The Tree Where Man Was Born by Peter Matthiessen & Jane Goodall

Author:Peter Matthiessen & Jane Goodall [Matthiessen, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781101663196
Publisher: Penguin Group US

Until recent years, when the elephant herds have become concentrated in game reserves and parks, it has been difficult to study elephants, since one could not stay close enough to the herds to observe daily behavior. Even now, most students of the elephant are content to work with graphs, air surveys, dead animals, and the like, since behavioral studies are best done on foot, a job that few people have the heart for. An exception is Iain Douglas-Hamilton, a young Scots biologist who was doing his thesis on the elephants of Lake Manyara.

Lake Manyara, like Lake Natron, is a soda lake or magadi that lies along the base of the Rift Escarpment. The east side of the lake lies in arid plain, but the west shore, where streams emerge from the porous volcanic rock of the Crater Highlands, supports high, dark groundwater forest. The thick trees have the atmosphere of jungle, but there are no epiphytes or mosses, for the air is dry. On the road south into Lake Manyara Park, this forest gives way to an open wood of that airiest of all acacias, the umbrella thorn, and beyond the Ndala River is a region of dense thicket and wet savanna. The strip of trees between lake and escarpment is so narrow, and the pressure on elephants in the surrounding farm country so great, that Manyara can claim the greatest elephant concentration in East Africa, an estimated twelve to the square mile. For this reason—and also because the Manyara animals are used to vehicles, and with good manners can be approached closely—it is the best place to watch elephants in the world.

In the acacia wood that descends to the lake shore, elephants were everywhere in groves and thickets. Elephants travel in matriarchal groups led by a succession of mothers and daughters—female elephants stay with their mothers all their lives—and this group may include young males which have not yet been driven off. (Elephants not fully grown are difficult to sex—their genitals are well camouflaged in the cascade of slack and wrinkles—and unless their behavior has been studied for some time, the exact composition of a cow-calf group is very difficult to determine.) Ordinarily the leader is the oldest cow, who is related to every other animal; she 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 time of stress. When a cow is in season, bulls may join the cow-calf group; at other times, they live alone or in herds of bachelors. When I drove near, the bulls moved off after a perfunctory threat display—flared ears, brandished tusks, a swaying forefoot like a pendulum, the dismantling of the nearest tree, and perhaps a diffident scream; sometimes they ease their nervous strain by chasing a jackal or a bird.

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