6
The Dry Season
When the river dries up and there is nothing left for the animals to drink, the elephant will dig a great hole, creating a waterhole for all, thus saving the thirsty animals from drought.
—MAYEYE LEGEND
THE THICK AIR WAS BLOATED, sliced by the rhythmic purring of a sickly ceiling fan. The bleak dry season could make or break the human spirit, oscillating between tumult and calm, paranoia and tranquility, all brought on by the wind, smoke, fires, and ash. Heat and pestilence can do strange things, whittling away at your sanity and giving way to delusions.
At one point, it was so hot that a rare bottle of New Year’s champagne burst in the cupboard, the sweet sap bubbling into the parched wooden shelf. Africa is subject to this indescribably extreme humid drought, until the clouds break, and the desiccated earth, the thirsty animals, and the starving plants soak up the rain like sponges.
In 1993, in the midst of this, Tim and I finished our house. On top of a previously laid 26 by 20-foot cement slab left behind and unscathed by the army, we had a waist-high brick wall constructed, finished off at the top with tightly threaded reeds. With screens across most of the front and back, the open floor plan and walls gave the feeling of being completely open to the elements—comfortable yet vulnerable. I installed rubberized window shades, fitting them with metal rods to cover the screens at the front of the house to stop the rain that would drive in sideways off the floodplain.
Tim plumbed the house, adding a flushing toilet and a shower, with a small hot-water heater—a great luxury. We installed basic wiring so that the lights, radio, computer, and printer could run off a solar panel. Later, we purchased some kiaat wood, a local red hardwood, and built a bar for the kitchen, a desk, bookshelves, and shelves for our clothing, all constructed with just a hand planer and hand drill.
Unfortunately, the house was topped with a sloppy thatch job, as we couldn’t afford a good foreman or a professional thatcher. Over time, the roof started to lean and we had to moor it to a nearby tree. Nevertheless, we loved our humble abode.
If we had to be away for any length of time, the baboons would make a playground of our roof, so we had to ask Mtombo, the Bushman laborer at the station, to watch the house whenever we were away for a week or more. Baboons love sliding down thatched roofs, and with every ride, they took handfuls of thatch with them. A thatched roof could disappear very quickly under such pressure. We even covered the thatch with chicken wire, but we could only afford the medium gauge, which slowed but did not prevent its inevitable destruction.
We spent the dry seasons counting and tracking elephants, putting up electrical fences and trying to remain cool and hydrated. We conducted dung and vegetation transects, a technique of sampling an area by choosing a plot of land and observing it many times to see how it’s used by wildlife. Over time, these observations were measured, which helped us to understand how elephant population density affects an area of vegetation.
In the Caprivi, we studied an open, or free-ranging, population, so the rules are different than they would be in a park like Kruger National Park in South Africa, which had more defined boundaries. Elephant foraging had a different impact on trees, depending on the soil type. Trees in clay soils couldn’t recover as well as those in sandy soils. Three elephants per square mile is thought to be a healthy density depending on the habitat, with a population growth rate of 3 percent per year. Up until the mid-1990’s, Kruger managers have harvested about seven percent of the population every year, and as managers were concerned that the vegetation couldn’t sustain the pressure from a rapidly growing elephant population. Such are the harsh considerations of managing elephants. In these areas, administrators must take into account all species, not just the elephant. And with such an intelligent animal at stake, the issue is contentious to say the least. After this time, there has been much research dedicated to alternative solutions.
At one time, the slow and thoughtful elephant did the flora and fauna a great service with its eating habits and inefficient metabolism; having to chew through some 500 pounds of vegetation a day in order to extract about 40 percent of the nutrients for itself. The rest was excreted, providing sustenance for insects, birds, and small mammals. Elephants often pushed over whole trees to reach choice, new growth or pods in the canopy. This habit was an important ecological force in forested habitats like the Congo basin where large mammals depended on the elephant to open up patches of forest, promoting the growth of grass and secondary growth forest and facilitating species diversity.
The plants, too, benefited from the fantastic seed dispersal and priming of seeds provided by the elephant’s digestive tract. Not a picky eater, elephants enjoy more than ninety different tree species. Over time, however, it became a question of their having to rely on eating plants that were restricted to smaller and smaller patches, which some park managers felt could no longer tolerate the pressure of this indiscriminant marauder of the habitat.
