were hungry, they said, slept in their temporary beehive grass huts or in caves when it rained or just under a tree, moved when they felt like it and never, ever, let their long bows and arrows out of sight. When I asked about the number of animals they bagged in a week they were puzzled. It turned out they had no concept of numbers beyond four and no idea what a week was.

Their clothing was an antelope skin apron or an old pair of shorts, relying on a fire to keep them warm at night – which they took less than a minute to light with a wooden fire drill. They wore sandals fashioned from wildebeest hide or went barefoot and were bedecked with colourful beads made from grass and seeds strung on sinew. A social anthropologist named James Woodburn, who spent time among them, noted that they ‘meet their nutritional needs easily without much effort, much forethought, much equipment or much organisation’.

They were, he found, free of jealousy, resentment, elitism, tyranny or any concept of private property. They owned what they could hold, stored no food, carried all they needed, buried their departed where they died and found the idea that anyone could own land to be incomprehensible.

For women there is none of the forced subservience of many other cultures. They’re frequently the ones who initiate a breakup – and woe to the man who proves himself an incompetent hunter or treats his wife poorly.

Indeed their lives were not ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’, as the philosopher Thomas Hobbes had described primitive people, but were mostly relaxed and happy. The only time the Hadza were extremely unhappy was in 1964 when the Tanzanian government provided brick houses, piped water, schools and a medical clinic and insisted they stay in one place, plant crops and become ‘civilised’. Many got sick and died from unaccustomed food and boredom. Within 10 years they had all returned to nomadic life.

They’re gentle stewards of the land and their entire life, it appears to me, is one insanely committed camping trip. They’re also the only tribe in Africa that’s never paid taxes.

With DeVore in mind, there’s something we of the modern world could learn from them. The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins has noted that in human history, every time a population overtook the carrying capacity of the environment, it was forced to innovate and ‘bounced’ upwards through exploration, innovation and specialisation – or died out. Which means that modern civilisation is the product of adversity, hunger and stress, which seems, paradoxically, to grow with affluence. Nearly a billion people are, right now, living in abject poverty and go to bed hungry. For thousands of years the Hadza took only what they needed so never ran out of land or food and are, therefore, perfectly adapted to their environment.

For all the time they’ve been living the simple life and are today, in DeVore’s words, the original affluent society. What this seems to suggest is that happiness is not linked to what we have but what we think we require.

In defence of sacred space

To some, Mphatheleni Makaulule is a demon’s daughter, destined to burn in the fires of a Christian hell. To others she’s an emissary from the ancestors and a keeper of ancient tribal traditions. She laughs at the idea. ‘I don’t blame people who criticise me,’ she says when I meet her in Thohoyandou in Venda, South Africa, ‘it’s just they don’t understand.’

People who do understand hold her in extremely high regard. They include traditional leaders and shamans from the Amazon and Russia, the Gaia Foundation in London, the World Conservation Union and, importantly, Venda elders known as makhadzis.

She tells me she’s just a traditional woman from rural Venda with healing abilities in her hands, but I disagree. Traditional rural women don’t generally win Bill Clinton Fellowships and study at Harvard. They don’t travel to the Amazon, Ethiopia, Colombia, Barcelona, Britain and Kenya in pursuit of knowledge about ancient cultures and global warming.

Mphathe’s story is altogether unusual and includes taking on a king – and winning. She’s a rural woman, but also something else entirely. And that something else has been fraught with challenges and contradictions.

I’m here to talk to her about a waterfall she’s protecting. It’s called Phiphidi and is lovely beyond imagining. Here the Mutshindudu River cascades down black granite into a pool rimmed by huge, ancient trees, their muscular roots entwined in seeming embrace and their gnarled branches reaching out over the water.

For countless generations women have come to the pool to perform rituals for bountiful crops, good rains and the health of the Venda people. The river is one of 24 that flow from the Thathe Holy Forest, higher up in the Soutpansberg, said to be protected by a white lion. Along their courses are groves, pools, falls and a lake where, the women say, trees, creatures and the air we breathe are purified and renewed. And they are not wrong.

Phiphidi is part of a biodiversity hotspot in Limpopo province, which supports hundreds of plant and animal species, some of which are endemic. Thirty per cent of South Africa’s tree species grow in Phiphidi, though it accounts for less than one per cent of the country’s area. In addition, 60 per cent of South Africa’s birdlife, 40 per cent of its mammals and 30 per cent of its reptiles call Soutpansberg home.

When I visited Phiphidi a front-end loader was clawing at piles of gravel and driving a road to the head of the falls. Dirty cloth and bits of plastic clung to roots around the once-clear pool, which was opaque with sediment. There was a rubbish dump nearby and the many condoms lying around suggested a less sacred use of the site. Under construction were eight chalets, a restaurant, laundry, bar and lapa as well as an imposing, lockable gate. A Limpopo hotel group was already advertising the falls and the sacred lake, Fundudzi, in its ‘Land of Myth and Legend’ tour package.

The falls are within the territory of a small local clan, the Ramunangi, who were horrified at the desecration of their sacred site. The development was evidently sanctioned by a local chief, Jerry Tshivhase, and was being undertaken by the Tshivhase Development Foundation Trust, of which the BEE billionaire Mashudu Tshivhase is a director. Both men are related to King Kennedy Tshivhase.

After my visit, the organisation that Mphathe formed, Dzomo la Mupo (Voice of Nature) took them all to court to force building operations to cease. The king, coincidentally, later had his kingship stripped from him. The message was clear: don’t mess with ancestral traditions.

As far as Mphathe is concerned, that was only the beginning. Sitting chatting in a park on a cool Venda afternoon, it seems incongruous that this pretty, thirty-something mum with a tinkling laugh could be parachuting ancient knowledge into a postmodern, eco-conscious age with such force and conviction – until she starts talking about how she got there.

She’s the first born of the third wife of a traditional healer whom she revered. Her mother, too, had healing skills inherited from her own father, a traditional spiritual guide. Mphathe’s father was 74 when she was born, the 11th of 24 children, a large clan related to the king. ‘My father gave me the name of Mphatheleni, which means ‘to re-build’, she says, ‘and I take it very seriously. He knew what he wanted me to do.’

