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I scanned the horizon with binoculars for game, but my local guide always spotted it first with his telescopic eyes. He swiveled his head from side to side, hardly glancing ahead as he steered the truck on a bumpy track in the northern Kalahari. The engine roared and wheels spat buckets of sand.
We left our private campsites every day at dawn for game drives. I had ticked every bird and beast on my must-see list plus dozens of other bonus species. The greening landscape after a long dry season now teemed with life. I became blasé about elephants, big cats, giraffes, herds of zebras, and antelopes, while my guide focused on finding novelties to please me.
I knew he had seen something when he dropped a gear and plowed at speed through wheel-high grass. I followed his pointing finger, now fully alert after a sleepless night in a hot tent. Yet I saw nothing, not even swaying seedheads, but trusted his uncanny sense of where to find wildlife drama from long experience in the veld. He understood the stakes and could calculate where a chase would end.
I didn’t notice the mêlée or hear the yelps until he pulled up abruptly and the engine died. Only five yards away, a pack of multi-colored African Wild Dogs shoved and nipped each other as dogs might fight for a ball in the park. The grin he flashed seemed triumphant at adding an endangered species to my list until I realized I mistook a fresh kill for a rough and tumble in the grass. I suspect he thought every visitor on safari expects that top attraction. I watched the grisly end of an Impala.
Lions and leopards drag down prey by the throat until the struggler starves of oxygen. Is that such a dreadful death? David Livingstone said he went numb with terror when a lion grabbed him not far away in 1844. But Wild Dogs have much weaker jaws than big cats. They tear off strips of skin and break weak bones bit by bit. They butcher their prey alive. Two young dogs fought over a tender fetus disgorging from an open belly. The pack picked a pregnant doe as the slowest in a herd for a relentless hunt to an inescapable conclusion.
Don’t be sentimental or stupid, I told myself. Nature is red in tooth and paw, and carnivores can’t eat straw! Haven’t you killed animals deliberately or accidentally and frequently by your dietary choices and land use? I hid my emotion from the guide who wouldn’t understand after seeing gore and wounded animals as a past leader of trophy hunters. I am still reluctant to admit complicity with killers who act for me out of sight but not yet a Jainish vegetarian.
At bedtime, he came to zip my tent door to keep out mosquitoes and deter inquisitive lions that sometimes wander through the camp. Feeling confident in his assurances, my thoughts turned to the fate of the Impala: was it a tragedy or part of the mystery of nature that enfolds us all? The sound of sniffing and scratching on the other side of the canvas wall distracted me before the night went silent. The next morning pictures taken automatically outside on a game camera revealed a Spotted Hyena had been my nocturnal visitor. Mighty predators can become prey.
If you hear ringing in your ears this month it could be the chorus of millions of cicadas, so don’t worry about getting tinnitus!
The last time periodical cicadas emerged in southeast Virginia was the spring of 2013. See the blog archives for the post I wrote at the time (“Seventeen-year anniversary”). I wondered then if I would live to hear the event repeated in 2030, but the species distribution map is wrong. It shows the thirteen-year brood expected this year would be west of Richmond, but it is here too.
Males have been singing on warm days in the tree canopies for a week and will continue to the end of their lives, another week or two. Birds are feasting on cicadas easily caught when the meaty insects launch from branches like slow-flying gliders. Soon the ground will be littered with their corpses and fertilize the soil.
They might hold the record for the briefest adulthood as a percentage of lifespan (0.3%). Hatching from eggs laid in the treetops during the 2011 courtship, nymphs fell to the ground where they dug furiously with relatively huge front legs before predators could get them. They found a root of a tree to tap sap for nourishment as we tap maple tree trunks for making syrup. They continued sucking for more than a decade, shedding their exoskeleton each time they outgrew it and replaced with a new chitinous shell. The fifth stage has emerged above ground en masse with amazing synchrony. They crawl up a plant or vertical surface to halt a couple of feet above ground. Then the thoracic shell segment splits open for the adult cicada to emerge. After drying its wings it looks for the rest of its clan with big red eyes.
They are singing heartily in every direction today. I heard people grumbling about the constant noise although I only recorded 60 dB compared to a big diesel truck on the highway nearby that makes nearly 90 dB (on a logarithmic scale). I will never complain about a marvel of nature.
