Final Entry from Africa, December 6, 2010 from “A Poet’s Progress,” Newtopia Magazine #18
December 6, 2010, Illala Lodge, Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe
Woke up this morning to the sound of animals screaming. I assumed it was the baboons, so I didn’t bother to investigate. But on my walk in to the dining hall, I saw in the near distance a wild dog, trotting in the same direction as I was walking, unhurried. He looked over at me casually without slowing down. The screaming I’d heard turned out to be the gazelles alerting everyone in the vicinity to the arrival of the dogs and in the savannah I could see a mature wildebeest, chasing two of the dogs away from an acacia, where she had hidden her children. Normally a wildebeest would be dinner for a pack of wild dogs, but we had come across these dogs yesterday, feeding on an eland. An eland is enough meat to feed a pack of wild dogs for over a week. These dogs were not hungry and so today was the wildebeest’s lucky day.
20-03 A mature flying termite moundA mature flying termite mound
When a flying termite community is dying, a male and female pair will leave the nest. The king follows the queen who is carrying a small piece of fungus in her mouth, looking for rich soil near abundant vegetation, but not too close to another termite nest. When she’s found what she’s looking for, she digs a shallow troth and drops the piece of fungus in it, and then she and the male will gather food—leaves and pieces of bark and wood—for eight days, placing it on top the fungus. The fungus feeds on the leaves and bark and wood, which is too tough for the termites to digest, turning it into a residue that’s an easily digested stew that termites can feed on.
When the king and queen have gathered enough food, they burrow underground and shed their wings and will never fly again. The queen lays eggs that the male fertilizes, over and over again. The first hundred or so litters—each litter containing hundreds of termites—are workers who fly off, collecting more leaves and bark and wood, returning to the nest many times a day. As the season changes, the material brought back to the nest changes, and in the autumn respond to the change in diet and begin to give birth to soldier termites. These soldier termites will protect the nest from birds and the aardwolf and other predators, including various forms of mongeese and lizards and snakes, who find the termites good eating. If too many of the soldiers are away on errands, it’s not difficult for the workers of other tribes to enter a nest and get out with some of its larder.
20-04 Abandoned termite moundAbandoned termite mound
When the queen’s supply of eggs is coming to an end, she is murdered by one of her daughters, who becomes the new queen. This second queen is less fertile than the first, and this is true for each succeeding generation for the next 40-50 years, until the 12th generation.
The termite mounds are made up of waste carried by the workers out of the nest. Birds love to feed on the termites, especially in the rainy season when the plains flood and only the tops of the mounds are visible. Soon plants are growing on these mounds, as the birds sit above the nutrient-rich soil, depositing dung, which often contains seeds of plants that will within a year or two turn the mound into a flower pot, with plants growing out of it and into it at once. Following the 12th generation, as the roots begin to grow thick, choking the nest, the final queen dies, and two termites fly off, a male and a female. The female carries a piece of fungus in her mouth. She is looking for some good soil to start a new community.
20-05 A male dung beetle with a perfect dung ballA dung beetle with a perfect dung ball
Today we watched a dung beetle roll a ball of dung the size of a billiard ball on the sandy trail. Late November is beetle mating season—just after the rains. This time of year male beetles use their front claws to shape a piece of elephant dung into a ball. When it is as large and as perfectly round as possible, they will pick it up with their hind legs and walk backwards like a car in reverse.
The first beetle we found had formed a near-perfect globe and moved it quickly and accurately over the sandy trail until it came up against a tree root. He left the ball and climbed the side of the sandy bank to look around. Finding a easier path, he went back, picked up the ball with his hind legs and pushed it laboriously backwards up a constantly shifting wall of sand until he reached the green above the trail and motored off.
The second beetle had a pathetic dung ball. It was more like a snow-globe with a flattened bottom. It wobbled and lurched, most of the time sideways, and flopped its way down the trail. Within moments, a female dung beetle landed nearby. She was impressed enough by the size of the ball to investigate. If the dung ball is large enough (which means plenty of food for their children), and well-shaped (which means he’s agile, which means he’s young), and the beetle can move it quickly (which proves he’s strong), it tells her that he has good genes and will be a strong protector of her and their children when they are their most vulnerable. If she approves of his effort, she’ll take over directing the movement of the ball, steering it toward a spot of rich, protected soil she’s selected as the perfect spot to raise a family. Then she will leave her eggs in the dung and the male beetle will fertilize them.
20-06 A fertilized dung beetle eggA fertilized dung beetle egg
When this female landed, the probably very young male went into a paroxysm of calisthenics, heaving the clumsy ball to the right and left like a muscleman, lifting it with one leg and then the other. And for the grand finale he did a shoulder stand and tossed the ball back and forth between his feet. But she wobbled and took off, looking for a beetle more like the one we saw earlier. But the male dung beetle was not discouraged and picked up the ball between his hind legs and clumsily motored down the trail. Ka-flump. Ka-flump. “That one’s going to have trouble finding a mate,” Mat laughed.
