Too many elephants?

Now that the dry season and its associated problems are over (well we hope they are over) it’s time to take stock. A lot has been said and written about the animal’s water supply, overpopulation of elephants in the Park and so on, mostly triggered by sights such as this…

 

  It looks awful but was it really so bad or are we just over-reacting to seeing dead elephants at almost every water hole? A number of questions need to be answered. How bad were the losses? Did we do enough to prevent them? What can we do in future? And since the key factor in all this is the number of elephants we must also ask are there too many elephants? Are they really destroying the Park? What can we do?

    Let’s take the questions in order. First, how bad were the losses? The main visible losses were elephants. In the Sinamatella area almost every major water source had one or several deaths but there were surprisingly few carcasses away from the water – certainly fewer than last year when it seemed at times that the smell of dead elephant was the dominant feature of the Park. Known losses are under one hundred but no doubt there were some unrecorded. We visit many places off the tourist routes and away from the main water points and have seen very few carcasses there so perhaps a reasonable guess would put elephant losses in the low hundreds. The recent WEZ game census recorded 2382 elephants in Sinamatella so (say) 200 deaths is 8.4% of the population. Yes, of course there are many factors to be considered, for example the age and sex of the animals dying (obviously the loss of breeding females has more effect on population growth than the loss of old males) but however you look at it, the death of 8.4% of  Sinamatella’s elephants would be bad but certainly nothing to panic about. In fact I think the actual number of elephants in the area is greater than 2382 (WEZ didn’t count in the Safari Areas) and the number of deaths was probably much less than 200 so the over-all loss would be well below 8.4%. My guess would be that it was closer to 4%.         

      As for other losses, the death of a small animal is hard to detect as scavengers quickly remove small carcasses. However, the WEZ census shows increased or steady populations for most species. Giraffe numbers have been in steady decline for some years but others such as Impala and Kudu are steadily rising. The value of 24-hour waterhole counts is often questioned but it is unlikely that these results could be obtained in the face of actual major losses so it seems that the mortality was distressing to look at but unlikely to have had much impact on animal numbers in the Park.

     So, did we do enough to prevent the mortality? Many observers have written about animals dying of thirst. In Sinamatella that wasn’t the case. Water supplies were (and are) adequate and the deaths were more due to poor diet and perhaps heat stress. These are factors though, which are clearly connected with water supplies. When animals are forced to stay fairly close to just a few water sources the food in that area is consumed and they lose condition so, did we provide enough water?

     There were numerous breakdowns of the ageing water pumping equipment but thanks to Mr Mafa and his hard-working team, no pump was out of action for very long.

Installing a new engine at Inyantue

    In September the Park authorities, recognizing that a problem was looming, called a meeting of interested parties to ask for help. Through the season many people and organisations donated money, equipment, fuel and expertise and without their help the situation would have been much worse. It would be fair to say that as much was done as possible, given financial and other constraints but of course more could have been done in an ideal world. There were boreholes that were unused or underused which could certainly have provided more water. So that leads to the next question, can we do better in future? For now though I want to leave that question and come back to it after we have looked at the ‘elephant problem’ as any future plans on water supplies must be made with reference to the growing elephant population.

   Are there too many elephants?

   The Hwange elephant population seems to be very mobile. The 2011 game census recorded 23,569 but in 2012 there were just 14,428. The missing 9,141 are not dead, they presumably left Hwange at some time and spent at least part of the dry season elsewhere – Botswana, Namibia, parts of Zambia, even South East Angola are all within easy reach of Hwange for an elephant. Our various animal counts show very large numbers of elephants in June/July and a steady decrease from then. Perhaps the elephant herds were as appalled as we were at the huge numbers early in the dry season and they reacted by migrating elsewhere. We could therefore say that the elephants are regulating their own population according to conditions and the question of “too many” doesn’t arise but I think that would be short sighted. Even if Hwange wasn’t over-populated this year, it just means that our elephants had become somebody else’s problem and sooner or later there must be too many because there is a limit to the areas they can inhabit without coming into conflict with humans – a conflict they are bound to lose.  So my answer to ‘are there too many elephants?’ is This year? No, I don’t think so, Eventually? Yes, certainly.

   Are the elephants damaging the Park?

   Just as one dead elephant has a visual (and olfactory) impact far greater than its real impact on the environment, a hectare of smashed bush or even a single felled Baobab looks awful and is far more memorable than a ‘normal’ landscape.

Baobab and Combretum bush destroyed by elephants

Hwange’s tourist roads were designed to pass through the areas of greatest animal concentration so anyone using those roads is likely to get an impression of widespread destruction. In terms of the Park as a whole, I believe the environmental destruction by elephants has been relatively small. Close to Sinamatella there are patches of Combretum bush that have been flattened almost to the ground. It is worse close to Masuma and Mandavu dams. Move away from these places however, only a few kilometres sometimes, and there are large areas of similar vegetation that are almost untouched. That’s a pattern that is repeated almost everywhere I go, a mosaic of  patches of clear and often severe damage and places that are apparently normal so, yes the elephants are destroying parts of their environment but in most places the damage is not anywhere near as severe as it is around the most popular water sources.

