The Elephant's Secret Sense by Caitlin O'Connell

Author:Caitlin O'Connell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2007-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

10

Ivory Ghosts

It does not require many words to speak the truth.

—C HIEF JOSEPH, leader of the Nez Perce (1732–94)

IT WASN ’T UNTIL 1998, three years after I had gone back to the United States to work on my elephant seismic communication theory, that I was able to return to the Caprivi. I had gained the attention of Rotary International for my work on elephants and farmers in the Caprivi, and they supported my return to Namibia as a vocational scholar to assess the results of my conflict mitigation project and to put in place more elephant crop-raiding deterrents.

A lot had transpired since we had left the region. A veterinary fence had gone up along the Botswana/Namibia border, funded by the European Union, to protect cattle from contracting foot and mouth disease from wildlife, but it cut off the migration routes of one of the last migratory populations of elephants left in Africa. Jo Tagg took us down to the fence to see its devastating repercussions. A kudu carcass hung impaled on the fence, most likely from exhausted attempts at escape.

Fortunately, the following year, NGOs in Botswana obtained Tim’s elephant satellite tracking data to prove that the Okavango delta was an important wet-season habitat for elephants in the Caprivi. Armed with this data, they were able to convince the government of Botswana to take down 12 miles of fencing on both sides, allowing free passage of elephants and other migratory species along the main migratory corridors of the Kwando and Kavango Rivers into the delta.

The troubled politics of the Caprivi continued to escalate, and the day we drove through the Ngoma border from Botswana, there was a trail of secessionists leaving for Botswana. Apparently, some Caprivians were tired of being controlled by politicians in Windhoek who they felt were not acting in their interests.

We had come from Kruger National Park, where Tim was finishing his dissertation on tuberculosis in the Cape buffalo and I was writing up our elephant/human conflict study. When we left Kruger, we drove across the Limpopo River and up through Zimbabwe, where we met up with my dissertation adviser and her husband at Elephant Camp, just north of Victoria Falls. I had arranged to do some seismic playback studies on a group of eight trained and semicaptive elephants at this site.

The results from these early playback trials were promising enough to encourage us to continue them in both captive and wild settings. We knew how difficult it was going to be to isolate vibrations within the ground in the wild. But in some of our more successful attempts, one young female elephant named Miss Ellie got so upset by one of the seismic playbacks that she bent down and bit the ground, an action that is seen in the wild only under extreme agitation. We did not repeat those experiments with her, since she was obviously very sensitive and we did not wish to cause her undue stress.

When we finished with these studies, we said our good-byes and Tim and I headed back to the Caprivi.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.