My Elephant Day

Twenty years ago today, it was a Sunday, I was in East Africa, at my best on a three-day walking safari with a couple from London in one of the biggest wildlife areas on the continent. It was only their second day in Africa, their first morning in a wilderness, waking up in a small fly-camp under a grove of Jackalberry trees, the smell of coffee brewing on the fire and a vastness around them that could only be found in a place like Selous Game Reserve. We had set up camp quite far from the lakes, just beyond the forests of spiny Terminalia, where the tree line thinned out to large baobabs, sporadic palms and then evened out to black cotton soils, Knobthorn thickets, and endless grassland.

As they rubbed the sleep from their eyes and followed the smell of caffeine to the fire pit, I climbed a fallen tree to survey the skies and decide on a direction to walk for the day. The sun was barely up yet vultures were straining in the cool morning air to get airborne, all with a destination in mind as they flew over camp heading North with their heavy wing beats barely giving them lift.

Apart from the small flattened grass two track that ferried equipment to the site from the nearest road to the South and ending at our small forest, no roads lay to the North so with the thought of finding a sight worth seeing, we set off, ready for another spectacular day on foot in remotest and wildest Africa.  The sun rose slowly but the temperature climbed steadily and soon we were out in the sun, in the grasslands, with sporadic Acacias dotting the landscape. In the shade of each lone tree stood a small group of Buffalo already seeking shade and, to avoid them, I decided to cross a small Karongo, a dry riverbed, which was lined with somewhat denser riparian trees and lower foliage, with the intent to emerge on the grassland on the opposite side and continue my quest to find out what the vultures had found..

It took a while to find a path to cross the deeply scoured riverbed but a hippo path soon made it possible and as we broke through the tree line on the other side, we were confronted with a huge herd of buffalo, most of who were already settling down for the heat of the day. All, though, seemed more concerned with the incessant swarm of flies that they have to contend with than our emergence out of nowhere.

Not wanting to disturb them or cause a stampede, I turned back to the riverbed and headed along the banks, following a game path that meandered along the edge of the steep side. On a particularly sharp bend, a red flash caught my eye and we were soon enthralled by a mating pair of red squirrels, a first for me and, having never seen the species before, a rare encounter. It was while we were quietly watching these two red balls of fluff scrambling up tree trunks, against such contrasting green foliage that I heard the unmistakable sound of leaves being stripped from a branch.  There was no doubt elephant were up ahead.

The riparian habitat was too dense to venture closer so I looked for a crossing to get downwind of them and to break out into the open, higher ground to the West so that we may have been able to see them. At this point I had no idea how many there were nor the composition; whether a matriarch and her family or a bull or herd of boys. I soon found another hippo trail that allowed for an easy crossing and as I emerged on the other side, I came face to face with an elephant calf who was just as surprised to see me.

The vegetation was still quite dense and as the calf turned to retreat, I saw the legs of a cow making a beeline for the riverbed to the East and felt it safe for us to continue up the slope out of the tree line and into open country where I could better grasp the situation.

Unbeknown to me, the elephant and her calf had encountered the steep sides of the karongo and were running alongside it trying to find a crossing to avoid another confrontation, but the riverbed made a sharp horseshoe, which brought her right in front of us; about 50 metres away, with me standing in the open, briefly slack jawed as she turned and came at me full tilt without hesitation, shouting her rage and trumpeting for emphasis.

I had time to get the couple behind an acacia and stepped out to the side to draw her at an angle away from them, all the while assessing her intent but knowing that she meant business. As she got closer, I waved my arms and shouted, hoping she would stop the charge but the fury and rage she was displaying (and no doubt feeling), made me realize I was in for some trouble. At the last couple of seconds, I raised the rifle and didn’t even get to contemplate a shot as she hit me full tilt with her trunk that swung out from between her legs, knocking the thing some distance from me.

Somehow, I ended up underneath her; perhaps I ducked as her trunk swung for me and her bulk overwhelmed me, maybe it was simply that her momentum took her over me, I was suddenly underneath her. In this confusion as to where I was, she swiveled around to find me, knocking me between the muscular pillars of her legs. As soon as she figured out how I lay she came at me with her left tusk, gouging a hole in the ground as I maneuvered out of its path, grabbing hold of the tusks as she withdrew, lifting me off the ground, all the while vocalising and trumpeting and screaming. I remember screaming too, shouting, aware of every moment.