20-07 Elephant familyElephant family
December 7, 2011, Illala Lodge,Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe
The Unexpected Consequences of Reasonable Behavior
Elephants—the largest land mammal on Earth—are now protected across southern Africa. Hunting is illegal and all fences have been torn down so that wild animals, including the elephants, can move freely, even across country borders.
20-08 Protecting the childProtecting the child
There are over 70,000 elephants in the Okavango Delta. Chobe National Park alone has over 120,000 elephants. Botswana can maintain 15,000-45,000 elephants, but has over 190,000—more elephants per square mile than any other country in the world. And that number is rising quickly, as elephants have no natural predators past the age of ten, and can live as long as 70 years and spawn seven generations before they become too old to mate. In their wake they leave acres of broken branches, trees torn out of the ground, shrubbery stripped and dying. A herd of elephants will eat an entire hillside of leaves and bark and brush in a single day. Botswana is losing a hillside per day per herd of elephant. And the rapidly disappearing bush and acacia that the elephants prefer are the only habitats of grazers—gazelles and other deer-like creatures—and the stalking grounds of the lion and leopard.
20-09 Grazers on the horizonGrazers on the horizon
The current over-population of elephants in Botswana has led to some elaborate plans to manage the herds. First biologists tried to control the elephant population by putting birth control in their food supply, but the elephant birthrate actually increased. Then the government used helicopters to push 15,000 elephants over the border into Angola and Zambia and Namibia where they’d been hunted almost into extinction, and transported another 500 to Mozambique, but because poachers are not pursued very aggressively in Angola and Namibia and Mozambique the elephants made their way back to Botswana, destroying everything in their path.
20-10 Lone adolescent elephantLone adolescent elephant
So the countries of southern Africa allowed regulated hunting on special hunting preserves. These are called concessions and we drove past several on our way to camp. Hunters from all over the world—but especially Spain and Germany and Russia and Japan—pay over $100,000 to hunt a bull elephant on a game ranch. But since everyone wants to bag only the most impressive bull elephants, soon only the weaker and smaller and less healthy animals were left alive to reproduce and the herds were weakening with each new generation. And the elephants that remained were quickly becoming dangerous. An elephant has an excellent memory and if you kill an elder elephant or a child, the family members will kill any humans they come across until they themselves are put down. So now government rangers go out with the hunters and kill the entire herd.
20-11 Get back!Get back!
Even under ideal conditions, working with elephants is dangerous work. James was part of a group of rangers that tried to free a young elephant from a wire snare. They decided to sedate the elephant from a safe distance—about 100 yards—and then remove the snare, sterilize and cauterize any wounds, and monitor the situation from a safe distance until the elephant was fully functional. But when they shot the elephant with a tranquilizer dart, it ran a short ways and fell over. The mother—who saw its child run a short distance and fall over following the arrival of the rangers and a gunshot—believed her child had been shot and killed. An elephant can run much faster than a human, and she ran the 100 yards and picked up their Land Rover in her tusks and hurled it after them as they ran away.
20-12 Crossing the highwayCrossing the highway
When Africa began to realize that wild animals were their third highest source of income and a potential growth industry, wildlife sanctuaries the size of Germany and France were created in Botswana. That’s a lot of territory to cover for a country whose biggest crisis is not elephants, but AIDS. Soon the rewards offered by the government for catching poachers became more lucrative, and the penalty for poaching became a minimum of 20 years in jail, so some of the poachers fought back, and several rangers were killed. So the law was changed and the rangers were under orders to shoot first and ask questions later, but not all of the dead hunters were poachers—some of them were fathers and sons who were feeding their family the only way they knew how.
20-13 Skull on the pathSkull on the path
The vast numbers of elephant skeletons found on riverbeds has created the myth that elephants can anticipate their death and will go to a special area to die—an elephant graveyard. The truth is much more mundane. An elephant has seven sets of teeth. As they grind one set into nothing, the next generation takes its place. But there is no replacement for an elephant’s seventh generation of teeth, so when an elephant loses its last set of teeth, it becomes too painful for them to eat and the animal will slowly die. But first it makes its way to a river and fills its empty belly with water.
20-14 Even a dead tree is beautiful (and home to migrating birds)Even a dead tree is beautiful (and home to migrating birds
The overgrazing by the elephants is not a total loss. Even a dead tree is beautiful, James tells me. And the elephant eats a lot but doesn’t process it well, so their scat is full of partially digested foodstuffs that become feasts for smaller animals. They also carry seeds across the savannah, and as they walk across the countryside in search of water, they create paths that will be used by other animals. And as they bathe and splash, they spread water to areas that would otherwise be dry. But their migrations are creating problems for any animals that share the land with them—including humans.
20-15 Elephant watering holeElephant watering hole
Each year the elephants are taking up more territory and there are laws prohibiting fences and interfering with the animals in any way. But if the elephants are in your garden, and this garden is your only source of food, what are you going to do? You are going to get out your flares and your wife will rattle sheets of metal and your children will risk their lives chasing the elephants in the dark, trying not to come between a mother and her children, knowing that if she gets a sense of how small you are, she will kill you just to get you out of her way
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