Elephants were not designed for confinement; their territories have been known to extend over 850 square miles. For a species with a life expectancy of sixty years or more, usually limited by the wearing away of their molars, that’s a lot of food to consume and a lot of territory to wander. Had elephants evolved with a more efficient digestive tract or foraged with a little less abandon, perhaps their management wouldn’t be so problematic. Unfortunately for large, complex, long-lived animals such as elephants, human influences usually occur faster than the rate of evolution, and elephant habitat is diminishing at an astonishing rate.
Elephants in the genus Elephus (modern Asian elephants, of which there are four living species) were once widespread throughout Africa, flourishing there for 3 million years. But in the Pleistocene era (1.8 million to 10,000 years ago), habitat for Elephus gave way to the more open and drier savannah habitats preferred by its contemporary, in the genus Loxodonta (African elephants, of which there are three species). At this time, the genus Elephus crossed the land bridge to Eurasia and then eventually became extinct in Africa about 35,000 years ago. Meanwhile, the Loxodonta thrived in sub-Sahara Africa. It is difficult to imagine that the closest living relatives of the modern elephant are the hyrax (rock dassie, about the size of a guinea pig), the dugong, the manatee, and the golden mole of the Namib Desert.
Perhaps one day the fossil record will reveal new evidence to shape a different interpretation of the elephant’s origin, but it’s clear that the elephant is highly adaptable and travels great distances. But these adaptations take time. How can a species born to migrate, compost, and disperse be expected to adapt quickly enough to survive a rapidly changing sociopolitical climate? Some believe that the elephant doesn’t negatively impact the environment. How can competing points of view be reconciled to come up with a reasonable and responsible management strategy?
Humans and elephants share common traits: neither appears equipped to compromise; both are refugees of war, struggling for a foothold, a patch to resettle, to reclaim and call their own. Unfortunately, elephants are victims of human circumstance; humans have more choices.
Through experiments with birth control, managers in Kruger National Park have attempted to find alternative solutions to reduce what they believe to be the negative effect of elephants on the vegetation. One method placed time-release estrogen implants in the ears of a number of adult cows throughout the park. This experiment took place in the mid-90s. Some reported that the estrogen caused an increased interest in the cows by bulls, resulting in constant harassment of these poor cows. Since it was expensive and yielded mixed results, that experiment was discontinued.
In 1996, another experiment used a protein immunization technique developed for horses, in which a protein extracted from pigs was injected into females, causing their bodies to create antibodies against this protein, which in turn blocked fertilization of the egg, thus simulating pregnancy. This technique showed great promise but was also very expensive. In 1998, it was estimated that at least three thousand elephants or more would have to be immunized every year in order for this technique to work. The research team that developed the protocol set about to develop an artificial vaccine, as it would be too difficult and costly to extract the protein from pigs to make this program viable for large numbers of elephants.
The forty-one elephants involved in the initial experiment were fitted with radio collars in order to track, dart, and take hormone samples from them annually, as well as given an ultrasound exam to ensure that the twenty-one cows given the vaccine weren’t pregnant. I was able to join the team on one of these ventures because of my collaboration with Thomas Hildebrandt of Irwin Berlin on some elephant anatomy studies. An expert at performing ultrasound on elephants, Hildebrandt and his team perform them regularly in the field. Although none of the cows were pregnant, I wished that I could have had the chance to see a fetal elephant in the womb, as they are remarkably well formed from a very early gestation stage. Having witnessed a cull on a previous occasion, I saw many of these tiny, fully formed elephants being weighed in the aftermath. I wanted to see one that was happily nestled in the womb, with its cute little trunk, floppy ears, and upturned mouth, but fortunately for the experiment, the cows had apparently simulated pregnancy successfully. The method was then successfully used on twenty-three elephants on a small reserve outside Kruger, but for larger populations or for areas that are already considered to be over-populated, the method may be impractical.
A more recent experiment in 2005 posits that the most dominant bulls win the most matings. Researchers have performed vasectomies on a few dominant bulls. Vasectomies in a species with internal testes is quite a feat. Researchers expect that since most of the matings would have been performed by the now sterile dominant bulls, the birth rate will decrease.
