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Ivory Wars
MARCH 2007
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| Ivory Wars: Last Stand in Zakouma (continued) |
By J. Michael Fay
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Photographs by Michael Nichols
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March 23, 2006 It had been a year since my last visit to Zakouma, but, flying in my Cessna over the Chadian landscape with photographer Michael "Nick" Nichols, I recognized the park by the meanders of dry riverbeds dotted with occasional pools. We descended into the heat of the brown floodplain of the Salamat River. At a thousand feet (300 meters), I spied an elephant standing under a large Terminalia tree. Circling lower, we saw elephants—hundreds—crowded under the shade of just about every tree in view, motionless save for the gentle flapping of ears to cool their bodies. Zakouma is the last place on Earth where you can see more than a thousand elephants on the move in a single, compact herd.
Nick spotted the Zakouma base camp. Radio antennas, satellite dishes, and a fleet of trucks and heavy equipment attested to a well-greased infrastructure—a secure island in a sea of human entropy.
Before landing, I wanted to show Nick the largest of the water holes, Rigueik, that act as magnets to life in the dry season. Flying east, we made a low pass over the pool as thousands of cranes, pelicans, spur-winged geese, and storks unfolded their black-and-white wings and took flight. A herd of buffalo—there must have been more than 600—fled south in a golden cloud of dust. Hundreds of topi, hartebeests, waterbuck, kob, reedbuck, and giraffes raced in a wave below. In the clearing, we also saw the half-eaten carcass of a juvenile elephant.
We touched down at base camp and were warmly greeted by a throng of kids and Luis Arranz, a Spanish employee of the European Union who has worked here for six years. (For the past 17 years, the EU has donated nearly a million dollars a year to the Zakouma conservation project.) Tiny circles pocked the dusty ground—there had been a "mango rain," a light shower, in the night. We immediately started talking about the elephants, wondering if these first raindrops had got them moving. Luis assured me that the full-blown rainy season wouldn't come until June and that the elephants hadn't yet congregated. I asked about the dead elephant we'd seen at Rigueik. He said it had been killed and eaten by lions a few days before.
March 24 After setting up camp south of headquarters, at Tinga, a refurbished tourist camp, we sat down with Luis and his team to discuss plans. We were here to observe the elephants during the seasonal metamorphosis from barren desert to verdant pasture. Back in 2000, Malachie Dolmia, a friend now working for Chad's Ministry of Water and Environment, had put satellite tracking collars on several Zakouma elephants while doing his Ph.D. He discovered that when the wet season begins, elephants leave the park apparently in two subpopulations, one ranging about 60 miles (97 kilometers) north, the other traveling about the same distance southwest. We wanted to find out what triggers the gathering of these big groups, whether they leave Zakouma at the same time, and, most important, how vulnerable the elephants are to poaching during the four to five months they're outside the park.
April 4 Our first task: an aerial survey of Zakouma. I would pilot the Cessna, and Pierre Poilecot, a French biologist who runs the park's ecological monitoring program, would be the front-seat observer and data logger, with Étienne Ngakoutou and Nicolas Taloua in the rear. This was to be a repeat of a survey we did the previous dry season, when we counted 3,885 elephants. Pierre's truck rumbled into camp at 3:30 a.m., sending millions of roosting queleas, finch-like birds, into a diluvian frenzy of flapping wings and chirping. A baboon reacted from his elevated night perch—hoon, hoon, hoooon. At daybreak, we were flying 300 feet (90 meters) above the vast confluence of floodplains that define Zakouma, back and forth on transect lines like a crop duster, counting animals.
On the first pass, we were in the thick of it. Nicolas called out, "elephant, 8, left," and Étienne, "roan antelope, 1, right." It continued like that: giraffe 3, giraffe 1, hartebeest 5, elephant 4, giraffe 4, giraffe 14, buffalo 3, buffalo 1, buffalo 65, elephant—a herd. I looked down: Five groups were loosely assembled on the savanna. We counted 175 elephants in all. By the time we landed, four hours later, we had tallied 4,205 animals: 2,063 buffalo, 952 elephants, 551 hartebeests, 301 topi, 194 giraffes, 74 waterbuck, 45 ostriches, and 25 roan antelope. Not a bad accounting for the first morning.
