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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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April 30 Back at the Salamat, the sky was a curtain of gray. Later that night, I was awakened by a thunderclap, followed by a rush of wind. Lightning creased the sky. As I emerged from my tent, a drop of water landed on my bare chest. More drops and swirling wind. The elephants responded with trumpeting. Large drops dimpled the pond's surface. Then rain, real rain, poured down. A life-giving torrent flowed on the land, erasing the months of drought.
May 1 Oven-like heat yielded to temperate coolness. Gusts blew in from the south. Yesterday, there had been thousands of marabou storks and pelicans along the Salamat. Now, there was none. The antelope and buffalo and warthogs and herons—and seemingly all other animal life—had vanished. The rain had robbed the Salamat of its role as the sole source of sustenance.
May 9 I took off south for a solo flight to look for elephants along the lower Salamat. None. I turned west, following a vein of newly watered lands, with fresh green grass as far as I could see. Near the western border of the park, I spotted a solid gray mass. Making a wide turn, I saw a single matriarch leading an immense herd of 800 elephants southward. Other females flanked her in a perfect pyramid, leading their families single file. Why such an assembly? Maybe because there is safety in numbers, or because elephants love to socialize. Or perhaps it has to do with history. Elephant families are matriarchal. Grandmothers, mothers, and daughters with their children form the family unit. Males are pushed out before puberty. In their annual forays out of the park, the old matriarchs have survived decades of contact with humans. Surely then, these females, possessed of deep wisdom, are best able to navigate the other elephants through safe corridors to food sources outside Zakouma National Park.
May 10 Nick, aloft in the park's ultralight with Luis, spotted the big herd outside the southern border. Luis immediately dispatched the guards from Ibir and Kiéké, Zakouma's southern outposts, to look for poachers. The fliers also saw another elephant carcass in the Tinga wash, and I went there on foot to take a look. It was a female. Blood had drained from her temple into a pool fringed by maggots. I guessed she had been shot, then had bolted and died of her wounds. Even if her killer had succeeded in taking her tusks, the ivory would, at most, have paid for a few sacks of millet and a bit of sugar and tea. All the poachers I have ever seen, even those who have killed hundreds of elephants, are still poor, often—by the looks in their eyes—at the expense of their souls.
May 20 The elephant collaring team—Dolmia, Bertrand Chardonnet, and Henrik Rasmussen—arrived in Tinga. Our plan was to collar two females at the north end of the park to track their annual migration. We assumed that because many nomads were also moving through this area as the wet season set in, the northern elephants would be the most vulnerable to poaching.
May 23 We were in the air by 5 a.m. to provide aerial support for the collaring operation. About 700 elephants, in three subgroups, were concentrated in the northeast corner of the park. Bertrand, Henrik, Dolmia, and a group of guards went in on foot. We would keep in touch by radio, steering them to the elephants from our bird's-eye vantage. I directed them to one subgroup. Those elephants, Henrik reported, were all males. I guided them to a second group with females. Minutes later, a big female was on her knees, flapping her ears, a phosphorescent dart in her rump. She had a baby by her side. Henrik pushed the baby away as it charged, defending its mother. Soon, Henrik radioed: Collar 6043 was on. We named the elephant Annie. Rocking back and forth, Annie eventually hoisted herself upon all fours and stood still, composing herself. There was no sign of the baby. Then she began walking south. Meanwhile, the rest of the elephants had fled in two massive herds, dust billowing in their wake. During the next hour, Annie found her way directly to the first herd, then made a beeline for the second. Her baby still hadn't joined her.
That evening, we flew to Zakouma's southern boundary to see three elephant carcasses reported by the monitoring crew. Circling over the black stains of rotting bodies, we counted not three, but sixteen elephants. All their tusks were gone, chopped from their faces. We surmised that the southern herd had been attacked just after leaving the park.
May 24 In the morning, we resumed collaring in the northeast. Bertrand reported that the team had darted a small female, and we quickly located her from the air. She was down, ears flapping. Another, larger female stood guard at her side. I guided the team in. Soon, the collar was on, and the antidote to the tranquilizer administered. The elephant struggled to get up, then collapsed. Bertrand gave her a second dose of antidote. Minutes passed. Again and again, she raised herself up on her front legs, only to collapse with each attempt. Afraid to look, I flew off. Fifteen minutes later, she was still trying desperately to get up. Bertrand thought others in the herd might have trampled her as they fled, or that her female guardian had sat on her in an effort to get her moving. An hour later, no change. Pounding the dashboard, I knew I was to blame for her suffering—I had instigated this exercise. I flew back to headquarters to assist the team's effort to get water to the scene. On the ground with the elephant, we worked frantically, bucketing 250 gallons (950 liters) of cool water over her back, willing her to recover. It was futile. As the hours wore on, she became more and more exhausted, until she could scarcely hold up her head. We decided to anesthetize her again, remove the collar, and let her rest. Using ropes attached to the truck, we gently flipped her from right side to left. That's when we saw her broken pelvis. Any remaining hope evaporated. The order was given. As I walked away, devastated, a gunshot rang through the trees. Having come here as protectors, we, too, were now messengers of death.
