Dancing with Jumbo

Elephants are everywhere here. You can’t help but see them when you go out on drives. We hear them all the time outside the camp fences rustling around and trumpeting to each other. They are always around our field sites. One even snuck up on me the other day. He was about 60 meters away when I looked up and realized he was there. Luckily he didn’t give a rip about me and went on his merry way or the interaction could have been more interesting. You wouldn’t think that something that big could sneak up on anything.

On my trips back and forth to Skukuza, I almost always see elephants, often close to the side of the road as it runs next to several rivers and elephants like foraging around the river beds. On my last trip back to Satara, I was minding my own business watching baby impala out the window (all the animals are having young now that spring has sprung) when I see a big bull elephant walking down the road towards me in the opposite lane. He’s a good kilometer (2/3 mile) away so I stop the truck and pull out my camera thinking I’ll get some great close-up pics as he walks by me. So I’m snapping away until he gets to about 75 feet from the truck when he decides to switch lanes and start walking right towards me. The elephants here have been known to do some nasty damage to the hoods of vehicles so I throw it in reverse and start backing down the road and pull into the opposite lane of oncoming traffic (there was none at the time if you discount Jumbo). Now the big bull is a good 200 feet away and in the opposite lane still moving towards me. Just when I get my camera back out to take pictures he changes lanes again to come straight at me. I quickly shift back into reverse and change lanes again. We do this little dance a couple of more times with the elephant changing lanes to take me head on and me trying my best to get out of his way.

Finally, I’ve had enough and decide to see what happens if Jumbo actually makes it to the front of my truck. So after I reverse into the opposite lane I just stop. Sure enough, the bull changes lanes and walks right up to within 10 feet of my hood. Towering over the truck. He flairs his ears and shakes his head back and forth while letting out a tremendous growl, not a trumpet, but a growl. I do nothing except take his picture. I guess this wasn’t the response he was looking for and decided I could no longer be intimidated so he just politely stepped off the road into the bushes and began eating. Fun time with the tourist was over. When I finally bothered to look down the road in front and behind me, there were tourist cars stopped well back on both sides surely enjoying my little dance.

When writing my last blog entry, I forgot to mention the darker side of the prevalence of predation here in Kruger – the human side.

First a little background. Poverty in this part of Africa is quite high as I’m sure most of you know. The division between rich and poor is astronomical and the unemployment here often reaches 50% in some of the areas just outside of Kruger. Despite the poverty in this part of the country, there are people from Mozambique that want to come into South Africa to work the fruit harvests. (Mozambique forms the eastern border of the Kruger Park, and our tent is about 25-30 kilometers from the border). When fruit harvest time rolls around, illegal immigrants from Mozambique walk across the Lebombo mountains which form the eastern park border and walk across the Kruger Park from east to west. When they reach the western border of the park, they cut holes in the fence to get outside the park and hopefully find work picking fruit.

While walking across a mountain range (it’s more like really tall hills) sounds like the most challenging part to this story, that’s really only the beginning of their challenge. Once the immigrants get into Kruger, they must run the gauntlet of lions, elephants, buffalo, hippo, and other large, very cross creatures that must turn their walk into a fearful trek. This may be fine and good during the day when they are walking and the animals, especially lions, are at their laziest. But I can’t imagine what their nights must be like. Sleeping in trees to avoid lions. Walking during the night to avoid the heat of the day hoping you don’t run into a leopard out on the hunt. In constant fear of surprising elephants, rhinos, or buffalos which could end your dreams of a job to feed your family in short work.

This story was all kind of abstract to me until I was talking with one of our collaborators here who told me about some of her friends who work in the northern part of the park where a lot of the immigrants cross the Kruger. They say that every year many people walking from Mozambique lose their lives to lions and other predators in the park and that they can tell, on sight, whether or not a lion has killed and eaten a human. Supposedly the lions have a different look, a different air about them, after eating a person. Hearing that definitely spooked me a little and made the whole thing a little more real.