From Grade 10, with her father now old, Mphathe went to live with her uncle, a fervent Christian who saw it as his duty to turn her from her ‘heathen’ ways. As she puts it, ‘modern life wanted to dominate me’. She tried to oblige, but kept having dreams in which her father, who died when she was in her second year at university, instructed her in the old ways of her people. When she told her uncle, he said her father was a demon and prayed over her head to exorcise him.

In her final year the spiritual contradictions were becoming intolerable. Right after graduation she had a breakdown. In hospital they diagnosed hyper stress and pulmonary tuberculosis.

Her uncle visited her to preach. Weak and in bed, she had little resistance, so she fought back in the only way possible. One day she dressed herself and ran away to the only place she thought she could find peace and healing: a forest at the foot of a sacred mountain near Elim named Luvhola. Utterly alone but with a memory of herbal remedies her father had taught her, wild fruits and spring water, she healed herself.

When her strength returned she built a rough hut and daily climbed the mountain to sit and think. ‘I spent two years in the forest,’ she says, ‘no money, living the way of my father. I wasn’t afraid – my totem is the warthog. I walked a lot. Friends brought me books and relatives came with food. Mostly I needed to stay alone, but I visited older members of my clan, learning from them the history of my people. It was a rite of passage and I found the strength to do what I’m doing now.’

She gathered traditional objects, old cooking utensils, cloth and beads – some from the collection of her father. Then, with plans that came to her in a dream and help from the community, Mphathe built a cultural village – traditional kitchen, bedroom, grandparents’ room and initiation hut. She did ceremonies with snuff and finger millet, communed with the ancestors and explained to anyone who came along what she was doing and why.

A tour guide, looking for traditional contacts, couldn’t believe his luck when he visited her. Soon bus loads of tourists from all over the world were coming to sit on the ground around Mphathe to hear what she had to say.

‘I made many friends that way, but I realised most of the tourists just wanted to take photographs,’ she said. ‘They weren’t going to do anything with what I was telling them. My place was listed as a picnic spot on the tour pamphlet. I was just entertainment.’ She began studying the ethics of guiding and qualified as a cultural guide.

‘But life was difficult,’ she says. ‘So many contradictions. I didn’t understand why. So I found a makhadzi who helped me make sense of it. One day she said the ancestors required that I have a child. That was a shock, but you don’t argue with your makhadzi.’

The details of how she obliged are ‘rather personal’, but the outcome was Thama, which means ‘best friend’. When I met Mphathe, her eight-year-old son really was her best friend and already deeply knowledgeable about traditional matters and her work.

Mphathe decided it was time to pull back from tourism, leave the forest and take what she had found there and within herself into the world. Back in Thohoyandou, she saw the offer of Bill Clinton Fellowships. She applied, but then withdrew, feeling that Thama was too young to leave with others to look after. The following year, however, the programme asked her to apply again. She was accepted and flew to the United States, where she studied leadership and other skills at various universities, including Harvard.

‘When I returned people said: “Yho, you’ve been to the United States and now you’re a millionaire. You must start a business.” But that’s not what I was preparing myself for. Money doesn’t interest me. I went back to what I was doing.

‘I worked with those who were really interested in traditions, and that’s how I met people from the Gaia Foundation. I spent days with them. They really understood what I was doing.

‘With their help and with the African Biodiversity Network we started Dzomo la Mupo to defend sacred sites and traditional rituals. I took my ideas all over the world and met amazing people – shamans, traditional leaders and people who understood the link between old customs and earth healing. In the Amazon it touched me how comfortable people were living in an indigenous way with nature.’

Back home, though, all was not well. Her uncle, who had failed to convert her, turned her family and even her mother against her, claiming she was doing demonic work. They forced her to remove from the family home all her traditional clothes and objects – and even the TV set she’d bought for her mother. Her uncle held a meeting in which he exorcised the ‘demon’ spirit of her father from the house. ‘He said, ‘I cast the demon spirit of evil out of this house. Jesus help you.’ It was a shock. My own father! I just walked out.’

Her mother, on instructions from her uncle, burned a book which contained all the ailments, preparations and cures collected by her father. Mphathe couldn’t begin to estimate the depth of cultural knowledge lost in that single action. But it hardened her resolve to seek accommodation of traditional knowledge in the modern world.

She began seeking out elders and recording their memories. She asked them why they didn’t speak out in defence of sacred sites. ‘They said: ‘We’re staying among Christians. We don’t want trouble.’ I did workshops with these people and, with Dzomo la Mupo, they are now a force, they have become free. I helped them have a voice. And when chiefs started building at Phiphidi Falls they said: ‘That is enough!’ We hired a top lawyer, Roger Chennells, to fight it in the courts. And, for now, he’s stopped them.’

In traditional society it’s not easy for a woman to go up against a man and near impossible against a chief. Mphathe had taken on a chief and a king, and won. It is an act of bravery and defiance almost unheard of. And she’s deeply saddened that her belief in the value of cultural traditions has isolated her from her family. But she knows what she’s doing is right for the world and her people.

‘There are 24 rivers flowing out of the Thathe Holy Forest. If you cut it down, what then? That’s the end of the farming system in Venda. Sacred sites are places that make evaporation that makes rain. If you don’t protect the pools and waterfalls, where do the people get clean water to drink? Rituals aren’t empty things. They’re the earth wisdom of hundreds of generations of wise people, especially makhadzis.

‘My father would never allow trees or bushes to be cut down near a river,’ she says, watching Thama swing in the branches above us. ‘You can call that tradition but it’s also good environmental sense. Without their shade, the life of a river shrivels and dies. It can dry up or flood your land. The tradition of my people protects the environment. It comes from an understanding of the natural world, which people have lost. It is old knowledge but it’s also future knowledge, because without it we’ll kill creation. We’re living in the time in between, when people have turned away from caring for the earth. But it’s changing.

‘You know if we want to save this world – especially people – we need to listen to women, particularly elders. They’re the bowls, the containers of life. They are food security. Even a king can’t be a king without a makhadzi. You can’t be a strong fowl if you haven’t felt the warmth of a mother hen. We appreciate highly the role of men, but we are the cradles of the human world.’