I was more lucky than shrewd in choosing to visit the northern Kalahari and Okavango Delta in Botswana at the start of the wet season and shortly before Christmas 2023. Mobile safaris organized by Penduka normally take up to nine visitors, but when I turned up the company didn’t cancel a party of only one! What a privilege to go on a private safari, staying for a few nights at each of four sites in the bush with an expert guide and camp staff all to myself. It only rained at night, a syncopating patter on the canvas. Kenny the camp’s cook prepared meals to the standard of a fine restaurant on open fires.
The team kept the campsite as pristine as we found it but the aromas from cooking food attracted wildlife. Without a fence to deter them, an Elephant barged past one day, a Spotted Hyena sniffed around my tent while I lay in bed, a cocky Pied Crow stole two eggs, and a scorpion dashed around our feet under the table. Fortunately, no lions though we heard them roaring a quarter of a mile away after dusk.
There is something magisterial about the biggest living things on Earth. We are the most intelligent, the most prolific, and the most polluting species but we don’t tower in height over everyone. We look up at some animals and plants while they look down on us.
I regret we missed the iconic megafauna that became extinct in the late Pleistocene era. Modern humans arrived a day too late on a geological time scale. I mean woolly mammoths and mastodons, dodos and moas, giant sloths and dire wolves. But I’m thankful we have a few survivors, mostly oceanic leviathans and two species of elephants.
Does any other creature look as imperial as an elephant? They fascinate us and our children fall in love with them from picture books and the telling of stories, particularly in India. At the zoo, we cannot pass the elephant enclosure without stopping. The perfume of aromatic manure guides us by the nose more surely than eyeing a signpost. There is only one grotesque aspect of elephants—a trophy head with tusks hanging on a wall.
I recently had the thrill of watching hundreds of wild African elephants in their northern Kalahari homeland. They barged through dense bush, like bulldozers and pulled down trees faster than a chainsaw before dining on foliage. They hung around waterholes to suck gallons of water and sprayed dirt on their backs through multifunctional trunks. Family groups marched at a stately pace across the veld in disciplined lines, keeping to the narrow tracks made by generations of heavy feet compressing the sand. My local Penduka guide regarded them respectfully, and so we backed off when they flapped their ears at us. Last month, an angry elephant killed a tourist in Zambia by overturning her vehicle.
Their distrust of human beings is understandable. We imperiled them by poaching, trophy hunting and anthrax from livestock farming. These threats remain but their numbers have rebounded since banning ivory sales and hunting trophies. Botswana’s government should be praised for beefing up anti-poaching units. However, it has resumed issuing hunting quotas since 2019 in response to complaints about an elephant population explosion, now estimated at 130,000, more than in any other country.
The President of Botswana receives complaints from rural people whose livelihoods and even lives are lost from trampling under big beasts. But consider the elephants’ point of view. The finest remaining wilderness is under pressure for agriculture and who can resist the begging image of a hungry child? Partly from their habitat shrinking, powerful animals are losing their fear from habituation, which leads to conflict with humans. I admit foreign visitors like me are part of the problem. Do we love wildlife too much for its good?
Mr. President faces a dilemma. Selling licenses to hunters helps to control the elephant population and top up the Treasury’s coffers. On the other hand, African wildlife has influential foreign advocates who condemn trophy hunting and might boycott safaris where the grisly business continues. He offers surplus animals to neighboring countries and makes an idle threat to send thousands to Germany. Why doesn’t he imitate the Kruger National Park in South Africa where an immunocontraceptive program controls the elephant population?
The mission of preserving biodiversity in pristine lands gets tougher from the direct and indirect impacts of spiraling human numbers. That problem has gotten a lot worse since the 1960s when the United Nations raised publicity. Ironically, Western countries are becoming more pronatalist from worrying about the demographic shift that projects a deficit of young people to support aging populations in the future. Developing countries rankle at criticism and rightly point out that wealthy countries are mainly responsible for plundering natural resources. Politicians grapple with national priorities or bow to resistance.
Meanwhile, elephants will always be elephants and we will decide their fate in our interests. Tant pis! They wouldn’t present such a problem if they weren’t so large, but if we genetically engineered mini elephants as replacements would they inspire as much awe in children at the zoo?
Published August 2016
Published September 2015
Published September 2013
Roger musing about Peace with Nature 