Well reality really set in, when we were working in the field the other day, far away from the camp or any other human habitation - I found a shoe. An old, ragged, tattered shoe, a cheap sneaker, that had been ripped apart at the seams. Just one shoe, nothing else. Maybe someone just lost a shoe while walking through the park to go pick fruit. It got torn up and just wouldn’t stay on anymore. Maybe the lone shoe has a more dramatic story to it. I don’t know. But I haven’t been able to forget the image of that shoe since. Every time the image pops into my head it reminds me of how poverty can drive people to do things that I can only imagine.

The Killing Fields

It is almost impossible to walk around the bush here without coming across zebra jawbones, wildebeest and buffalo skulls, and giraffe bones. It’s a pretty stark reminder of how prevalent the predators, particularly lions, are around here. As an ecologist I know that predation is an important part of ecosystems that regulates herbivore populations and in turn affects how the composition of the plant community. But, knowing that and actually being around big animals that kill each other are two vastly different things. It’s even different from the marine systems I’ve worked on where fish usually eat each other whole and its rare to find fish bones lying around on the bottom. There are no fish kill sites for instance that you run across and know that a grouper had his meal here this morning. Its much different here in Kruger with bones strewn about everywhere. For example, the nice set of kudu horns we found along the road one morning on a drive down one of the rivers near Satara. And just the other week I saw a hyena running around with a big hunk of warthog in its jaws. But, I’ve yet to actually see a kill happen, and probably won’t, but here’s hoping one day.

The closest I’ve been was last week when I happened across two male lions that had just killed a zebra in an area right next to one of our research plots. The kill was right next to one of the fire break roads in the area we were working so we got to sit in our truck literally 10 feet away from the two lions lazing under the tree with their kill. The two had already eaten their fill that morning so they had huge distended bellies and were just lolling around under the tree not really moving. All they could do was pant in their misery – looked kind of like most of us do after a good Thanksgiving meal. I honestly think you could have run up and smacked them on the bum and made it back to the truck with no problem these guys were so lazy. (And every one here is obsessed with seeing lions, but I’m convinced they are the laziest animals on the planet. They must sleep 90% of the time. If you see them up and moving it’s a real treat.)

Yesterday, my team and I were out at one of our field sites setting up transects to survey herbivore dung abundance (Insert your own joke here). We were walking along through the bush when we flush a big group of vultures off a wildebeest carcass. It was quite fresh, probably killed the morning before, with the head still attached to the ribcage. About twenty feet away was the hide and hooves that had been stripped off the carcass. While we were going about our business setting the transects, the smell of the kill followed us everywhere. There is nothing like the smell of a rotting carcass in the bush. It’s a pungent sickly sweet smell that really lingers in your nose and jumps onto your clothes to last you a little while. Even though we found the carcass early in the morning, the smelled stayed with me until mid-afternoon.

I posted some new pics on the Flickr website http://www.flickr.com/photos/kruger_park

"That's Africa Baby!"

This is my new catch phrase. After the fourth time of trying to get money to pay our work crew and failing (this was a couple of weeks ago), the other post-doc on the project looks at me and says "T.A.B". When I give him a quizzical look that says "are you speaking English?", he says "That's Africa Baby - T.A.B." Its the basic explanation of what happens when things go wrong in your day - as they often do when two or more people are involved in a project here. So when things go wrong now, its T.A.B. - just like it comes with the territory (or the continent I guess).

Have to hold the comuter printer drawer in so that it won't shoot paper across the room when you print - T.A.B.

Your work gloves fall apart after one day in the field - T.A.B.

The hardware store give you fencing standards with no holes in them, then acts like you are crazy that such a thing would happen - T.A.B.

Can't finish building your experiments because there is a NATIONAL SHORTAGE OF FENCING STANDARDS - you guessed it T.A.B.

It just kind of somes up working here in some respects. Not that I am not enjoying myself and the field work. The extra challenges just make things a little more interesting and unpredictable.

I'll try to post some more pictures to the Flikr site on Friday when I'm back down in Skukuza.

Cheers to Rain

On Monday, after it topped 106 degrees, we had the first real rain here in more than a month. It broke a streak of several 100 degree days in a row and dropped the temp 25 degrees in about 3o minutes. In celebration I grabbed a beer from the fridge and stood out in the blissful shower to revel in it. And yes Dad I don't have good enough sense to come in out of the rain.