A family of elephants walk along the grassy shores of Namibia, where they risk their lives each day to get food. (photo: Christine Dell'Amore/National Geographic)
Elephant
Refugees Flee to Last Stronghold in Africa
By Christine Dell'Amore,
National Geographic
27 November 16
A national park in Botswana is struggling to support the
staggering number of animals fleeing from poaching in other countries.
The elephants swim across the river in a
straight line, trunks jutting out of the water like snorkels. With low,
guttural bellows, they push their bodies together, forming a living raft to
bolster a calf too tiny to stay afloat on its own.
This
pachyderm flotilla has a dangerous destination in mind: The grassy shores
of Namibia, where elephants
are literally free game for legal hunters. The animals will risk their lives to
feed here before fording the Chobe River again, back to the safety of Botswana's Chobe National Park.
To
avoid ivory poachers in neighboring Namibia, Zambia, and Angola, elephants like
this family are fleeing in astounding numbers to Chobe, where illegal hunting
is mostly kept in check. (See National Geographic's elephant
pictures.)
"Our
elephants are essentially refugees," says Michael Chase, founder of the Botswana-based
conservation group Elephants Without Borders, which works to create
transboundary corridors for elephants to travel safely between countries.
But
while Chobe offers some protection, it’s not the most
welcoming stronghold. The increasingly dry ecosystem is buckling under the
pressure of supporting so many of the six-ton animals, which each eat 600
pounds of food daily.
Helicoptering
above the park on a searing-hot October afternoon, the landscape looked, as
Chase puts it, nuked after a war: Only a few spots of green interrupted a flat,
seemingly endless terrain of desiccated trees and brush. (Read more about why northern Botswana
is such a hard place to live on Nat Geo WILD.)
Gray
hulks, massive even from the air, moved slowly below, following their noses to
the few water holes still left at this time of year. The rains should come
soon, but in the meantime, the elephants are desperate. The animals can drink
river water, but they prefer to drink from remote water holes because rivers
are usually risky places to linger.
These
elephants have already eaten some plants, such as marula and acacia trees, to
local extinction. Forced to eat bark, some Chobe elephants have died from blocked
intestinal tracts, Chase says.
"The
irony of elephants seeking refuge in the Kalahari Desert, an environment not
compatible to sustaining these numbers of elephants, is a tragedy," he
says.
'Landscape
of Fear'
Under
siege from poaching and development, African elephant numbers have
plummeted by 30 percent in recent decades, according to the 2016 Great Elephant Census, the biggest
continent-wide elephant survey ever undertaken.
Once
ranging from the coastal plains of Cape Town to the foothills of Mount
Kilimanjaro, the species has fallen from 1.3 million in the 1970s to about
352,000 today, according to the survey, which was led by Elephants Without
Borders. The International Union for Conservation
of Nature lists the African elephant as vulnerable to
extinction.
When
Chase began collaring and tracking the giants 20 years ago, he was surprised by
his initial GPS data, which showed elephants fleeing unsafe territories for
safe ones, and then making epic trips back home.
For
instance, elephants that had likely escaped Angola during its bloody civil war
in the 1970s and '80s traveled hundreds of miles back to Angola in the early
2000s, his data revealed. Other elephants at the turn of the century returned
to Namibia and Zambia, where rampant poaching had pushed them out. (Read about the alarming increase in
poaching in Zambia.)
"Unfortunately,
this time of peace was not to last," Chase says.
Between
2011 and 2014, when the demand for ivory in Asia boomed once again, the
elephants' movements stopped dramatically. They stayed put in Botswana, and
their numbers are mounting each year. About 130,000 of those survivors now live
in Botswana, the most in any country.
Chase
worries that poachers are following them—55 elephants have been killed
illegally in Chobe National Park in recent months.
"These
animals are highly intelligent," he says. "They know where they're
persecuted."
Master
Evaders
How
the big-brained creatures know to escape danger—and where to go—is part of
George Wittemyer's research in Kenya.
Wittemyer,
scientific chair of the Kenya-based nonprofit Save
the Elephants, and his colleagues have found that elephants can
identify and navigate what ecologists call "a landscape of fear."