April 8 By our last survey day, the numbers were looking good for all species except the elephant. Pierre arrived at my tent at 4:37 a.m. I opened the truck door and reached into the side pocket of my backpack to grab my headlamp. An insanely intense pain seared my right thumb. As I yanked my hand back, I felt a large, hard arthropod of some sort. Pierre blurted out, "Scorpion!" By the time we got to the plane, my arm was throbbing and covered in a cold sweat. I tried pulling on the controls, but it was useless. Mahamat, the night watchman, came to the rescue. He examined the sting, then started to rub it hard with a scrap of wood given to him by a Sudanese witch doctor. With each rub, a funny-bone sensation shot up my arm. Howling, I let him continue—maybe the exorcism would work. I spent the next four hours in a fetal position in my sleeping bag repeating the mantra: "You will look in your sack before you put your hand into it in the dark. You will look. …"
Later that afternoon, I mustered the will for an overdue chat with Abakar Abdel Ali, the park's longest serving guard and the son of the chief of the former village of Zakouma, one of several Arab settlements whose people once fished and grew sorghum along the Salamat River. Abakar had been a young man in 1958 when his father agreed to a proposal by a French civil servant to turn the area around the village into a reserve where hunting was banned. Five years later, Abakar witnessed the creation of Zakouma National Park. The forecast was full of promise: Wildlife would flourish, tourists would come. But first Zakouma and seven other villages had to be razed and their occupants, who received compensation and the promise of employment, moved outside the refuge. Abakar started working for Zakouma in 1969 and, the next year, became a guard. At that time, buffalo were almost extinct in the park, and there were about a thousand elephants. There are now 6,500 buffalo, and elephant numbers have steadily increased since the ban on international ivory trade in 1989, reaching 3,885 in 2005.
Do the resettled villagers support the park? Abakar paused. "They don't care about its importance as a reserve for wildlife. They regret not being able to exploit it." I asked him if the park's future seemed secure. He replied, "If there is money, the park will exist. The park has been good for wildlife." Indeed, as our surveys show, Zakouma has been nothing short of a miracle for wildlife. You can fly for hours in any direction outside the park and find no place else with such abundance.
April 9 With my hand functional again, we were back in action. The final elephant count was 127 herds, with a total of 3,020 animals, almost 900 short of last year. Luis was perplexed. Had we missed a large herd, or had we double-counted a herd in 2005? I had no reason to believe that the drop reflected an increase in poaching. In 1985, I'd participated in a survey, led by Iain Douglas-Hamilton, of the range of elephants in the northern part of the Central African Republic, that yielded a disastrous ratio of live elephants (4,308) to carcasses (7,861). Our dry season survey in Zakouma revealed not even one-tenth that level of poaching.
April 10 The days were scorching and clear. We moved camp to a big water hole on the Tinga, upstream of its junction with the Salamat, pitching our tents just below a low bridge built across four steel culverts. At the end of the dry season, this pool, jade green on a thick bed of sand, had the sweetest water in the entire park. A black kite, dipping its wings and inclining its tail ever so slightly, circled, eyes fixed on the queleas that were spilling onto the water's edge, drinking. A flock of guinea fowl came to the bank, clucking cautiously as they alternated between searching the ground for seeds and checking the sky for aerial predators. In the pool, the mouths of thousands of whiskered catfish dimpled the surface like water striders.
Then, it happened. Elephants appeared on the edge of the bank, juveniles first, followed by a large female. They stood still, listening. The female nudged one of the young males forward. He resisted at first, but thirst and a mother's insistence drove him down the bank. Other elephants followed, pouring down the steep incline, 30 to 40 of them, babies in tow, heads bobbing from side to side. At the water, they dropped their trunks into the coolness, taking deep drafts of the precious liquid before being pushed forward by the horde behind. As the craving for water subsided, the juveniles started to play, dunking each other; the adults retreated to chuck hot sand over their backs. It had been years since I had been treated to such a social display by elephants on the savannas of central Africa. The elephants then filed up the opposite bank to continue their relentless search for dry season forage. Four minutes later, they vanished. The only movement came from a lone sandpiper scurrying along the bank and the red-throated bee-eaters nabbing insects above the constant churn of fish.
Slowly but surely, he cut into the flesh, yanking, grinding, licking, pushing ever deeper into the throat, finally pulling off a chunk of trachea and chewing contentedly with his back molars. After an hour, M03-03 headed off to find water.
Nathalie said that lions in the park commonly prey on young elephants. In the early 1980s, when elephant poaching by Arab horsemen from Darfur was out of control in the Central African Republic, I had seen many elephants orphaned by poaching become the preferred prey of lions in Manovo–Gounda–Saint Floris National Park. I wondered if this was now happening in Zakouma.
We followed M03-03, hoping he wasn't heading for the poisoned water hole, until we reached a lone ngato tree, the grass tamped down below a halo of low-hanging branches. "This is where the cubs are," Nathalie said. Hearing our voices, the two cubs, whose mother we never found, emitted high-pitched growls and squeals. They wrestled and tumbled, not knowing that without the protection of their mother, they must now be counted as members of the living dead.
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