Using her front legs, she beat me in the back and sides with her wrist until I let go and fell back to the ground, giving her another chance to take a stab at me, this time the tusk missing my head by inches as it dug into the dry clay of the ground. Once again I grabbed the tusks and was lifted off the ground as she drew back her head, swiping at me with her front legs to make me let go. I don’t remember how many times this happened. It might have been the third time that I was holding on to the tusks, with my legs stretched out between her front legs as she raised a foot to push me off and somehow connected with my shoulder, dislocating it badly. I fell onto it unable to scramble with my left arm to avoid what I knew was coming next. At this, she swirled around, knocking me in the face with the clubbed end of her tail and as I fell back from the blow, she came down at me again, her left tusk piercing my groin just inside and below of my right hip bone.

Almost instantly and inexplicably, she stood up and ran off to the calf, disappearing into the riverine vegetation with a final scream that I barely heard with the ringing in my ears and the adrenaline pumping through my body. Items that I had been carrying were scattered in a radius of about 5 metres and after I was sure she wasn’t coming back, I asked Phillip and Baiju to help me gather it all together. Despite the adrenalin, my shoulder was beginning to throb with stabs of pain; the ball of my arm was well out of the socket and was sitting almost beneath my chin and already any movement sent these shockwaves through my body.

The backpack I had been carrying had broken straps from being ripped from my body, the rifle lay off to one side, the two-way radio had been ripped from my belt and lay several feet away, as did my binocular pouch, also ripped from my belt. Phillip gathered it all together and we set off back to camp.

Since leaving the fly-camp we had been walking for a couple of hours and I explained how to get back to the vicinity of camp and landmarks to look out for in case I couldn’t continue but we made slow progress over the most uneven ground one could walk on. The dried, black-cotton clay, pockmarked with the depressions of elephants and buffalo footprints from the wetter months, which made each step agonizing.

We eventually crested a ridge with a familiar baobab in sight and made our way back to the shade of the Jackalberry trees and our little campsite. Phillip and staff managed to lower me onto a mattress, propped against one of the larger trees to assess the situation. The radio didn’t work well so I sent the Game Scout, Peter, onto the ridge with a backup to try to raise someone within range. We were not likely going to reach base camp from this distance but there was at least one boat safari on the lake and with guests in the main camp, at least two vehicles out on a morning safari.

Neither Phillip nor Baiju had any first aid training and with a lot of blood leaking from down below, I needed to know what the damage was. At least it wasn’t an artery but the red streaks down my legs and the big patch of red on my shorts where they were torn from the tusk, showed that there was a gash that needed attention.

It must have been quite daunting for this random Texan from London to strip a man of his shorts to assess an injury in a rather private area of the body but Phillip didn’t blink, it was what needed to be done.  I couldn’t move my head, let alone look down with my left arm as it was, any movement elicited searing pain.  I don’t remember him mentioning anything about the gash to my lower abdomen, next to the hip bone, but I do remember him muttering and then telling me, somewhat blandly, that a testicle was completely ejected from my scrotum.  No amount of first aid knowledge prepares one for that.

I had a hard time keeping focus, my head had been knocked around between four of the heaviest legs in the animal world and I no doubt was going into shock and suffering from a concussion.

Luckily there was a vehicle watching a pride of lion further down the very same dry riverbed, closer to one of the lakes. Peter managed to communicate the urgency of the situation and soon the noise and dust trail that roared into camp delivered a game viewer, replete with ashen-faced guests and a concerned Apollo, the guide, behind the wheel. (Some years later, Apollo also had an encounter with an ele and was also gored but returned to guiding in the Selous too).

I had the vehicle pull up as close as it could get alongside me so that I could communicate with camp directly, needing someone to try to raise the alarm in Dar es Salaam, a few hundred kilometers away. But it was a Sunday. In Africa. After a while, I managed to talk to Sal, our chef and the guy I co-managed the camp with, recounting the incident in brief but highlighting the seriousness of the dilemma. At that point, it was out of our hands and we needed to settle in for a wait.

After the initial shock at their hasty departure from a pride of lion, a mad dash through the bushveld, arriving at an injured and bleeding person under a tree with little more than mosquito nets hanging from trees around a central fireplace, the guests on the vehicle began to understand a bit of the situation and understood that this was not a typical day on safari.

A lady climbed down and introduced herself as Diane, she said she was a nurse, from Cape Town and knelt beside me to help.  I was quite disoriented by now, well into the third hour after the incident and she was talking to me, telling me to stay awake, saying all sorts of random things. At one point she was talking about dead dodoes and it made me think of a cousin from Australia who, when visiting South Africa, had misread a sign about a dodo without knowing it was in Afrikaans and here, out of the blue, this was being repeated by a strange lady in one of the remotest wildlife areas in Africa.