In 2013 Mphathe was awarded the Global Leadership Award by the International Indigenous Women’s Forum. Her acceptance speech underlined the clarity of her wisdom:

‘I call on the South African government and those who appreciate the vital role of indigenous knowledge in dealing with the many crises of ecosystem collapse and climate change, to recognise indigenous peoples and their way of life. This means recognising our sacred natural sites and territories and custodial governance systems so that we can continue to live according to our indigenous knowledge systems.

‘Indigenous knowledge is rooted in practice, not in libraries. It is about protecting the sanctity of life, as a way of life, as we have done for millennia. Now, more than ever, the industrial world needs to wake up to the fact that our planet is in crisis and everyone needs to learn once again that we are inextricably part of the web of life, and need to abide by her ecological laws – for the sake of all the children of all species.’

Mphathe had a meeting to attend and her cellphone was ringing. She apologised, called Thama and stood up to go. Then she turned to me with a look that suggested steel. ‘I have to stay strong to live the way I do and be who I am,’ she said. ‘We’re not chosen, we choose. Defending the old ways and bringing that knowledge to the future for our children is what I’ve chosen. It’s what I must do. It’s not easy, but I won’t be stopped.’

Kruger Park’s rhino war

The crack of a rifle in the pre-dawn glow can mean only one thing. Poachers! The Tshokwane field ranger notes its direction and possible position, then radios his section ranger. Within minutes the call comes through to South African National Parks (Sanparks) Environmental Crime Investigation Unit. Bruce Leslie, who until that moment has been sitting at his desk chatting amiably, blurs into action.

Out in the park a rhino is dying, its killers waiting with an axe to chop out its horns and make a run for the boundary fence. It doesn’t need to be dead for them to begin.

Phone, radio, dogs, choppers – everything at the unit becomes focused on speed and practised efficiency. It will be a combined mission between Sanparks, the police and the army. As a chopper thuds down, the dogs arrive. Belgian shepherds – the best, according to Bruce – for tracking humans.

His dog, Killer, greets him gleefully, sees the chopper and just about somersaults on its lead with excitement. ‘They’re working dogs,’ says Bruce. ‘This is what they live for.’

Within half an hour, men in battledress and dogs are taking off from Skukuza airport on yet another mission in a war that’s turned nasty, with Kruger Park at its epicentre. There are an estimated 29 000 rhinos in the world, nine out of 10 of them in South Africa and most in the Kruger Park. Poachers are killing an average of one every 15 hours. It’s here that the battle to save the rhinoceros from extinction will be won or lost.

The amounts of money involved in this war are staggering. A full-grown rhino carries about eight kilograms of horn, which at black market prices is worth millions. That makes it more valuable per gramme than gold or pure heroin. In an attempt to stop the killing, Sanparks is pouring R450 million a year into anti-poaching operations. According to Interpol, rhino horn is part of a global, illegal wildlife trade that could be worth up to $20 billion a year – that’s more than the GDP of most African countries.

‘The park has a 400 kilometre border with Mozambique in the east, a northern border with Zimbabwe and impoverished communities to the west,’ said Kruger’s chief mammal scientist, Sam Ferreira, when I tracked him down at Skukuza. ‘A critical switching point is the minimum wage around here. At some point it’s so low that poaching becomes a survival issue. No legal disincentive works when you have no money at all. When that happens, anti-poaching operations tend to shift from legal disincentives to a shoot-to-kill policy. But payment for horn is so high that it’s even overcoming the disincentive of death. And when there are no more deterrents you’re in serious trouble. I think that’s where we’re at right now.’

According to the head of Sanparks Environmental Crime Unit, Ken Maggs, there are basically five layers to the poaching business: shooters, recruiters, receivers, exporters and consumers. His unit deals mainly with the first two at park and local level, but is also involved in levels three and four.

‘At the first level there are several types of poacher,’ he said. ‘There’s the traditional poacher who lives nearby, has excellent bush skills, often has military training and starts dirt poor. Payment for a single rhino hunt can utterly change his life.

‘Then – and more worrying – are wildlife-industry poachers: park rangers, vets, pilots, game-capture operators, professional hunters, game-farm managers and owners. The cost of a rhino is a fraction of what you can get for its horn, so it could be worth your while to hunt your own rhino. These guys have skill, money and sophisticated hardware.

‘Then there are bogus hunters, mostly Vietnamese, who get a legitimate licence to trophy hunt but everyone knows the horn will end up on the black market. They’ve even armed Gauteng prostitutes to up their hunting quotas.’

At the time of writing, there was a court case where a game-farm owner and two vets are charged with killing more than 39 rhinos and selling their horns on the black market. Assets seized included two helicopters, four houses, four farms, a fleet of vehicles and trust accounts, the total worth being an estimated R550 million.

In the chopper with Killer between his knees, Bruce and the section ranger deploy SADF observers on the eastern boundary, then head for the area where the shot was heard. The aim is to locate the carcass and track the poachers from there. They don’t find the rhino, but the dogs pick up the spoor and the team moves off silently, firearms ready.

The bush is thick, the poachers have weapons and the team is without body armour (too hot). Their best protection is that the poachers think they’d be out-gunned by Sanparks and don’t set an ambush. But less experienced poachers are coming on line and their weapons are getting more sophisticated.

After a few kilometres four poachers suddenly emerge ahead. One swings his rifle towards the trackers so they fire warning shots and the men scatter. The chopper is radioed and comes in low and fast, pushing them to ground. One is arrested, then two more, but one escapes. After returning the captives to base the anti-poaching team are back in the helicopters to search for the rhino.

‘Either wounded or dead,’ says Bruce as he grabs some water and spare radio batteries. ‘We’ll find it. We get a call like this sometimes three times a day, often every day. We average around twice a week throughout the year. Kruger’s almost the size of Israel or Wales – two million hectares – and lots of it is remote.

‘Every minute of every day or night there’ll be armed poachers in the park. It’s a hard war.’

Members of the anti-poaching unit carry some pretty fancy kit in their backpacks, including satellite phones, GPS and powerful rifles – as well as first-aid equipment if men are wounded in a firefight. And the teams are backed by dogs and aircraft. They pack a mean punch if required to.

