Outrunning a Marauding Elephant

Witness  |  Hilaire Avril, Oct-Nov 2009

www.Helo-Magazine.com 

***********************

Wildlife-rich countries have come to realise that upgrading conservation programs is good for tourism. In East Africa, more is now done to protect wild animals as the main attraction to tourists’ foreign currency. But the efforts of regional governments can hardly keep human settlements from encroaching on wildlife habitat.

Hungry farmers slash and burn forests, and desperate herders take cattle deep inside national parks in search of the last patches of decent grazing. Of the local animals who object, the most vocal are often elephants. Elephant killings of humans are on the rise, although incidents often go unreported and figures are hard to come by.

The first time an elephant charged me, it wasn’t my fault.

[Continued below]

****************

The neighbor, the threat... Kenya, Photos by Hilaire Avril. 

I was touring the beautiful, under-rated Simba Hills national park in Kenya, whose elephant conservation program is so successful it has begun shipping elephants by truck to other reserves. A good 600 pachyderms roam freely on a space fit for 200 at most. The place teems with lone males and matriarchal clans, and elephants need their space.

Following a track cut through the long grass, we slowly approached elephants munching acacia branches. I was wide-eyed, clinging to the open sunroof of our matatu, the ubiquitous East African minibus, observing my first live elephants: a mother, a younger female and a baby. After a few minutes of absorbed grazing, the older one suddenly looked up and stopped flapping her ears. She raised her trunk, trumpeted in a strident, ear-splitting, terrifying wayand charged the minibus.

Jolted out of indolence, the driver jumped into his seat and floored it. We screeched down the hill, quickly leaving the angry mother in a cloud of dust. Sunglasses were lost, beers were spilled, and someone got a nasty bump on the head—all acceptable losses, considering that tusks will pierce through a car from side to side and that elephants have been reported to flip minibuses and trample their occupants.

A park warden later told us that we’d inadvertently parked right between the mother and a very young calf, hidden in the tall grass a few meters away. Blocking an elephant’s direct line of vision to her young is guaranteed to send her into a tantrum, and we’d been lucky.

A few years later, in a private reserve where well-armed patrols kept elephant poachers at bay, I was enjoying “sundowners”--cocktails at sunset, as they call them in Kenya--on a hilltop: a perfect spot to see elephants battle down below.

The argument was probably over access to water. About 30 elephants had gathered, in two groups at both ends of a valley. They kicked up dust and trumpeted for a few minutes, building up attitude. Once properly worked up, they charged each other, running down the valley and clashing in a brutal melee. The fight lasted only a few minutes, but it tore down most of the trees in the way. No one seemed to get seriously hurt, and each group slowly went on its way. Quite a show, from a distance...

But while we were driving back to base, we heard again the all-too familiar cry. Running at us from bushes 20 meters away, a young female with a broken tusk charged our jeep in screaming fury. The Masai guide riding with us saved our skins, suggesting we leave the bumpy trail on which we couldn’t distance her, and drive up a dry riverbed.

Thanks to God and Toyota four-wheel power, we escaped and made it safely to camp. Apparently elephants will quit chasing you if they have to run uphill--hence the riverbed crossing. A worthy bit of trivia, since a broken tusk is often a sign of serious aggressiveness.

I became increasingly involved with elephant stories as a journalist. When the drought currently devastating East Africa began in 2005, no editor would touch stories about the plight of local farmers. But when elephants started leaving reserves, raiding farms in search of food and killing farmers, the same editors couldn’t send TV crews fast enough. I took a few trips embedded with the “Problem Animal Control Unit” of the Kenya Wildlife Service, soldiers sent to chase killer elephants away from populated areas.

On one occasion we had been waiting for a group of elephants to come to a watering spot with their young. Lying in the long grass by the side of a pond, we were upwind, cameras ready.

The older elephants came first, to survey the spot and clear the way for the young to go for a drink. The photos were great. But then the wind slowly turned, and the 20 or so elephants got their first whiff of a human presence. The entire group stopped drinking and froze, trunks in the air, smelling us. After a few seconds, they all trumpeted in a panic and gathered around the calves, shielding them from us. The largest one, about six meters high, ran around the pond towards us, and started charging with ears spread out and trunk in the air.

We squirmed backwards, getting a few final shots, then got up and beat a frank retreat, camera still aimed. The Masai warden was tapping my shoulder anxiously. “Let’s go now,” he said, “we must really go now,” he insisted a few times before turning around and running.

Forget the practiced cool of a hardened news crew. A Masai running in terror is enough to send me sprinting. We ran a good hundred meters before looking over our shoulders. The charging elephant had stopped. She was 10 meters from the cameraman, who was kneeling on the ground, still filming.

Incredibly, the elephant had stopped. She was stomping the ground and trumpeting furiously, satisfied that she had scared us away. She’d made her point.

But it was obviously not her first brush with men. And unfortunately for her, probably not the last.

END

The expert, Kenya, Photo by Hilaire Avril.