After repeating it a second time, I focused more on her words and ignored my memory and realized she was telling me that Di and Dodi had had an accident in Paris and that they had not survived. This was in the biggest game reserve in Africa, in one of the remotest places in the Northern Sector, it only dawned on me later on how bizarre it was that the news had already reached so far.  So fast.

It was only four months prior to this that Charles and the boys had spent a glorious few days at our main camp, Mbuyuni, Selous Safari Camp, having fun with the guides and fishing on the banks of the mighty Rufiji.

It took a while but Sal managed to get someone at the Dar airport on the HF radio and a few calls were made, eventually the crucial one, to the Flying Doctors in Nairobi and the plane was dispatched.

There was still a long drive to the airstrip that necessitated a makeshift bed under the back seats of the game-viewer and the long, painful, bumpy ride there. I don’t remember much other than being given a shot of morphine and don’t recall whether the medics came out to the campsite or it was administered on the airstrip but it helped.  It was mid afternoon when the wheels of the Cessna 5H-DEA left the gravelly strip at Kibo, banked over the Rufiji and headed North and there was a measure of relief that I was in the right hands.

We had to land at Kilimanjaro airport to clear customs and it took a while for them to understand that I was in no position to disembark to have my passport checked and stamped and we somehow got through those formalities.

Sometime later, descending out of a dark sky, the lights of Nairobi began to reflect through the windows onto the bulkhead and as we taxied in at Wilson Airport, I had the strobe of the ambulance waiting next to the terminal filling the small interior of the plane. I don't remember the dash through the darkness of outlying streets of Nairobi, but once at Nairobi General, I do remember looking at a clock on a stark hospital wall behind an anesthetist asking the usual questions prior to theater. It had been about thirteen hours since I had done the tango with an angry elephant cow. My shoulder still hurt like hell.

Many who know me are aware that I cannot exist without elephants. I spoke to an elephant earlier today after relocating a pair of mice that need to be far away from my bungalow after the mess they made in my absence. I have been sitting in the dark on my day bed, typing this to the sounds of elephants trumpeting in the distance and at least one closer to camp, stripping leaves and gently breaking branches. I have only just returned from an unpleasant time in the city, three months of not knowing when or if I could come home and not for the first time either. And, whilst I couldn’t be here for the 14^th anniversary for my kidney transplant, it was essential that I be here for today.  My Elephant day.

A Mopane Grove Moment

A Mopane Grove mongoose lies in the shadow of the curved arm of a Candelabra Euphorbia, the scene dappled in sunlight and rustic hues. The shadow contrasts with the whiteness of her throne and her elbow rests on the crest of the aging and flaking cervical vertebra of an ele who died long ago. She wears the latest in mongoose fashion accessories, a fake canine, looking every bit the false sabre-tooth that her temperament may show her to be.

There have been times that elephant have stood here and touched these very bones with the tips of their trunks, even moved them, though never far. Hyena have chanced a theft but deferred to reason and also left them not too far away, though often gnawing at the raw calcium they present.

These bones lie at my front door.  

They are my memorial to elephants I have known, loved and lost.

It’s summer!

Wild Foxglove, Ceratotheca triloba

It’s a wonderful Summer, given the amount of persistent rain and the speed at which nature has bounced back after such a test of endurance that this last extended dry season has thrust upon it. It’s hard to compare it with any other wet season that has come before. From a sun-baked and wind-blown bare earth, with seemingly lifeless trees holding on to their moisture, to the dense green wonderland that has emerged, with so many flowers and a constant flutter of butterflies.

It is such a stark transition and a time when we see the process of survival and adaptation with a climactic change that has swung the gene favour in a completely different direction to the wet and dry years of seasons gone by, resulting in the somewhat sudden proliferation of some species and the inexorable decline of others. 

Last Summer, we lacked the successive and soaking showers that were needed to continue the growth spurt that began after the first rains. It's like a false start, when it rains and life begins to grow and then there's no rain to feed it but only the blazing sun to bake it.

Last Summer, we had only a few, heavy, once-off downpours, that caused more run-off than soaking, life-giving hydration. The consequences were manifest in the plants that did manage to survive and the whole food chain that had to depend on them. And so, the quality and the quantity of a season pretty much dictates what flourishes; whoever can adapt the quickest and even benefit from the conditions.

It's not quite that simple, but it’s a good place to start when trying to figure out the changes we see from season to season and why some things are here at one time and completely absent at others.