In addition to these population-controlling experiments, there have been proposals by the South African government to resettle some areas of the park with desperately poor South Africans. There is talk of a transboundary park, taking down fences between the Kruger border and a park in Mozambique, but such deliberations come and go, and the conflicts continue in the cornfields and in reserves where managers don’t feel it’s appropriate to manage parks for the benefit of a single species.
I WAS ABLE TO GET high-resolution satellite images of the Caprivi region through the then Ministry of Agriculture, Water, and Rural Development, and a botanist colleague in Etosha had inspected each of the zones defined by contrasts in the images to confirm different forest types in each area, where a mixed dense acacia forest was darker than an open terminalia grassland, for example. Armed with this information, I selected twenty transect sites along the Kwando River, some near the river’s edge and some 3 miles inland. Then I chose a representative mix of tree types and forest densities.
Tim’s regular research schedule had been postponed because the satellite collars for his project didn’t work and needed to be sent back to the United States to be refurbished. He would have to wait for the following dry season to get the collars on the elephants. So he and I had planned a quick safari to set up my transects and to do his dung counts.
Dung counts had been developed as a census method where the vegetation was too dense to enable aerial surveys. By clearing off certain sections of the roads and counting the fresh elephant dung, we were hoping to get a rough estimate of the population in the area. We were doing this during the first year, before there was money to do aerial censuses, but we later determined that the method was hopelessly inaccurate for our environment. I was also collecting dung to look at how elephant nutrition fluctuated seasonally.
We woke up that October morning and packed up camping gear, shovels, and food to head out to the field for two days. We were doing the elephant dung counts in the Triangle region and headed out to the Golden Highway, which bisected the West Caprivi in a seemingly endless stretch of white calcrete, corrugated in the dry season and treacherously slippery in the wet season. We were cruising along the bumpy calcrete when a huge herd of buffalo stood muddy next to the road. The herd quickly took off into the bush as soon as the pickup stopped next to it. We both started to count, settling on an estimate of four to five hundred and assumed that they had come from Guesha pan.
In a year with good rainfall, Guesha remained full for several months into the dry season. Tim pulled away as the herd disappeared into the dense Baikea woodland. We headed down the Guesha track to set up a transect that I had already selected in the open woodland. The Caprivi had huge tracts of Baikea, also known as Rhodesian teak, prized for its very dense red hardwood. I liked to start with the Baikea transects because elephants did not seem to like this tree, so they were the easiest to do. Getting a few transects done quickly helped make us feel better about how many remained. Some transects could take several hours, depending on the amount of elephant-favored plants they contained. These areas also tended to have more buffalo and thus more tsetse flies, making working conditions tense for many different reasons.
We stopped at another area, a mixed dense forest according to my satellite image. I needed transects of each forest type, first near the river and a second of each type located about 3 miles away from the river. The mixed dense river transects were the most utilized, since they were along the path to the water and they contained the elephants’ favorite foods. The whole area had been demolished, particularly the Acacia nigrescens, which must taste like candy to the elephants, as the adult trees were almost completely debarked, the saplings chewed off like cane stalks and the seedlings eaten down to the base. No wonder this tree evolved thick thorns on its trunk (its nickname is “knob thorn”), and yet even the thorns were no match for the elephant.
We looked for a representative transect area, took a random compass bearing, and set up the transect line. It was important that our selection was unbiased, even though the devastation at this location was perfectly uniform. This area was particularly dangerous, however, as it was next to a lagoon, putting it in line with the traffic of many species going to drink, including buffalo and elephant. Tim kept the rifle on his shoulder just in case.
I looked at the fine thorns of the knob thorn seedlings and compared them with the adult form, a thickly barked and gnarled nipple protruding from the trunk, with a sharp claw sticking out, hooking downward. These knobs studded the entire tree trunk (in the few areas where bark still remained). It was fascinating to consider the evolutionary pressures driving the race between host plants and their herbivores.
Elephants have evolved relationships with many plant species. For some species of plants, the elephant gut is an essential first step for seed germination. In fact, elephants could be called the “Johnny Appleseeds” of Africa, responsible for the dispersal and planting of many of the continent’s acacias. In the case of the erioloba, the guts of elephants and other large mammals not only soften the hard seeds and hulls, but also kill the beetle larvae that infest them.