    And now we come to the really difficult question. What’s to be done about the elephant population? There are three broad answers. First, do nothing; let the population regulate itself, even if that leads to large scale mortality and environment change. Second, shoot enough elephants to bring the population to an acceptable level and then keep shooting them in subsequent years to stop it rising out of control. Third, try some technological fix such as reducing the elephants’ fertility through chemical means.

    Each of these answers has its backers and each has its pros and cons. I don’t believe there is a ‘right’ answer but arguably, allowing matters to take their own course is the ‘morally correct’ way. However, if the elephant population reaches a point where there is massive conflict between elephants and humans as hungry animals flood out of the Park into the surrounding farms and villages, the impact of that on the whole National Park/wildlife conservation concept could be huge. We might end up losing everything in such a situation so ‘morally correct’ would have to give way to action of some kind and I would have to say I think culling is inevitable in the end – unless a cheap and practical technological fix emerges of course.

      So finally, that brings us back to what can we do about water and food supplies in the future. If we want to precipitate a ‘natural’ decline in animal numbers perhaps we should stop or at least reduce the pumping of water. On the other hand, if we believe that there are not yet too many elephants then we must try to provide water points in as many places as possible so that all the Park’s food resources are used. These are huge decisions that will continue to provoke great debate and they are decisions that possibly no-one is ready to make. Here on the ground then, the only thing we can do is make sure that next year the water pumping effort is at least as good as this year and that, if possible, more of the under-utilised infrastructure is brought back into action. That will at least ensure that we don’t decide the future of the Park by default – by simply failing to do anything – and it will give time for the tough decisions to be considered. Whatever else we do, one important thing is not to panic or over-dramatise. Some time in the future the situation may become desperate but we haven’t reached that point yet and the Park will be as wonderful next year as it has been this.

A storm at Mandavu

On Saturday as we were approaching Mandavu Dam from Masuma even the most inept weather prophet could see that rain was inevitable…

    By the time we reached Mandavu, rain was visible in the distance and the wind was starting to blow strongly……

Within minutes the rain started……

And our view was quickly obscured……

But within half an hour the rain had stopped and we drove to the top end of the dam to see if the Mandavu River was flowing. The dry dam-bed had changed from desert to swamp in a matter of minutes…..

  And the rivers were bringing new water into the dam….

    We had a similar experience the following day when rainfall upstream brought the Sinamatella River down in flood.

    Suddenly water and green leaves are everywhere and the harsh sights of the dry season are replaced by the soft colours of the wet….

The road towards our house at Sinamatella

And of course, with clouds in the sky there is more scope for Sue to add to our huge collection of sunrise and sunset photos!

Sunrise at Sinamatella.

Some recent trips

Our trips away from Sinamatella in recent weeks have spanned (we hope) the start of the rainy season. Just before the rain we took some of the children from Sinamatella School into the Park to see the animals close up. Living at Sinamatella they are surrounded by animals but rarely get to see them except from the top of the hill where the camp is situated. They were a bit shy at first – no big smiles for the camera!

Grade 7 2012, Sinamatella School.

We headed out to Masuma and were lucky to see lions just after we left the camp, then later a big herd of buffalo. At Masuma we found a scene of devastation. The ‘scooping’ of the dam had come to a temporary halt with heaps of drying mud still piled up around the edges. In the dam, just in front of the viewing point, an elephant lay dying in the shallows, large numbers of thirsty elephants were jostling noisily for water at the trough. A dead buffalo lay behind them, swelling horribly in the sun and at the back of the dam another elephant had collapsed and was barely alive.

An elephant dies in the water at Masuma

At the trough.

    The smallest elephant in the second photo above had a large wound on the side of its trunk through which water leaked whenever it tried to drink. It was forced to take many small sips but the bigger elephants allowed it to stay at the trough for a long time without bullying it. The wound was pink and clean and will probably heal.

    With two dying elephants and a dead buffalo close to the viewing point we arranged to return the next day to “clear up”. The buffalo was easy and we soon towed him away to what is becoming a large graveyard well beyond the dam.

    One of the elephants was dead and also soon towed away but the other was still just alive and had to be finished off first – not at all a pleasant way to spend the morning.

    Much better was a trip out to Inyantue from which we have just returned. The Inyantue area has had at least two quite good rain showers so far and is, to our eyes anyway, luxuriantly green. The river hasn’t flowed yet…….

Inyantue River

   In the Mopane woodlands we found the flowers of the ‘fire lily’ Scadoxus multiflorus……

    And grass seeds sprouting between the dead Mopane leaves…..