This summer, after an absence of a few years, the Foxgloves are back.

And back with a vengeance in fact.

In the past few years, our Wild Foxglove, Ceratotheca triloba, started growing with the first, sparse rains that fell in early summer and I doubt whether even a fraction of them flowered and even fewer managed to seed. I watched a lot of them wilt before they even left the ground.

Now, however, filling the gaps between the trees where bare, baked earth made it hard to imagine that anything could grow, are the towering, flowering Foxgloves, hiding the Heliotropes that were the first to fill the spaces. Many more species are flourishing; the pioneers of the soil, the ones whose seed survived the wind and unrelenting sun.

Mopane Grove Green

With all these flowers being so insect-dependent, there are a myriad of insects and some of the most extraordinary are the hover-flies, bee-flies, carpenter bees and solitary bees and their extraordinary aeronautical abilities.  There are also robber flies and dragonflies and ooh, all the spiders and mantids that also like the bees and flies, but in a different way.

So much life and action, it tempts me to digress just thinking of it all.

Sometimes I wish I could just plug into a USB port.

So, this current status quo, this life that now explodes around me that has different tones to anything before, but is reminiscent of the floods of five years ago, is slowly revealing a new world around me, things I haven’t seen for years, things that are different because the bush has never been like this in our lifetimes and it is a wonderful feeling to be in something so new.

Yet also so familiar.

One  species I haven’t seen in such numbers as I am seeing now, in this area, for so many years, is the Quelea, although I did miss out on a number of years here at Mopane Grove when I was either in East Africa or when I was on the southern tip of Africa in the wet and windy Cape, when I had to have my transplant.

A few weeks ago, I noticed the presence of a few families of Red-Billed Quelea; a small bird, cousin of the finches and not only a prolific breeder but also an avid seed-eater. They are probably one of the most numerous of species on the planet and obviously of some consequence to a farmer or two. 

Within days, these small families became larger clans and bigger gangs and soon they were in flocks of uncountable numbers that appeared throughout the day. As the birds gathered, plants grew, rain fell, grasses came back and are now seeding. After the late December rains, those daily soaking showers that left little rain but made sure to soak it in, the veld is a green sea of seed and now, with flocks in their thousands, there is a constant Quelea presence. Their combined weight flattens the veld, bends and breaks branches and we still have a lot of summer to go. 

We might be surprised by a spectacle.

With this constant presence comes the background symphony of their chirping and the occasional hurricane sound as a whole flock takes flight and their collective wing-beats are enough to give even a lion a start. I have some resident Go-Way birds, which I still call Grey Louries but Ornithologists keep changing names. The Louries hide in the Mopane and every now and then emit a life threatening alarm, as only they can do when they want some attention. At this, the Quelea take fright and fly up in unison to the nearest thorn tree. Knowing the Louries as I do, I’m sure they get some sort of perverse pleasure out of these antics.

A couple of days ago, at sunset, clouds of Quelea made their way to their nightly roost, flying in large shadowy flocks, making shapes against a pink and purple sky. When the sky eventually emptied of clouds and birds and the colour faded and the day darkened, a  pre-full moon cast Mopane leaf shadows and a wasp plugged a hole with a stone and flew off to hide under a leaf for the night.

She’d been digging the hole for most of the day. Just one of those tiny, unrecognized and complex wonders that are at play every moment of the day or night. Beauty and perfection of the smaller components that make everything else work so well. Like so many other things that go unnoticed in the pursuit of the hairy and scary and the ultimate photograph.

I was quite young when I first followed a wasp with a worm and saw her plug a hole with a stone.

It was some time after I discovered a batch of wasps emerge from a mantis egg case that had been made on the curtain above my bed one day. I was baffled at first, especially since I had come home from school for weeks hoping to see the new mantids and instead found these tiny wasps! There was little available for an enquiring mind in the early 70’s and all I had apart from a meager school library, was access to a neighbour's Time-Life library and I spent a lot of time on the insect edition and developed an intriguing fascination for wasps.

I don’t think it was very long after that, perhaps on a trip to Kruger or even here at Mopane Grove, still in the early 70’s, that I followed a sand wasp with a worm. I was probably looking for a chameleon and ended up mesmerised as this wasp dragged a caterpillar across the ground.

I was reminded of this as I watched one whilst out on the day bed waiting for an elephant as the Quelea faded away with the light.