When we finished our work for the day, we continued on to Horseshoe. At dusk, we rounded the corner to a view over a great oxbow lake where the river bent around in a perfect horseshoe. Another large herd of buffalo was just finishing their drink. A baboon troop quickly descended from its sausage-tree roost. Rather than climbing higher when threatened, baboons descended from a tree.
We set up camp among the hippo choruses, near the baboon tree, a large ebony that towered over the corner of the oxbow. Several hippos approached us from the water and blew air at us from their nostrils, flashing their huge teeth from gaping mouths as a warning to stay clear. We rinsed off with a quick sponge bath, anxious not to remain at the water’s edge for very long. In this fairly deep water, a croc could easily sneak up to the surface. Knowing that the laundress from Lizauli had been eaten not too far down the river, we were particularly wary.
We heated up some cans of mutton and settled into the tent to read. I drifted off to sleep, the noise of the baboons right above us as they resettled into their roost for the night. An occasional squawk, probably from a troublemaking adolescent, would set off volleys of screeching and howling from the younger ones before an older male would have to step in with a deep, throaty reply, threatening them into silence. Tim and I were used to these nightly melodramas, since we had a troop that roosted just behind our house. Some nights we would awaken to the most horrific bloodcurdling screams, deep, thunderous roaring, and “hoo-haas” as the troop tried to fend off the resident leopard, on whose dinner menu baboons are a preferred item.
Sometime well after midnight, the oxbow lake filled with prehistoric wailing, roaring, and trumpeting echoing in the dark as elephant family groups reunited after three days of foraging separately inland from the river. With so many elephants in the area, we knew that it would be a difficult day of transects.
The following day, after several nerve-wracking transects, we left the Horseshoe area late in the afternoon. It was later than we would have liked, considering that it would take a least an hour to get home, and the dense forest at Doppies was not safe after dark if there were elephants around. We drove slowly down the track of Horseshoe, rounding the bend, which opened into a section of terminalia savannah where the trees were so heavily browsed that they looked like a grove of bonsai shrubs with thick trunks. I chose a waypoint for a perfect transect that we’d have to return to measure later.
After passing through the open savannah and entering the dense forest at Doppies, we were suddenly surrounded by elephants. Without thinking, Tim floored it, teeth clenched and eyes like saucers as elephants trumpeted and approached from all sides. It was like a scene from Jurassic Park. I began shouting immediately, “Slow down! Slow down!” I held up my arms too late and my head hit the roof as the truck bounced over a fallen tree that the elephants had dragged onto the road. More mad trumpeting burst through the bush as the matriarch closed in on the pickup. “Go left!” I screamed as the white of a tusk was about to strike the door. She swung her tusk at me just as Tim swerved the truck in the other direction.
“We’re surrounded. Damn it!” Tim swung the wheel wildly as we veered back and forth between the trees for half a kilometer before the roaring and trumpeting subsided. The elephants slowly disappeared behind us as the truck slipped out of the forested area and into another open grassland.
“That was a close one!” Tim wiped his brow in relief and glanced over at me. I was fuming.
I had frequently seen how the rangers approached elephants by vehicle, accelerating toward the herd, aggressively speeding through, while the elephants charged defensively, trumpeting, roaring. The rangers then aggravated the situation by emptying their R-1 semiautomatic rifles into the air, scattering the herd into the bush.
“If you just drive slowly, they won’t do that! You almost got us killed!” I was furious.
Tim was incredulous. “You’ve got to be kidding me! Don’t you remember what just happened to those German tourists?”
Friends had just told us of helping these tourists, whose Land Rover was turned over and repeatedly tusked by an angry adult cow for no apparent reason. Fortunately, they had remained in the vehicle until she had spent her fury and left. Not realizing the dangers of hippos and crocodiles, however, they unwisely left the area by walking up the river and were rescued by the manager of a local lodge.
“Maybe they also hurtled themselves at the elephants, thinking that was the best strategy.”
Tim now got angry at me. “So, what, now you’re an expert in elephant behavior? I’m sure the rangers, if anyone, would know the best way to deal with them.”
“Yes, but many of them didn’t grow up in the bush. They were just stationed here recently, as adults. It’s all-out chaos when the rangers drive through, so it’s no wonder the elephants freak out. Look at how the elephants respond to shots fired from the truck. There’s got to be a better way. If we gave the elephants the right of way and allowed them to pass peacefully, they wouldn’t feel threatened by us.”