‘We’re bound by rules of engagement and don’t aim to kill poachers,’ said Ken. ‘But they have no rules whatsoever and won’t hesitate to shoot at us. We do return fire – around 21 poachers were killed in the park last year. This is organised crime par excellence. There’s an enormous amount of money involved.’

Kruger has about 10 500 white rhinos and 630 black which, between them, produce around 1 000 youngsters a year. Because of extra waterholes and good grazing, they breed faster than in a more natural environment. In the past, Kruger has sold off the ‘beyond normal’ supply, spreading rhino DNA further afield and raising essential revenue. But that surplus is now falling to poacher guns while the revenue from the supply of rhino to other parks and private buyers has dried up.

In Kruger’s attempt to halt the slaughter lies a terrible irony. The more successful the park rangers and other anti-poaching initiatives become, the more money poachers have to throw at killing rhinos.

‘It’s simple economics,’ Sam pointed out. ‘What drives up the price of a commodity? Scarcity. Anti poaching squeezes the supply but the demand stays the same, so all that changes is the value of rhino horn. And the incentive to poach and the money available, therefore, gets bigger and bigger.

‘I’m a biologist, but with rhino poaching I’ve had to rapidly become an economist. And it’s been an eye-opener. We can’t stop anti-poaching, of course, but I’ve realised that it’s a short-term response – a holding pattern until we sort out the demand end of the chain. We need to understand the drivers at the Asian end to get the whole picture and we don’t – not really.’

This realisation has forced organisations like the National Wildlife Crime Reaction Unit to think more broadly about poaching and the demand end of the equation. Rhino horn is used for dagger handles in Yemen, but the larger demand is traditional medicine in China and Vietnam. China has been using it for thousands of years and, because of modernisation, could be a declining market.

Southeast Asia is the big problem. Among these countries, Vietnam is a recent market which suddenly expanded when a politician ran a television campaign about how rhino horn cured his cancer.

‘The demand was created by aggressive campaigning and social marketing,’ said Sam. ‘In a way there’s more hope there, because it means that aggressive social marketing against the use of rhino horn could work. Law may be a disincentive to use rhino horn, but it’s not as powerful as creating an incentive not to use it. That has to be run by people who understand the Asian market. Until they do that, anti-poaching is just hanging on to the tail of the beast.’

An additional problem is that the demand for horn is not being driven by consumers but by speculators hedging against rhino extinction. Veteran conservationist Clive Walker has suggested that the trade could be linked to investment and not use, but nobody knows for sure. ‘We find ourselves in a position where we know what needs to be done in terms of research into the market … in the East,’ he writes in his book, The Rhino Keeper, on rhinos, ‘but with seemingly no way to do it. The Southeast Asians must be part of the debate.’

Back in his office, Bruce is again on standby and relaxed. He’s been in the park for over 20 years and knows it intimately. He tells me that when he’s tracking poachers, especially at night, he’s more worried about wild animals than men with guns. He tells me about how he was attacked by a leopard, which grabbed him by the hand as he tried to fend it off. ‘It was old and hungry,’ he says. ‘I can’t blame it. I was just food.’

I say it’s rather unusual to be putting his life on the line almost every day to protect an animal. He gives me a hard look.

‘These animals have been on the planet for 30 million years doing just fine. Then we came along with guns, greed and habitat destruction. Without parks like Kruger there’s no hope for rhinos. They could go extinct in my lifetime. What an indictment. We can’t let it happen! Not on my watch.’

Being there

‘I listen to the sounds of the hunted and I become the hunted, because we’re all interested in the predator,’ said Ona Basimane after we’d sat in silence for a few minutes. ‘The hunted talk to each other about predators.’

We were on the Linyanti floodplain near DumaTau in northern Botswana looking for leopards. Ona was my guide but also something else: a photographer and a good one. He was monitoring sounds but also watching light, considering angles.

Each day he takes guests out to view and photograph animals as his job requires, but in a bag between the seats is camera equipment generally far superior to theirs. If they appear not to mind, he’ll haul out one of his Canons with indecently long lenses and capture something the guests often beg for back at the lodge.

This is how so many wildlife photographers began – as Land Rover jockeys and guides living and traveling in Africa’s wild places as part of their work. And each day their perception and intuition builds.

‘It’s a wonderful job, a privilege to be here,’ Ona said as he fired up the engine and headed in the direction of a chattering tree squirrel. ‘You’re here for maybe a few days. I’m here all the time.’

That week I’d met another guide with a camera. Dan Myberg was managing Jacana Safari Lodge in the Okavango Delta and is a hugely experienced wildlife lensman. The lodge is surrounded by water and is a birder’s dream.

‘Ever shot a fish eagle taking prey?’ he casually enquired over brunch, knowing it to be a photographer’s iconic dream shot. ‘Want to try?’

That afternoon we were positioned at the edge of a deep blue pool with the sun behind us and a majestic black and white eagle in a tree some way off. ‘I know him,’ said Dan. ‘This is where he fishes. Set your camera on speed shutter, spot focus and wide aperture – and be patient. Then follow him in.’

We waited, the eagle waited and the sun sank towards the horizon. Then it suddenly launched itself straight towards us. I locked focus on its speeding body and pressed the trigger. The raptor was moving at incredible speed as it hit the water and through the viewfinder, as it wheeled away, I could see a large pike in its claws.

‘Get it?’ asked Dan. I flicked through the run of shots and whooped with delight.

‘Did you?’ I asked.

‘You bet! Now let’s go look for kingfishers …’

Wildlife photography can be about luck, but mostly it’s about knowledge – correctly anticipating the moment, being there at the right time of day in perfect light. In this business rangers and wildlife guides have considerable advantage. Understanding takes time to build and they have the time to do it. It’s their job. Most never pick up a camera, but when they do they can make your eyes water. It’s been the route of photographers like Jonathan Scott, Nigel Dennis, Chris Martin, Patrick Wagner, Curtis Martin and Greg du Toit.