  Unfortunately we didn’t find what we were looking for – rhino. None has been seen in this area for several years but we had hoped that maybe one or two were there, unknown. It seems not.

    The main Bulawayo to Victoria Falls railway runs close to where we camped. Long ago the lines took a different route and Sue was struck by the contrast in the monumental style of a bridge for the old line…..

Remains of the old bridge at the Makwara River

And the functional crossing of the new line a few hundred meters down stream.

  In the past the Inyantue area has been the scene of a great deal of activity both for the railway and for mining. Out in the hills while we were walking, we found numerous prospecting trenches and a few old claim markers, the oldest still legible dating back to 1966. Presumably whatever the miners were looking for wasn’t there in sufficient quantities as there are no active mines and everything is back to being wild, overgrown and used only by the animals …..

    If only the rhino population could bounce back as easily as the bush does.

First rain, first power failure

     For most parts of Zimbabwe, especially urban areas, power cuts are a daily occurrence. Here at Sinamatella we are lucky that our electricity is connected via the town of Hwange which supplies a great deal of Zimbabwe’s home-produced power so we don’t often get cut off. In the rainy season however, things change. The power lines out to Sinamatella run on an old-fashioned series of wooden poles, often located on high ground and very vulnerable to lightning strike. When that happens we can be without electricity for several days while we wait for the fault to be located along the approximately 40km of cables. We had our first big thunder storm of the season on Saturday morning and, within minutes of the first clap of thunder waking us just before dawn, the electricity went down and stayed that way until now, three and a half days later.

     We saw the first distant lightning way out past Shumba towards the South on Friday night and Sue’s reflexes proved to be up to the task of pressing the camera shutter quick enough to get a photo.

    All ‘our’ elephants had left us to feed wherever it was that some rain fell a few weeks ago but had returned, presumably when the pools of water they were relying on there dried up. By Friday evening there were around fifty elephants at the Sinamatella River but they must have seen the distant lighning as well as we had, and were gone again by the morning. We haven’t seen a single one since.

    The storm took the whole night to reach us and wasn’t especially violent when it arrived. There were a few minutes of heavy rain followed by a couple of hours of steadier fall. Unfortunately the rain coincided with changeover day for anti-poaching patrols and the outgoing patrols had to set off from Sinamatella in dismal weather. My first drop-off points were in the northern sector as usual. Sue stayed at home to avoid taking up space inside the car where one of  the Rangers could otherwise keep dry so the “official photographer’ wasn’t there to record our mud-splattered journey or the slightly unnerving (but very slow) ninety degree skid that left us up to the axles in mud and temporarily broadside across the road near Chawato.

    Back from the northern sector in late afternoon I set off for distant Gubombiri, away to the South-west. I remembered to take the camera but not far from Sinamatella in that direction we found there had been no rain and there were no dramatic “stuck in the mud” photos to be taken. We met a small group of lions that had killed a buffalo close to the road so I did make some use of the camera.

 

   These are part of the pride whose dominant males are known as Jose, Patron and (to us at least) The Third Man. The young male in the photo will presumably soon be chased away by the ruling coalition to live a nomadic life until he can get a territory of his own.

    Returning from Gubombiri I heard a radio call from the driver of the Parks Land Cruiser that he was stuck in mud on the road to Bumboosie South so next I headed out that way. It is a bad road just after rain and I made it worse by missing a ‘detour’ in the dark and heading up a deep, muddy gully that had once been part of the road. We got through, as much by luck as skill, towed the Parks Cruiser to safety, delivered the rangers for their patrol at Bumboosie South and finally reached home close to midnight. With no electricity we sat on the veranda to eat a belated dinner by the light of our old-fashioned but bright paraffin lamp. The light attracted a mass of beetles and newly hatched ‘flying ants’ and Sue made good use of the camera again with these fascinating photos of them….

 

Sharing the veranda with all these insects is interesting for a while but eventually we get fed up with beetles down our necks, moths between the pages of whatever we try to read and seemingly every winged insect in Sinamatella trying to get into our food so we have to reluctantly turn out the light and go in the house.

Yesterday, we watched another elephant die

    It has been hot recently - very hot. After dispersing for a few days following scattered rain a couple of weeks ago, the elephants are back and they are dying in the heat. Sitting at the viewing point at Mandavu Dam it is possible to count six reasonably “fresh” elephant carcasses (if “fresh” is a word that can ever be applied to something so smelly). At Masuma and Shumba the carcasses are usually dragged away so that the smell doesn’t reach the viewing platforms but at both of these places the remains of many dead elephants are clearly visible.

    Lions are one of the causes of death at Masuma. The big “Mohican” pride has killed four elephants in the past four days and when we passed there on Monday they were so full of meat they made no attempt to move away from the car and we got some nice photos.