I begged him to consider my alternative approach, recognizing that we were visitors in their space and should yield to their right of way. That night, however, we only got as far as a truce and headed on, knowing that there was one last patch of dense forest to get through before we got to the house. It was already dark.
Tim started to stiffen up as we crossed the Golden Highway onto the Susuwe track. “Great. You know the forest around Susuwe is bound to be crawling with elephants.” They did seem to come in waves. Every few days, a new bond group paid a visit to the river. They would head inland to forage, then circle back to the river to drink; and there were large herds all along the Kwando. This was their movement pattern in the dry season, and it took about three days to complete.
“The only way to get through this section is to gun it. You know that. The rangers always do it.”
I shook my head and offered to drive. This got Tim’s blood going, but he did promise to try my technique in the future, in the daylight, experimenting in the floodplain rather than in the forest. There was no way I was going to win this one. But eventually, after several peaceful encounters with elephants, with me in the driver’s seat, he reluctantly admitted that I could be right. After several of the rangers saw how I was handling the situation, they laughed and agreed that my method might be better.
We made it home without incident. There was not an elephant on the road until we pulled up the path to our house, which was dwarfed by elephants feeding on the Acacia erioloba pods scattered over the sandy clearing in front of the house. There were about thirty of them, and they made a run for it when our headlights broadsided them. Nonetheless, we waited a while before getting out of the truck and heading inside. Tim got out the maglight and scanned the clearing to make sure the resident leopard was not lurking somewhere. We grabbed a few essentials and headed into the house to shower, heat up some cans of beans for dinner, and go to bed, exhausted. The most difficult vegetation transects were now behind us.
AS NOVEMBER CREPT IN—the hottest, most humid part of the year—we finished the transects and switched into fencing mode. Not the best time to plan a community project, but the only time before the rains come, when everyone would be busy plowing and planting their crops. We had been camping with the game guards just outside Lianshulu village in a mopane scrub forest with no shade, mopane flies buzzing mercilessly at and in every orifice.
While on fence-building duty, we occasionally encountered the Mudumu herd, a large extended bond group of about two hundred fifty elephants. Elephants are usually slow and deliberate in their approach, but some are more active and aggressive than others. The Mudumu herd was renowned for its aggression, most likely because it is a small herd in a very small park surrounded by angry farmers.
They chased us unprovoked a few times, fortunately on the open grassy straightaways of the terminalia savannahs and not in the dense mopane forest of Mudumu National Park. When I looked in the rear-view mirror and saw ears pinned back, heads bobbing, and violent trumpeting, I knew the situation was serious. Sometimes, when flying through the tall grass in the truck, the elephants failed to appear any smaller in the mirror. Then my heart would start racing, especially if the path was blocked by the elephant’s “Do Not Enter” sign, a large tree trunk dragged onto the dirt trail.
Once, from a distance, we had watched the Mudumu herd feeding. At first we could only tell where they were from the sounds of trees breaking, so we waited as they slowly browsed their way toward the perimeter of a tree island where we could see them.
An adolescent bull snapped in half an almost full-grown Terminalia sericea while a young cow dragged a debarked terminalia branch along with her as they headed for the dense mopane forest. When we could no longer see the herd, we reluctantly headed back to our uncomfortable camp.
Midway through the fence building, Tim and I went home to pick up more supplies, take a shower, cool off, and have a night to relax. There was no solace from the sun. The “cool” shower was almost boiling, the water in the metal tanks having cooked all day in the merciless sun. After scrubbing off the mopane clay, we sat outside and stared at the wavering floodplain as cicadas clicked their ear-piercing maracas.
Smoky wafts of hot air emanated from the river as the hippos squabbled over whose head would rest on whose back as their wallow shrank. Suddenly a swarm of locusts emerged in the mirage of a horizon, millions of wings providing the only cool air we had felt since the start of summer. We ran out on the open floodplain and stood in the middle of the swarm to marvel at it. We were engulfed in papery, beating wings.
A ranger came by later to tell Tim that he had come across a dead elephant just south of the station. There had been an outbreak of anthrax in the elephant herds that year, and this was the suspected cause of death. Tim had been monitoring the outbreak, taking samples from any carcasses we came upon on our patrols. Since we had been away for a couple of days, the ranger wanted to make sure that Tim got a sample of it before lions or even some of the villagers got hold of it.