Frans Lanting, one of the world’s finest wildlife lensmen, watches more than he photographs, seeking to understand what’s going on. He never rushes. ‘Animals communicate a lot with body language and are sensitive to what others are demonstrating with their bodies,’ he says. ‘To photograph them I enter their world, live eye to eye with them and come to know their most intimate, desperate and ordinary moments.’ It’s something that people like Dan and Ona do instinctively.

The Linyanti is known for predators and elephants. The raised walkways at DumaTau dip down as they cross elephant paths to not obstruct thirsty pachyderms. Big cats have been known to startle guests on their way to bed. Particularly, it’s a place of leopards. I’d flown up there to photograph them and Ona offered to find some for me.

My lesson began with tree squirrels. ‘They’re my friends,’ said Ona as we bounced through deep sand surrounded by dead leadwood trees seeming to grasp at the scudding clouds. ‘They have different alarm calls for eagles, snakes and big cats. The hunted communicate. Guinea fowls tell me what’s coming along the ground, monkeys see things further off and shout – but sometimes they see too far and waste my time. Starlings vocalise at snakes. Kudus never give a false alarm.

‘Also I know where elephants like to cross water and when a red lechwe is about to take off through the shallows. All these things are about getting into position, working with the light and the angle and the animal.’

A squirrel began chittering. Ona took out his camera and laid it across his lap.

‘I’m also a hunter,’ he said. ‘When prey tell me there’s a predator, I hunt it. I give chase. I anticipate its moves. Then sometimes – not always but sometimes – it all comes together and I sit in my room afterwards looking at the shot and it’s: ‘Wow! Yes. Got it!’

Ona has more advantages than most. Born in the small Botswana town of Maun on the edge of the Okavango Delta, he’s lived with wild animals all his life. When he was a youngster he herded the family cattle in lion country.

‘Guests appreciate getting great sightings,’ he said after another bout of silent listening. ‘Some can be very generous on many levels. I get them shots they want or had never dreamed of getting and they help me with my photography.

‘One guest was upgrading his camera and just gave me a Canon 5D. That’s how I started. Another sold me an almost new Canon 7D for half price. Sometimes, at the end of their trip, they give me their memory cards. I’m very lucky.’

I think it was a francolin that led us to the leopards. Whatever it was, Ona’s direction was unerring. We found three of them under a low tree – two females and a magnificent male. It was an extraordinary find, considering that leopards are solitary animals, and made even more remarkable because the male was mating with both females.

This was tough love. One of the females would back up to the male, flipping her tail in his face. He would mount her, snarling, and grab her by the scruff of her neck or an ear. As he dismounted she’d lash out at him and he’d spring away. Then she’d roll on her back in obvious contentment. It went on for hours.

Back in my room at DumaTau I flipped through the images and of course went ‘Wow!’ Later that evening, with the southern constellations glittering in the still river lagoon, I raised a glass of good red to Ona, Dan and all of Africa’s extraordinary photo-savvy wilderness guides. Not, I confess, without a touch of envy.

Lord of the Flies

In 1973 a film called Soylent Green starring a young Charlton Heston was produced based on a novel, Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison.

It was set in 2022, in a world suffering the effects of global warming and massive food shortages. Farms were under military protection and only the rich feasting on meat and vegetables. The rest got to eat composite protein with the consistency of seaweed, the most nutritious being green. When the gunk ran out there were food riots. It was disturbingly prescient for its time.

The strategy for population pressure was an exit to a happy land for the over 60s. But, as Heston discovers when his old friend decides on that option, happy land is actually a facility showing peaceful movies to oldies before turning them into green protein to feed the masses.

It was, of course, preposterous, and I gave it no more thought until a book, The Protein Crunch by Jason Drew and David Lorimer, landed on my desk. The subtitle is Civilisation on the Brink. If ever there was a book that smacks you into global awareness or drives you into denial, this is it. The authors don’t pull any punches. Here are a few choice facts they serve up without caramel sauce.

It takes 30 000 litres of water to make your cellphone. It takes 150 litres of water to make a pint of beer. Only 25 per cent of river water now reaches the sea. Two hundred people die every hour from unsafe water and sanitation.

Erosion, mainly from farming, is washing away 25 billion tonnes of soil a year equalling an area nearly the size of Ireland. Countries like China and Russia are buying up huge tracts of land in Africa to grow crops for their own exclusive consumption – China has 2.8 million hectares in the Congo alone.

Across the world there is an average of 100 million acts of sexual intercourse taking place yielding 369 000 babies, of whom 160 000 die.

The top four transnational agricultural corporations control 40 per cent of the world food trade. More than a third of all the grain grown and fish caught are fed to the animals we eat. There are 16 billion chickens alive at any one time. Nearly half the world’s antibiotics are used on farm animals. Nearly a billion people go hungry each day, but another billion are overweight or obese, including nearly one third of British children under 15.

Land used for farming increasingly grows biofuel. If you fill up your 4x4, it uses the same amount of grain that would feed a person for a year. Since 1950 we have consumed half the world’s resources ever used by humans. We are, in short, on a collision course with nature.

Drew and Lorimer put it rather well: ‘Nature is like a goose laying golden eggs. When egg production stops we want goose-feather pillows, then foie gras, and then roast goose sandwiches every day until there’s nothing left. Then we want our goose back.’

It requires a strong constitution to take this on board and the most common response is protective denial while we pass the plate for another helping.

Are we left, then, with no hope for the future? Surprisingly, according to the book, that’s not the case. Humans are survivors and very good at it, or we wouldn’t have got this far with small teeth, no claws and sparse hair. We have the means to fix the problem – if we want to.

For instance, if we improved food security and reduced the need for oil, we could massively reduce military expenditure – most of the wars in the past 50 years were about oil or food supplies. We spend trillions of dollars on healthcare but almost nothing on caring for the earth. If we spent more on the latter, we’d have to spend less on the former. We need, they say, to change our definitions of success.

If we used the powerful engine of capitalist entrepreneurship linked with earth-restoration science and pressure from an aware public, Drew and Lorimer insist, we could turn this thing around in a generation. If corporate entrepreneurs invested as much in eco-enterprises as they invest in planetary destruction, they would make huge profits while solving the global environmental crisis. It is, in a sense, a no-brainer.