I saw Souleyman later. On foot, he and a team of guards had surveyed the massacre site south of the park. He counted 20 carcasses in all, including a fetus, so we had missed a few in our aerial estimate. All the tusks had been removed, and the meat butchered by villagers. Shell casings revealed that the weapons had been AK-47 and M14 automatic rifles. From the position of the shells, there must have been at least three shooters. Souleyman blames the intensified poaching on the chaos in Darfur and the Central African Republic. "You can buy guns and ammunition in those places as easily as a camel," he said. Considering that a force of 88 armed guards is needed to keep the elephants inside Zakouma alive, these mass killings prove the potential for carnage outside the park, where the only protection comes from the elephants' own evasive abilities and the will of God.
May 31 Annie's collar had been on for ten days. I pulled out my computer, hooked up the satellite phone, and downloaded her latest location. What was going on? She had traveled more than 50 miles (80 kilometers) north of the park in just a couple of days. We took off to find her and, after flying over villages and millet fields for 25 minutes, reached a dense, viny thicket occupied by more than a hundred elephants. I couldn't believe they had gone so far so fast. We circled, and there, among one small group, was our collared lady, eating away happily, her baby at her side.
June 15 I had to leave Zakouma for the United States, but I worried that our work wasn't finished. A wet season survey was needed to assess the elephant situation outside the park.
August 1 Invited by the Chadian government, I returned and teamed up with some of the Zakouma guards to search systematically for elephants and signs of poaching. First we surveyed inside the park again and, aside from the carcasses of three males, found no serious poaching activity. Then we flew a grid of transects outside the park to the north and south in areas Dolmia had identified as the wet season range. Over the days, we came upon evidence of rampant poaching: five sites where a hundred elephants had been massacred since May, their trunks and tusks hacked off. I saw poachers fleeing, and one man fired on the plane. Seeing the inert, dismembered bodies of elephants is every bit as disturbing to me as seeing the bodies of humans killed in war.
We now also have confirmation that as the rains progress and the plains outside the park turn green, elephants cross the boundary of protection in massive herds led by a single matriarch. Using her prodigious knowledge of the vegetation and landscape outside Zakouma—every trail, every creek crossing, every village and road—this wise old elephant uses routes that, for the most part, avoid all hazards. In daylight, when approaching a road that must be crossed, she will stop miles before reaching it. As soon as darkness comes, she starts the herd moving again, hurrying her dependents to safety.
August 15 The signal from Annie showed her streaking south for three hours. Then I received 14 readings from the same point. After that, silence—no more signals.
September 28 Back in Zakouma and desperate to find Annie, I flew with guards from Am Timan to the point of her last transmission. At an acacia thicket, I passed just east of the point. There she lay—or rather, there lay the bones and fragments of her skin. With her were eight other elephants, all dead. As of this writing, Nicolas, Souleyman, and the other guards are collaborating with the Chadian military and gendarmes, scouting the territory outside the park in unrelenting pursuit of the poachers. Four elephant killers have been apprehended and jailed, including the man who fired on my plane.
What comes next for Zakouma? The situation in southeastern Chad is eerily reminiscent of the Central African Republic during the 1980s. We were in an all-out war against hundreds of armed men from Sudan, rampaging on horses and camels—the kind of men now known as janjaweed. Despite our efforts, we watched the black rhino driven to extinction over a large area and elephants reduced to 5 percent of their original populations.
There is a direct connection between depletion of natural resources, including wildlife, and human conflict. The sanctuary of Zakouma is not only a critical last stand for elephants in central Africa but also a force for peace and stability in the region. But if poaching outside Zakouma by villagers living on its periphery, or by nomadic herders, is to be stopped, management must be extended throughout the entire range of the elephants. A wider peace for elephants—and humans.
Note to Readers
Because its staff has stood firm in the face of adversity, Zakouma remains the best protected park in central Africa. But the fight to save Zakouma's elephants is urgent. The Chadian authorities have pledged to safeguard the herds when they leave the park during the wet season. Information networks must be strengthened, and collaboration with Chad's military reinforced. In addition, an airplane is needed for daily surveillance. For more information, go to How to Help.
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