The villagers were monitoring the outbreak by watching for the vultures circling overhead, waiting with knives and axes sharpened. They sneaked into the reserve and hacked away at bloated carcasses, bacteria exploding into the air as the gas-filled innards were punctured. Anthrax, as found naturally in the wild, does not compete well with putrefaction bacteria, so after killing an animal, its real success lies in its ability to sporulate quickly and remain in the soil for long periods of time. If a carcass is not opened, there is a better chance that anthrax will die before it can form spores.
We had come upon this particular young bull several days earlier, lying dead on its side next to the river, blood gushing from both the trunk and anus, fluid-filled vesicles on its stomach, all telltale signs of anthrax. Tim had already taken samples for the record.
We decided to go down and have a look at the carcass again, and sure enough, a crowd had amassed. We tried to warn them of the dangers of handling an anthrax-infested carcass, but they just laughed and said that they knew the disease and that it was not a problem for them. Seven tons of free protein was just too hard to pass up.
We weren’t sure how much anthrax was in the air, but we didn’t want to get too close to these enormous, bloated intestines and putrid flies buzzing back and forth between carcass and people. It was tempting to ask one of the men to slice up a foot or parts of the head so that I could have a look for my own research, but I thought better of it. Instead, I stood back and wondered about this poor elephant’s final days. He looked old enough to have left his family group, but had he left any friends behind? As far as I could tell from watching them, the loss of a loved one seems just as hard on elephants as on people. In fact, not only relatives visit the graves of dead family members, but completely unrelated elephants have been documented visiting the graves of others. It’s no wonder why there is so much lore around the concept of an “elephant grave yard.”
The men hacked at the bloated remains with such fury that it was remarkable that they didn’t slice an arm or a hand accidentally. Huge strips of meat were hung on long branches and carried across the men’s shoulders back to the village. Probably because of how they prepared the meat by boiling it for hours and possibly aided by natural resistance to anthrax, the people weren’t getting sick from eating the diseased flesh.
On our way back, we stopped in at the ranger station to report the event just as a local foreign aid worker was leaving. He had brought a very sick baby elephant to the station and didn’t know what to do with it. Unfortunately, this happened often during anthrax outbreaks, as young mothers succumbed to the disease, leaving their babies orphaned. It was very difficult to get another family group to adopt a baby, because nursing mothers were not usually willing to share their babies’ sustenance.
We crouched over the wheezing baby. It couldn’t have been more than two months old. It could barely breathe, its lungs filled with fluid. We sat stroking it and tried to comfort it, but too weak even to lift its head, it died within an hour.
Another Caprivi orphan had been brought to Etosha a few months before, but it was in much better condition. He was about five months old, traumatized, missing the end of his tail, probably from a hyena, and didn’t want to be left alone. He was just gaining control of his trunk, and he searched our pockets for food, pulling us toward him when he sensed that we were about to leave.
Since none of us had had any experience raising a baby elephant, one of the vets did a little research and learned what we needed to do to keep it alive. The baby required 4 quarts of a special warmed formula every few hours. I stayed with him once, and it was tough to keep on schedule through the night. He desperately wanted me to sleep with him, so I lay down with him in his hay bed until I thought he had fallen asleep. I gently got out from under his grasp, but by the time I approached the door of his stable, he had gotten up and beaten me to it and wouldn’t let me out. He wailed and howled at my act of betrayal. If it hadn’t been so frigidly cold, I would have spent the night with him, but with a final shiver, I finally worked up the strength to beat him to the door after three hours and many attempts to send him off to sleep by stroking his trunk and lying next to him. I ended up sleeping in the back of my truck next to his stable. I felt like a terrible mother.
Tragically, all these efforts were in vain, as he died a month later of diarrhea and probably a broken heart. I’ll never forget his inquisitive trunk digging into my pockets. The poor little baby that now sat in my lap, dead, would not have had nearly such control. Another anthrax orphan down and my heart broke all over again.
Tim and I showered particularly carefully when we got home, since the odor of dead elephant seemed to pervade everything. And then it was time to get back to the fence. The clouds had started to amass once again. It was almost the start of another wet season.