‘So what’s an eco-entrepreneur look like?’ I asked Jason at his book launch.

‘My brother, Wilco,’ he replied. ‘He’s a farmer. I’ll introduce you.’

‘What’s he farm?’

‘Houseflies.’

That, it turned out, is exactly what he does – in their trillions. And the reason? For protein. That’s when I remembered Soylent Green.

‘Why flies?’ I asked Wilco over a cup of tea a few days later.

‘The common housefly is very good at making protein out of waste,’ he said, ‘and they’re tough. They can live in waste and anywhere from the Congo to Antarctica and they eat almost anything. You have no idea how much food-processing factories dump as waste – mountains of it, and I’m not kidding.

‘We’ve got an experimental factory on Stellenbosch University’s research farm where we feed waste to flies. They lay eggs which produce maggots which are 60 per cent protein. We feed those on waste – blood from abattoirs seems best – then dry the maggots and produce Magmeal. We’re planning huge factories round the world.’

‘Who eats the stuff?’ I asked.

‘Things with a single stomach, like chickens, fish, sheep that need protein. There’s an agricultural feed producer in Germany than can take 16 000 tonnes of Magmeal a month if we could produce that much.’

‘Could humans eat it?’ I asked, thinking Charlton Heston would have approved of the alternative.

‘Why not?’ said Wilco. ‘It’s pure protein.’

I forgot to ask if it was green.

Beer and skyfies

He’s peeled the potatoes and now Christo Pieterse’s cutting them into skyfies (chips), very precisely, then scooping them into a bowl. There are a lot of potatoes and not many of us, but no matter, Christo’s talking about his life and chopping seems to help.

At a waterhole not 50 metres away an elephant with huge tusks is sucking water up his nose and squirting it into his mouth, eyes closed in obvious contentment. A troop of baboons is having a noisy family brawl and a jackal is trotting around inquisitively. Just beyond the waterhole is Botswana’s border with Zimbabwe marked by a dusty track and no fence, an occasional conduit for refugees desperate enough to brave the lions.

Christo leaves off slicing for a moment to fetch something from his office, named Tank. Let’s pause for a moment to consider this particular establishment. Tank is a 4.5-litre petrol Land Cruiser that was big when he bought it but now needs long legs or a ladder to enter the cab.

Its bullbar could take out a rhino and is wound with two thick snatch ropes that have pulled dead elephants out of waterholes and towed kaput 4x4s to the source of the Zambezi. Dangling from it is a cowbell ‘to warn animals I’m coming’.

The roll-bars out back are as thick as your upper arm and between them are raised seats. Underneath are boxes and bags and fishing gear, precisely placed. He can fit four spare tyres, three fridges and has a 420-litre fuel tank. The fishing gear is important: some good rods and thousands of rands worth of rapalas for tiger fish. Christo takes fishing very seriously.

Earlier that afternoon we’d slipped moorings in his small boat named Skattie and motored down the Chobe River to its confluence with the Zambezi near Kazangula. There was a spot he knew about. Sure enough, a fat tiger was soon bending the rod, then it shot out the water, shocked to discover its easy meal wasn’t quite as imagined. Christo hauled it out to be photographed, then gave it back to the river.

Tank’s cab is a wonder of extras: a couple of GPSs, radio mounts, inverters, two big Maglites in clips beside the windscreen, a safe, power tools, night-vision equipment, place for a laptop and even a calculator mounted on the roof for quick money conversions when crossing borders. It is, indeed, Christo’s office, the love of his life and legendary across Botswana, Zimbabwe and Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania and Mozambique.

His only other abode is a small tent in which he sleeps only if it rains, preferring to curl up in a bedroll under the stars. ‘I’ve got a zillion-star hotel and 1 000 offices all over Africa,’ he says, ‘the sky overhead and every big tree and river bank.’ A few nights before he had to smack a hyena on the head with the Maglite seconds before it removed Christo’s cheek.

Back at the chips and prodded by questions, Christo explains how he got here. He was born in Randfontein and, like a good Afrikaans boytjie, learned to hunt at weekends. After school he was drafted into the South African Defence Force’s anti-aircraft unit, then volunteered for the elite 32 Battalion, known as Os Terriveis in Portuguese, the Terrible Ones. It was a covert, semi-conventional hodgepodge of Angolan and South African wild men who did more damage and won more medals than any other unit in southern Angola. Rumours suggested the use of excessive brutality. The battalion was a hunting man’s heaven.

From its ranks, after the war, were drawn soldiers of fortune that found their way into private military companies such as Executive Outcomes and Sandline International as well as a special protection force for the American general commanding forces in Iraq. Oh yeah, and the failed coup in Equatorial Guinea on 2004.

For Christo, 32 Battalion was an adrenaline rush of note. He was the only troopie ever to shoot down a Mig23 fighter plane with a 20-millimetre anti-aircraft gun. After 15 months of bush war he joined the Soweto Riot Squad amid mounting urban warfare in the most volatile place in the country. This was the 1980s, all hell was breaking loose in the townships and the squad’s job was to keep the lid on a boiling revolt against apartheid. God knows what went on there, don’t ask, but for R&R Christo headed for the bush with a gun over his shoulder.

‘In the wild I was really trigger happy,’ he remembers. ‘I didn’t care what kind of animal I shot, or how I shot it, as long as I could shoot.’ He decided to get a professional hunter’s licence, but to be a PH you needed to study nature, the environment and wildlife. This provoked an epiphany. ‘I started noticing birds, trees, things I never took particular interest in before.’

Cities and urban stuff were getting to him so he resigned from the police and offered hunting expeditions to clients as well as starting a chicken farm in Brits. He bought Tank and begun shaping her to his needs. Many of the clients weren’t hunters, they just wanted to kill things, and often did it badly. One day he sat on a koppie after shooting seven springbok and thought: ‘I’m not enjoying this anymore – shooting animals isn’t fun at all.’