  The vultures are no doubt grateful for the lions’ wastefulness…..

   Away from the “Mohicans”, the cause of death of the elephants is not completely clear. A very few seem to have died of a mystery disease in which their legs swell to grotesque proportions. More seem to be either too young or too old and to have died of ‘poverty’ in this over-long dry season. Others however look reasonably healthy and it isn’t easy to say exactly why they have died – stress through lack of food, competition for water, extreme temperatures and so on is the best guess. Yesterday we saw the end of one such animal.

   We had parked at the crossing of the Gubombire River to drop off an anti-poaching patrol…..

   Down at the river, a big bull elephant was drinking from a hole dug in the sand. As we stood watching he suddenly threw up his head, his back legs gave way and he sank to the ground in an uncomfortable cross-legged position.

   It was obvious that this wasn’t a natural position so we went closer and as we approached, his head sank to the ground…..

  

   He was still alive at this point, his ears moving feebly and his trunk stretching out in front of him.

   But as we all stood silently watching, his breathing stopped, his ears no longer moved and, without a sound, he died.

   Even after this rather ungainly death, he was still sufficiently awe-inspiring for us to be reluctant to approach but eventually we got over our fear and Sue took some photos to mark the death of yet another of our elephants…..

   If the rains are long-delayed, he won’t be the last.

Some news from Masuma

In June I wrote about the great game viewing in the dry season at Masuma Dam. Back then there was plenty of water in the dam and the animals were able to spread themselves out to drink

Masuma dam, 3 July 2012

By the end of the month the water was disappearing fast..

And Sable Antelope (Hippotragus niger) , never seen here except when conditions are very dry, were coming to drink.

Masuma Dam, 26 July 2012

  By September the water was very low and so stirred up by bathing elephants that nothing really wanted to drink it. The three remaining hippo came out of the mud to drink the fresh water coming from the pump.

Masuma dam 20 September 2012

And most of the animals and birds coming to the dam to drink also tried to use the pumped water.

Waterbuck

Impala and Guinea Fowl

By October, the water in the dam itself was all but gone.

The lions in the area had grown fat on the easy pickings of weak old buffalo and vulnerable young elephants

   Without the water it was clear that the dam was heavily silted. National Parks don’t have the resources to move such a huge amount of mud and the dam scoop made available by Wildlife and Environment Zimbabwe (WEZ) was busy in the Main Camp area so local mining company Makomo Resources offered to send in machinery to clear the dam. We went yesterday to see how they are getting on. For lovers of Masuma it isn’t a pretty sight….

There’s an impressive amount of mud to dispose of but the dam will surely be much improved without it and no doubt it will hold much more water next year. Our thanks to Makomo for their generous help.

The end of the dry season

This is (we hope), the end of the dry season. In the middle of October the heat was intense. For days on end the temperature didn’t fall below thirty degrees in our house, day or night, and at its hottest it reached thirty nine degrees. Outside, the view from the edge of the hill was of the flood-plain baking in the heat and almost disappearing in the heat haze.

   Then last week a few clouds started to appear, promising rain to come.

    Eventually the day came when the rain finally arrived. First there was a strong wind, raising clouds of dust from the bush across the Sinamatella River…..

   Then at last the rain fell and Sue rushed out with the camera to record the first drops falling on the verandah…..

   As usual we were not prepared and had to hurry around closing car windows, bringing in chairs and so on but we needn’t have bothered as the rain stopped almost as soon as it started, just leaving us to enjoy the smell of damp earth for a few minutes before it all dried up again.

    In one or two other places there has been slightly better rain and the elephants have gone to wherever it fell. They have left us with the bush around Sinamatella looking as if it can’t possibly recover. The Mopane scrub, which is the elephants’ least favourite has been broken down to elephant-height stumps with broken branches and hardly a blade of grass between the trees. It never looks exactly lush but now it looks awful

   More palatable bush such as Combretum which can be dense and green in the rains has been opened out in places until it looks almost as bad as the Mopane.

  And, for some of the trees the rain, when it finally comes, will be too late. Elephants have destroyed many small and a few medium sized Baobabs this year – a sad sight when they fall..

   But as usual, the situation is not as bad as it seems. The bush will of course recover, though we will need a couple of good years for it to get back to how it was at the end of last year.  Some of the plants are already preparing. This interesting purple succulent which we found near Chawato Sulphur Spring (and can’t identify), has flowered and sent out its airborne seeds to wait for the rain.

   And close to Bumboosie Springs the Rain Trees (Lonchocarpus)  and the Crotons have come into full leaf and have flowered.

    Meanwhile, back at Sinamatella, the Cicadas are singing, the sun is shining and we are still waiting for the rain. Last year, early rain was followed by weeks of scorching sun. We just hope this year isn’t a repeat of that.