Sand rivers by Peter Matthiessen, 1937- Hugo van Lawick
Authors: Peter Matthiessen, 1937- Hugo van Lawick
Tags: Zoology
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MATTHIESSEN
Thomson took note of the sad state of affairs in what is now Uganda: "In my sojourn of fourteen months during which I passed over an immense area of the Great Lakes region, I never once saw a single elephant. Twenty years ago they roamed over those countries unmolested and now they have been almost utterly exterminated." Eighty years later Murchison Falls, now Kabalega, in the north part of "the Great Lakes region", was the site of the first elephant-cropping program in East Africa. In the 1890s, the ivory hunter Arthur Neumann encountered no elephants at all while crossing the entire extent of the Tsavo country; in 1970-71 more than 6000 elephants died at Tsavo on account of drought and degeneration of their habitat caused by over-crowding. In 1913 the first safari into the Serengeti found no elephants at all; in 1968, with Myles Turner and George Schaller, I saw more than 500 in a single herd.
In an air survey made in 1976 by Alan Rodgers and Iain Douglas-Hamilton, the estimate arrived at for the Selous was 100,000 elephants, about a third of the Tanzania population (which, with Zaire, claims half the elephants in Africa). Douglas-Hamilton says that this figure may have been too low since many animals must have been missed due to the rough nature of the terrain: "If you want to be conservative," he told me recently, "just say 'over one hundred thousand'." The survey noted a remarkable lack of the habitat damage so pronounced in most of the parks, probably because the elephant were broken up into small groups, mostly five or less, widely distributed throughout this vast, trackless and well-watered reserve - which I like to think accounts for the fact that on the ground one might encounter rather few of them, even along the river margins. But to judge from what we had seen so far, of course, it is too high. Brian Nicholson says that in the 1960s, he and Alan Rees, at that time warden of the western sector of the Selous, arrived separately at the same figure of 30,000, using a ground-survey technique worked out between them. Nicholson however has complete faith in the competence of Alan Rodgers and feels that the survey must have been more accurate than his own figure, since he and Rees could only extrapolate from a rough sample taken in a relatively small area.
If Brian's uneasiness about their scarcity is well-founded, then they may have departed of their own accord for elephant kingdoms in other parts of this vast country. Thus we may hope that in the far south the hidden thousands will appear. At supper the night before someone had spoken of a recent novel in which the last herd of Loxodonta, fleeing the insatiable guns of blood-crazed Homo, hid themselves in a huge swamp by walking in there backward, in order to persuade their pursuers that they had departed from that place.
On the far side of the Madaba River, the track passed a stack of junk and rusting fuel drums; collapsed and splayed out in the undergrowth lay the
SAND RIVERS
tin roof of what once had been a hut. "In my time," said Brian, "there was a permanent patrol post here - four men, rotated every three months. Old Bakiri Mnungu used to be in charge here. He's been at Kingupira for the last three years, and he told me he still doesn't know that country; in three years, he said, he hasn't yet been sent out on patrol, not even once." The Warden gazed about him bleakly. "They're running out of people who still know the bush; Bakiri and Goa are among the last. All these new people do, when they do anything, is run up and down the roads wasting petrol and beating up the machines, like those ones that you saw this morning. Not their fault, of course; there's nobody in authority any more who is interested enough to set them an example."
The Nicholsons drove on, and Hugo and I followed, feeling very subdued. But as the track continued to deteriorate, pushing ever deeper into the bush, kongoni, wart hog, wildebeest and zebra began to appear in
Thomson took note of the sad state of affairs in what is now Uganda: "In my sojourn of fourteen months during which I passed over an immense area of the Great Lakes region, I never once saw a single elephant. Twenty years ago they roamed over those countries unmolested and now they have been almost utterly exterminated." Eighty years later Murchison Falls, now Kabalega, in the north part of "the Great Lakes region", was the site of the first elephant-cropping program in East Africa. In the 1890s, the ivory hunter Arthur Neumann encountered no elephants at all while crossing the entire extent of the Tsavo country; in 1970-71 more than 6000 elephants died at Tsavo on account of drought and degeneration of their habitat caused by over-crowding. In 1913 the first safari into the Serengeti found no elephants at all; in 1968, with Myles Turner and George Schaller, I saw more than 500 in a single herd.
In an air survey made in 1976 by Alan Rodgers and Iain Douglas-Hamilton, the estimate arrived at for the Selous was 100,000 elephants, about a third of the Tanzania population (which, with Zaire, claims half the elephants in Africa). Douglas-Hamilton says that this figure may have been too low since many animals must have been missed due to the rough nature of the terrain: "If you want to be conservative," he told me recently, "just say 'over one hundred thousand'." The survey noted a remarkable lack of the habitat damage so pronounced in most of the parks, probably because the elephant were broken up into small groups, mostly five or less, widely distributed throughout this vast, trackless and well-watered reserve - which I like to think accounts for the fact that on the ground one might encounter rather few of them, even along the river margins. But to judge from what we had seen so far, of course, it is too high. Brian Nicholson says that in the 1960s, he and Alan Rees, at that time warden of the western sector of the Selous, arrived separately at the same figure of 30,000, using a ground-survey technique worked out between them. Nicholson however has complete faith in the competence of Alan Rodgers and feels that the survey must have been more accurate than his own figure, since he and Rees could only extrapolate from a rough sample taken in a relatively small area.
If Brian's uneasiness about their scarcity is well-founded, then they may have departed of their own accord for elephant kingdoms in other parts of this vast country. Thus we may hope that in the far south the hidden thousands will appear. At supper the night before someone had spoken of a recent novel in which the last herd of Loxodonta, fleeing the insatiable guns of blood-crazed Homo, hid themselves in a huge swamp by walking in there backward, in order to persuade their pursuers that they had departed from that place.
On the far side of the Madaba River, the track passed a stack of junk and rusting fuel drums; collapsed and splayed out in the undergrowth lay the
SAND RIVERS
tin roof of what once had been a hut. "In my time," said Brian, "there was a permanent patrol post here - four men, rotated every three months. Old Bakiri Mnungu used to be in charge here. He's been at Kingupira for the last three years, and he told me he still doesn't know that country; in three years, he said, he hasn't yet been sent out on patrol, not even once." The Warden gazed about him bleakly. "They're running out of people who still know the bush; Bakiri and Goa are among the last. All these new people do, when they do anything, is run up and down the roads wasting petrol and beating up the machines, like those ones that you saw this morning. Not their fault, of course; there's nobody in authority any more who is interested enough to set them an example."
The Nicholsons drove on, and Hugo and I followed, feeling very subdued. But as the track continued to deteriorate, pushing ever deeper into the bush, kongoni, wart hog, wildebeest and zebra began to appear in
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