He went home and sold everything except Tank. It netted him R22 000 which he put in his pocket and headed north: Botswana, Zimbabwe and Zambia, looking for something. Peace, maybe. For Christo, boots and long pants symbolised the army and police. He took them off and has never worn anything on his feet since; his protest against confinement. He found beautiful places, but kept moving. Around 50 000 kilometres of wandering later, with money running low, he figured he could start charging to show people what he’d found.

One day a rhino ambled up to the Land Cruiser and scraped a bit of paint off the door ‘so close I could have touched it’. So he named his company Touch the Wild. These days he laughs a lot, is an irrepressible tease, is resolutely shoeless and is one of the best long-range guides in Africa. Tank’s clock now sits at a little over 250 000 kilometres.

Christo doesn’t do what he calls tar-road safaris. ‘Whenever I have cellphone signal I know I’m on the wrong route,’ he says, still chopping chips. ‘If you don’t have time, don’t call me. Call me when you have time. I won’t work myself rich but, man, just look around at where we are.’

Finally the potatoes are all sliced, half a bottle of sunflower oil is bubbling in a pan on the fire and the steaks are on the grid. ‘Watch this,’ he says with a wicked gleam, ‘but stand back.’ From an indecent height he tips the wet chips into the pan. Oil leaps out in protest, catches fire and there’s an explosion that throws a flame metres into the night sky.

‘That,’ he says, ‘is the way to make skyfies.’ In the distance a hyena whoops and a fiery-necked nightjar calls, ‘Good Lord, deliver us.’ Christo raises a can of Castle lager and grins: ‘Lekker, né?’

Vet: do not follow

There were several tasks at hand, the most pressing being to find an aggressive buffalo with swollen testicles. Then there was the elephant with a bloody breast and an impala with a badly swollen haunch.

These were on the to-do list Clay Wilson picked up from the wildlife office as we entered Chobe National Park. He ambled back to his Land Cruiser and eased himself behind the wheel. On both front doors was a sign that read ‘Honorary Game Warden & Veterinarian. Do Not Follow’.

‘Let’s go see what we can find,’ he said as he reversed out of the car park and down the bumpy road along the Chobe River. The park has 387 kilometres of riverfront and connects to Moremi, Savute and wildlife areas in Namibia, Angola, Zambia and Zimbabwe. It’s immense, a long way from the comfortable veterinary practice Clay sold in America. And the park’s 150 000 elephants and lion prides have little in common with the poodles and gerbils he was dealing with before he had an epiphany and fled back to Africa where he was born.

‘I had a big practice with 20 staff in what could be considered the Beverly Hills of Florida,’ he said. ‘People had no problem spending two to three thousand dollars on their animals. But one day I’d just had enough. I realised all I was doing was paying salaries. So I sold everything – even my aeroplane. I bought dart guns, other equipment and medicines, everything I thought I’d need and just came here. Hey! There’s a buff with big balls. Let’s have a look.’

We peered at the rear ends of several giant bulls mooching in the woodland and ended up metres away from two lionesses lolling in the shade.

‘Pretty cats,’ Clay observed, then turned his attention back to the dark beasts. ‘All the buffs seem to have big balls so I guess that’s the norm around here. Not our guy.’

We headed down to the river, where a family of elephants was splashing and spraying. Clay, looking for a bloody breast, got out of the Land Cruiser and headed in their direction with me in tow, nervously aware of the nearby lions.

‘I don’t like to see animals suffering,’ he whispered as we looked down at the herd just below us. ‘If an elephant goes down it can take five or six days to die. It’s a horrible death. You can say we shouldn’t interfere with nature, but so many of the problems are man-made, like snares. If we make the problem, we should undo it. That’s my opinion.’

Back in the van I asked Clay how he handled the change from Pekinese pups to things that bit to kill.

‘An animal is an animal,’ he said, you know: heart, brain, bones. It’s just a matter of different dosages, really. You under-dose a buffalo or elephant when you dart them and they tend to come after you. I’ve been charged by lions, elephants … the closest was a buffalo. It nearly killed me. You have to be careful working with wild animals. They’re sick and they’re hurting and often it’s people who have done that to them.

‘But, hey, I wouldn’t want to do anything else. I couldn’t go back to the city. At night I hear lions roaring and hyenas calling. Five minutes by car and you’ll run into a herd of elephants. Not many places on earth you can do that.’

All the elephants we saw had intact breasts, but a bit deeper into the park we came across a baby elephant stuck in yucky cotton-soil mud at a waterhole. Clay used his vehicle to shoo away the worried herd that had been trying to get it out, darted the mother who wouldn’t leave so she’d go to sleep, then hauled the youngster out with ropes attached to the Cruiser. By then a little crowd of tourists had gathered and, when the baby came out, they cheered. Clay was covered in mud, but he was wearing a Jack Nicholson grin.

‘This is why I’m here,’ he said, ‘where I can be useful to wildlife. Chobe’s one of the most important biodiversity hotspots on earth. It’s a treasure and we have to look after it.’

Sometimes, though, Clay’s tendency to ‘just get on with it’ in the small town of Kasane can get people huffing and puffing. A few months back there were hundreds of scrawny, stray dogs around and distemper broke out. Dead but still infected dogs were being thrown on the local dump, where they were being scavenged by hyenas and jackals.

Clay realised the whole park was at risk, so he and his girlfriend, Laura, set up an inoculation site and put out the word he’d do the work for free if people couldn’t afford to pay. Laura dabbed a spot of white paint on the forehead of each treated dog. Clay then put out the word that he’d shoot any dog without a spot – and after two week’s grace, he did. The SPCA had a fit.

‘What else was I supposed to do?’ asked Clay, looking puzzled as he negotiated yet another turn to inspect some testicles. What’s more important, some stray dogs or the whole darn park?’

On the way back to base Clay got to dreaming. ‘You know what this place needs? A research centre with world-class experts coming in to study and assist. And I’d like to re-introduce rhinos, which have been poached out, and breed roan and sable antelopes for reintroduction.

‘Oh yeah, and I’d like to get some aerial drones – little remote-controlled planes with cameras and GPS and night vision. They’d soon sort out the poaching. They are hugely expensive and I’m running out of money. But I’ve been negotiating with the manufacturers.

‘Maybe I’m too passionate. If I see a problem I just deal with it, whatever it is. Everything here’s important. There’s no difference between an insect and an elephant. They all have their place in the fabric of life.

