There is a mystery behind that masked gray visage, a life force, delicate and mighty, awesome and enchanted, commanding the silence ordinarily reserved for mountain peaks, great fires and the sea.
Peter Matthiessen, The Tree Where Man Was Born
All morning we drove along the banks of the mostly dry Grumeti river in Northern Tanzania with our safari driver, Wambura, and our very own Maasai, Twerta. The abundant wildlife enchanted us; the stories and information our guides told us kept us transfixed. In those few hours we saw lions, capped buffalo, many types of antelope, zebras, wildebeests, and much more. But, what we most enjoyed was hanging out with a family of elephants while they munched on the trees, took sand-shower bathes, rested (their oh-so-heavy trunks on rocks), and sipped water from puddles in the riverbed.
Please click on this link to also see my short and peaceful video on the Elephants at the Watering Hole
As we were departing from the area we inadvertently drove too close to a mother elephant and her youngster. She turned, flapping her ears, hardening her wide-spaced eyes, and raising her truck to trumpet a loud “back-off-buster” warning at us. Our guides respectfully (and perhaps with some trepidation) moved our Land Cruiser slowly, but steadily past her.
Within moments she resumed her loud foraging, breaking off branches, ripping up grasses, and elegantly swinging the foliage into her small hidden mouth under her fat trunk and long tusks.
In the late 1960s, scientist Iain Douglas-Hamilton was the first western behaviorist to realize the basic unit of elephant society is led by a matriarch elephant. In order to determine this he spent years photographing and getting to know the elephants as individuals. He traipsed through the savanna intentionally annoying the beasts in order to get them to face him and angrily flap their ears. From this posture he could see notches and cuts in their ears, the size and configuration of their tusks, characteristic scars, and other distinguishing features. As he got to know the elephants what he learned was that the herd matriarch is usually the oldest, wisest, and best leader, and that she is one of “undaunted female intelligence.”
Peter Matthiessen wrote in his African travel masterpiece The Tree Where Man Was Born, that the matriarch “may be fifty years old and past the breeding age, but her great memory and experience is the herd’s defense against drought and flood and man. She knows not only where good browse may be found in different seasons, but when to charge and when to flee, and it is to her that the herd turns in times of stress.” (p. 209) Her herd is comprised of her daughters, other female family-member elephants, their babies, and other youngsters--including young males. As the boys age they are driven off to go live in small bachelors groups or alone for the rest of their days.
An elephant can eat as much as six hundred pounds of grass and brush each day. They are destructive feeders, damaging trees and shrubs, and tramping down the grass and underbrush as as they pace off paths through the savannas.
“Elephants, with their path-making and tree-splitting propensities, will alter the character of the densest bush in very short order; probably they rank with man and fire as the greatest force for habitat change in Africa.” (Matthiessen, p. 203) After the Serengeti was set aside as a game reserve in 1937 more and more elephants, many from space-challenged agricultural areas of western Kenya, moved into northern Tanzania.
Even 50 years ago--when Matthiessen book was first published (1972)--the problems between elephants, the land and man were notable. Matthiessen said at the time, “The Serengeti is immense, and can absorb this damage, but one sees quickly how an elephant invasion might affect more vulnerable areas. Ordinarily the elephant herds are scattered and nomadic, but pressure from settlements, game control, and poachers sometimes confines huge herds to restricted habitats which they may destroy. Already three of Tanzania’s new national parks--Serengeti, Manyara, and Ruaha--have more elephants than is good for them. The elephant problem, where and when and how to manage them, is a great controversy in East Africa, and its solution must affect the balance of animals and man throughout the continent.” (p. 204-205.)
It was a problem back then; its an even bigger problem now especially with global warming escalating the situation.
After we were safely past the disturbed mama elephant, Twerta told us that among the “Big Five”--the most dangerous of the African animals--he fears the elephant above all others. “Because,” he said, “if an elephant has ever been hunted it knows that man is his enemy. And it never forgets.”
...to be continued.
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