There are many insects and arachnids that dig holes as homes and for many, if not most, not much care is taken to mask or conceal their burrow. In fact, for some, ants in particular, the piles of sand that appear around the entrances to their nests are most noticeable as the atmospheric pressure changes and weather moves in, bringing with it sometimes heavy rain. The volcano-shaped mounds of sand then become plugs that seal the entrance as water gushes over it and the colony stays dry.

It is often easy to see the sand that is brought up to the surface, being a darker, richer soil than the wind-blown and rain-washed sand that makes up the substrate; sand that is composed of granules of quartz and granite or the iron rich red that is found in many parts of Africa.

For many things it is not likely that their homes will be invaded by something else and usually, with the residents present, there is enough of a defense to safeguard their domain. For the sand wasp, however, no such thing exists and as she prepares her burrow for her offspring, there is always a danger that something will find it during the long, hot hours of preparation and the times when she is absent.

For her, the burrow is not a home but a place to hide her egg and a food store for her young when it hatches so she can ill afford the likes of an ant or other predator to discover her secret. She is a very slender wasp and a meticulous mother who goes to great lengths to safeguard her progeny and its survival. Every grain of sand that is excavated is taken several feet away, disposed of and dispersed in a way that makes it impossible to see that a hole is being dug in the first place.

Using her jaws as a chisel and the vibration of her wings as a jackhammer, she drills into the hardest of sun-baked soil, emerging every few seconds with the loosened soil, which she then holds together as she flies away a few feet to sprinkle it over a few square inches, returning to the excavation with pinpoint accuracy. To do this, she maps out the immediate area around the hole, taking note of twigs, stones or other objects to navigate to her nest.

At times when there is other insect activity around her excavation, she becomes extremely agitated, aggressive and protective, resorting to the physical removal of the intruder by picking them up and carrying them several feet away, discarding them as she does a clump of sand and no doubt with a message to stay away.

Once the burrow is complete, perhaps a few inches deep, she takes time selecting a small stone to plug the entrance, often vibrating her wings over the "door" to blow dust over any sign of disturbance as the next task in her quest can take some time. To provide for her young, she needs to find a caterpillar. A very particular caterpillar. Too small and it will be finished before the larva can pupate and too large could leave something to rot and attract attention.

Usually, it is a drab brown looper caterpillar (or inch-worm to some) that she will sting and immobilize, sometimes dragging it up to 50 feet or more to the nest. To find the caterpillar, she hones in on the scent given off by a leaf of a tree as it is eaten by the caterpillar that she wants to abduct. Her sting is not deadly because her prey would die before her larva emerged and so her venom acts as a neurotoxin, disabling the prey yet keeping it just above the threshold of death, an induced coma.

With it being too heavy for her to carry whilst flying, she grasps it behind the head and drags it between her long slender legs, occasionally administering another dose of sting if it struggles too much. Often, when the burrow is still some distance away, she will risk leaving the caterpillar to fly a sortie over her target area to readjust her bearings, then going back to her prey to continue the arduous journey.

Back at her burrow, she removes the plug, has a quick scan for ants or other parasitic wasps and proceeds to stuff the caterpillar down the hole and, once it is secure, she emerges, turns around and deposits an egg on the back of the caterpillar and then proceeds to close up the hole in a most extraordinary way.

Unlike the single stone plug she used when she would have to leave an unfinished job, she now takes time to find several large grains of sand that she can pack around the edges of the plug to make a very strong seal. Once this is done, she gathers sand and sprinkles it on top of her door before finally brushing sand from around the hole by kicking sand with her legs and fanning it smooth with her wings. This effectively conceals the fact that the soil was even disturbed in the first place.

When finished, there is no evidence that hidden just under the surface, an egg will hatch and a little white grub will begin feeding on a live caterpillar, finally becoming a pupa when the true transformation will take place. That science-fiction-like process where the cells of the body transform the creature from a blind, pale and legless grub into a powerful, winged and maternal adult.

When the rains wet the soil and soften the earth, the adult wasp will emerge to set off and find a spot in the sand, to begin to dig a hole. And find a caterpillar.

It has taken a few days to complete the process of typing this up, editing and waiting for batteries to charge. During this time, with the full moon present, the weather has changed considerably, bringing with it some days of cloud and a soaking rain over the last 24 hours. The Quelea have not been seen since the weather change and the wasp hasn't returned to her burrow. Yet. Well, not that I know of. I think it's too wet. I wanted to get some macro shots of the wasp and her labour but that will have to wait. Those that I have on file are on an unrecoverable hard drive but I will endeavour to post some when I can. Thank you all for your support!