‘There! That buffalo. Err … no, standard balls. Maybe I’ll come across it tomorrow, poor old bugger.’

As we turned out of the park Laura leaned over from the back seat and gave him a hug. ‘He’s perfectly crazy, isn’t he?’ she said, then gave him another one.

Final note: Clay Wilson was later imprisoned for no reason he could figure out and given 24 hours to leave Botswana. He thinks the SPCA may have had a hotline to high places. He never found the buffalo with swollen testicles.

Life with nurdles

Humans have always produced trash – it seems to be the byproduct of our intelligence. Stone Age people left hand axes and arrow points. Strandlopers produced mountainous shellfish middens. Ancient civilisations are marked by piles of rubble that were once buildings.

Mostly it’s been biodegradable, gobbled up by bacteria, swallowed by forest or ground to rocks and pebbles by wind and rain. For thousands of years, what we failed to recycle, the planet’s natural forces did for us.

Around 50 years ago all that changed. Chemists began experimenting with hydrocarbon molecules and came up with plastic – a substance which nature cannot decompose. By 1960 a torrent of cheap products roared into production and the throwaway society was born.

In 1997, Californian sailor Charles Moore sailed his catamaran into an area of the western Pacific known as the horse latitudes because of its capricious winds and deadening calms. It’s the centre of a vast subtropical gyre which swirls towards a depression, like a slow whirlpool.

What he discovered there, to his horror, was a continent-sized sea of floating refuse – plastic cups, bottle caps, fish netting, polystyrene packaging, ear-bud sticks, six-pack rings, deflated balloons, bits of sandwich wrap and limp plastic bags.

Among the mess he found countless nurdles – the little plastic pellets sold to be melted down and moulded into objects. Around 5.5 quatrillion – about 114 billion kilograms – are manufactured annually and huge quantities end up in the ocean.

We simply can’t continue to use the earth as a trash can and not expect to pay the price. So here’s an idea. See how much plastic you can avoid this year. Boycott excess supermarket packaging. Recycle. Every bit helps – and it could reduce the nurdles in your sushi.

The strange tale of a druglord and his roaming monsters

For some reason, between building a mansion called Hacienda Nápoles, engaging in cocaine wars, partying with underage girls and fighting the national army, Colombian druglord Pablo Escobar acquired a taste for prehistoric monsters and old cars. He built a herd of huge, gaudy concrete dinosaurs, including psychedelic tyrannosaurus chicks bursting out of eggs while their mother did battle with a concrete triceratops. Among his many vintage cars was, appropriately, Al Capone’s gangster-mobile.

But he also had a passion for African animals and constructed a private zoo. To stock it, he imported a small herd of zebras, several elephants and giraffes, a lone ostrich and four hippos.

In 1993 Escobar was tracked down to what he thought was a safe house in Medellin and riddled with bullets. After El Patrón’s downfall, his mansion and grounds were heavily looted and the dinosaurs smashed by people hoping to find hidden gold bullion.

The ranch decayed and the animals were dispatched to zoos. But nobody could figure out what to do with the hippos. Who wanted a pod of fierce, fat pachyderms? So they stayed in their soupy lake, grazed the evergreen grass on the banks and lazed and grunted undisturbed for many years. But, as we know, at night hippos are far from lazy.

Without power, the zoo’s electric fence shut down and it didn’t take much to shove it over. In 2007, 14 years after Escobar’s death, people in rural Antioquia began phoning the Colombian Ministry of Environment to report sightings of peculiar animals in the Magdalena River. Carlos Valderrama, a vet from the charity WebConserva, went to have a look and declared them to be hippos – rather a lot of them.

‘The fishermen, they were all saying, ‘How come there’s a hippo here?’’ he recalled. ‘We started asking around and, of course, they were all coming from Hacienda Napoles.’

There is considerable doubt about numbers of descendants from the original four. When the estate was abandoned there were 18 in the home pool – 14 years later estimates were running to 65 in the surrounding river system. But as anyone who’s visited an African game reserve knows, there are always more in the pool than you imagine. At night the animals roam the countryside, wandering into ranches and eating crops. Valderrama has spotted hippos 250 kilometres from the ranch.

The problem is that Colombia is idyllic hippo country: its rivers are shallow, slow-moving, flow all year round and, as Escobar appreciated, there’s deep jungle into which to disappear.

Just how much they like the country can be judged from the sex they’re having. In Africa, hippos usually become sexually active between the ages of seven and nine for males, and nine and 11 for females, but Escobar’s hippos are becoming active as young as three.

All the fertile females are reported to be giving birth to a calf every year. Unlike in Africa, there’s no natural brake on the size of the population. So their genes have clearly put out the message: go forth and conquer Colombia.

Just what to do about them has become a vexing problem. Hippos can be dangerous and, back home in Africa, they kill more people than any other mammal, though there are no reports of fatalities from Escobar’s beasts.

Local fishermen, though, are worried and there have been calls to castrate the males (rather you than me), shoot them all or relocate them to zoos. Fencing an area large enough to contain them would cost more than half a million dollars and Colombia is a poor country.

An Amazonian biologist, worried about the ecosystem, suggested they should be barbecued and eaten. San Diego University ecologist Rebecca Lewison considered the problem as a crazy wildlife experiment. The WWF declared it an ecological time bomb. But any solutions are countered by what Valderrama calls Colombia’s ‘floppy effect’. Hippos are seen as either charismatic animals or cute and cuddly toys. Rural children have adopted new-born hippos and feed them milk from baby bottles and carrots. When a marauding bull was shot by a professional hunter, a photograph of him posing next to the body caused a national outcry.

‘Whatever decision the government makes will be controversial and invoke popular backlash,’ says Valderrama. ‘When we managed to castrate one, there were people saying, ‘Why do you have to castrate them? Just let them be. Castrate the politicians.’’

The mixed feelings about hippos reflects the way Colombians regard Escobar. Though thousands of people died at the hands of his Medellin Cartel, thousands more were helped in lavish displays of largesse. What to do about his hippos has become tied up with his legacy and that, to say the least, is conflicted.