As in
Botswana, Kenyan elephants can discern boundaries of protected areas—such as
Samburu National Reserve and Amboseli National Park—without the aid of fences
or other markers. (See stunning pictures of elephants.)
In a
recent study, Wittemyer and his colleagues found that elephants living in a
patchwork of protected and human-dominated land will shift their circadian rhythm to rest
more during the day, which they've learned means fewer encounters
with people. In such places, the animals also choose less populated areas to
rest—even if they are farther from water.
Then,
under the cover of darkness, the elephants make beelines for water holes,
dashing through places where people or poachers may lurk. "It's been
remarkable to see the way they will identify areas they see as safe and move
rapidly through areas they don't see as safe," says Wittemyer.
In
protected areas, elephants will switch this behavior and hang out at water
holes all day. The
herbivores' evasive skills are due in large part to their highly sophisticated
spatial memory.
Satellite
data from collared elephants in Namibia's Etosha National Park show that
the animals travel the fastest, most
direct route possible to water holes, according to a 2015 study
co-authored by Wittemyer.
These
animals take the most efficient path to water sources regardless of where they
are starting from, suggesting they maintain detailed, wide-ranging maps in
their heads.
No
Outwitting Poachers
Joyce Poole, co-founder of
the conservation group ElephantVoices, has studied
elephants in the wild for 41 years, identifying hundreds of postures and
gestures that show the brainy creatures can consciously make decisions—and act
on them.
"Elephants
may look as if they are doing nothing, but often if you look closely, you can
see subtle signs that they are thinking, contemplating," says Poole, who
is also a National Geographic explorer.
Poole
says that elephants are superb at hearing and smelling danger. For instance,
experiments in Amboseli National Park show that elephants know how dangerous
certain humans are from how they speak.
Elephants
in the region can distinguish between the language of the Maasai, an ethnic
group that sometimes hunts them, and other languages, a study found.
It's
possible, too, that elephants can smell chemical stress levels in other
elephants' dung and feces, which could communicate which areas are safe,
Wittemyer adds. (See "Elephants Have 2,000 Genes for
Smell—Most Ever Found.")
"Elephants
use their cognitive and sensory abilities to avoid poachers as well, but they
aren’t always successful, especially when poachers use sophisticated
equipment," says Poole.
"How
do we protect these elephants and not end up with refugees running from one
tiny safe haven to another? We've got to stop the demand for ivory."
Several
countries, including Kenya, have burned ivory
stockpiles in recent years to symbolize their commitment to
halting the trade. But poaching shows no sign of stopping: Illegal killing for
ivory is so intense that in 10 years scientists expect to lose 50 percent of
Africa’s remaining elephants, Chase says.
"As
long as there are people out there [who] feel elephants are worth more as ivory
trinkets than living animals, we have a battle ahead," says Poole.
(Related: "A Legal Trade in Ivory Would Wipe Out
Elephants, Study Finds.")
Anti-poaching
and park management are virtually nonexistent in southeastern Angola and
southwestern Zambia, and until that changes, Chase says it won't make sense to
establish elephant corridors.
"Those
habitats need to be secure, otherwise we are sending elephants to a certain
death," he says.
And in
some cases, Wittemyer notes, there's not much left for the elephants to go back
to.
Across
much of Africa, ill-maintained parks have become overrun with domestic
livestock that have denuded the land, he says. Meanwhile, many countries in Africa are expected
to double in population by 2050, leaving less space for wildlife and
fueling the growth of large-scale development—major highways and railways are sprouting
everywhere, severing elephant populations from one another.
Still,
there are some victories worth celebrating, the scientists note.
Uganda, Namibia, and Gabon have stable or
recovering elephant populations. And in Botswana, ecotourism—which includes
wildlife safaris—is the second largest foreign exchange earner, which means the
country is "reaping the rewards of successful conservation," Chase
says.
Perhaps
most importantly, "the world is listening to the plight of
elephants," he says, citing the growth of wildlife documentaries
like Savage Kingdom as one example.
"We've
shocked people out of apathy and into action."
C 2015 Reader Supported News
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