Chapter 2
Africa’s big animals have long been a vivid reality
for me. I spent the first half of my life in South Africa,
and visits with my parents to that country’s biggest
wildlife sanctuary, the Kruger National Park, are among the
best of my early memories.
It was only when I returned to South Africa after a twenty-seven
year absence that I realized what an extraordinary phenomenon
the Kruger National Park really is. The research I’d
done for this book had informed me that it isn’t peculiar
or unexpected when humans exterminate big animals.
We’ve been doing it for hundreds of thousands of years.
What is, however, extraordinary, – what does call far
an explanation – is the fact that so many species of
big animals have survived in the Kruger Park. Kruger
is one of the very last places in Africa where all of the
continent’s 2,000 lb-plus animals – elephants,
white rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, black rhinoceroses, giraffes
and elands – still exist together in viable numbers.
The planet’s largest bird, the ostrich, is found there
too, as well as what’s arguably its largest flying bird,
the bustard Ardeotis kori.
Many of Africa’s big animals and birds were inoculated
(as we saw a few paragraphs back) against the lethal power
of human intelligence by their early and continuing contact
with our kind. Around three thousand years ago, however, human
pressure on the African megafauna slowly started building
to a new level. Black, bantu-speaking people which had previously
occupied a relatively small area in the vicinity of present-day
Cameroon, started developing agricultural, pastoral and metallurgical
skills which allowed them to expand their numbers and their
geographic range. In doing so, they displaced and/or absorbed
the San and Pygmy hunter-gatherers which had previously occupied
most of sub-Saharan Africa. About 350 years ago – some
two millennia after the first black farmers had entered present-day
South Africa – white farmers from Western Europe with
even more sophisticated technology started settling the continent’s
southern end.
The African megafauna may have been relatively resistant
to the presence of hunter-gatherers like the Pygmies and the
San, but it couldn’t withstand the human population
growth that started building up with the spread of agriculture
across Africa. That population growth did a slow burn at first,
but it exploded in the Twentieth Century. It’s no coincidence
that Kenya lost three-quarters of its elephants and virtually
all of its rhinos soon after the 1960s, when the growth of
that country’s human population hit a rate which would
see it double in less than twenty years.
Partly because of the presence of white settlers equipped
with firearms, South Africa’s megafauna had gone into
decline about a century before that of East Africa. It’s
only because the growth of South Africa’s human population
had temporarily been reversed by the terrible “mfecane”
wars of the early Nineteenth Century, and because malaria
and cattle sicknesses like nagana hampered the establishment
of farming communities in the north-eastern wilderness which
is now the Kruger Park, that small populations of megafauna
were still in existence at the end of the Nineteenth Century.
When the reprieves granted those species by human conflict
and disease ran out toward the end of that century, they were
saved yet again – this time when South African government
authorities created the game reserves that formed the nucleus
of the Kruger Park in the old Transvaal region, and protected
the last of South Africa’s rhinoceroses in Zululand.
If you’d invested $60 back in 1897 at 5% compound interest
per annum, your descendants would have just over $12,240 by
the end of 2006. That’s a close approximation of the
rate at which the population of South Africa’s “giant”
or “white” rhinoceros Ceratotherium simum
has grown back from near-extinction. The 40-80 white rhinos
that survived in South Africa in 1897 managed, under effective
government protection, to increase their population to the
point where there are in the year 2006 around 12,000 of them
in existence. Populations of South Africa’s other megafauna
also experienced big increases in the course of the Twentieth
Century, and the Kruger Park contains, as a result, the most
complete collection of African “big game” on the
entire continent. Few people realize, though, that Kruger
has an even wider significance than this – that it has,
through a mixture of dumb luck and the actions of a few visionary
conservationists, managed to retain a relatively intact community
of a formerly planet-wide megafauna.
* * *
On my first visit to Kruger after my return to South Africa,
a pride of lions took advantage of the smoke and confusion
of a veld fire to kill a giraffe. By the time I came on the
scene, both the kill and the fire were over. The giraffe was
lying half-eaten on the blackened grass, and only big branches
which had been left on the ground by elephants were still
burning. A lioness walking through the smoke in her grim,
inimitable lioness way made me realize that I was every bit
as fascinated by Kruger’s big animals as I had been
as a small boy.
That fascination extends, however, to the supporting cast
of organisms that surrounds and sustains those big beasts.
Watching a gathering of elephant families on the Mphongolo
River in Kruger’s northern end, I saw what looked like
a hummingbird hovering around the whitish flowers of a Combretum
bush next to the open window of my car. I did a doubletake
because there are no hummingbirds in Africa, and realized
that I was looking at a large moth with a beak-like proboscis.
Viewed from above, the hovering moth’s color was a soft
fawn, but its underside was marked with dazzling blacks and
whites. My eye went from the moth to a small, lemon-yellow
spider crawling on the combretum, and from there, to a busy
ant-traffic moving along its branches. Two species of wasp
were, I noticed, also visiting the bush – a black one
so slender that I mistook it, at first, for a damselfly, and
a larger bluish kind with a bright yellow abdomen.
My attention was drawn back to the elephants for a moment
when a big bull caused excitement in one of the families by
testing the sexual readiness of a cow with his trunk, but
it returned to the bush next my window when an enormous black
wasp with red legs approached for a landing. Metallic blue
beetles with yellow heads were also visiting the bush, and
a blood-red fly hovering around its flowers caught my eye.
It was impossible, though, to make out the details of all
the flies, bees, moths and butterflies that were trying to
keep station with those sparse, off-white flower-clusters
as they bobbed around in the wind.
I feel the same fascination which the Combretum
bush and its visitors produced in me, when I see Barbus
mariquensis fishes flashing like bars of gold in the
fast waters of Kruger’s Letaba river, or when a blemish
on a tile in the Nwashwitshaka research camp’s washroom
turns out, on closer inspection, to be a white tree-frog.
It comes to me, too, when I see the cold beauty of a Trigoniceps
vulture, and it makes me stop and look at flowering knobthorn
acacias and wild pear trees the way other people stop to look
at buffaloes or lions.
Late winter/early spring is a great time to be in the Park.
That’s when the leafless branches of the Erythrina
trees display their impossibly red flower-clusters against
the deep blue African sky, and when the Gardenia trees are
covered with white blossoms. My Palgrave’s Trees
of Southern Africa is open all the time. Maybe, I think,
I’ll discover some deeper truth about this remarkable
place if I can identify that tree or this little bush. Biodiversity
is long though, and my botanical knowledge, short. I can’t
find the bush I’m looking at in Palgrave, or in Codd’s
Trees and Shrubs of the Kruger National Park. The
only thing I can tell about it is that it has pods, and that
it’s a member, therefore, of the pea-family Leguminosae.
Those pods are what drew my attention to it in the first place
– how, I wonder, can they be that long and
that thin? Evolution seems to have created Africa’s
Leguminosae the way Mozart wrote piano sonatas –
always searching for a more humorous, more unlikely and more
poignant variation on a theme as simple as peas in a pod.
* * *
For better or for worse, I’ve always been a nature
freak. Growing up in Johannesburg, I spent a lot of my time
on the banks of a tiny creek which wound its way through the
rural suburb of Sandown. That creek, too small to have a name,
flowed into a larger stream called Sandspruit, which ultimately
joins the Limpopo river. Big freshwater crabs lived in it,
and I discovered that I could catch them with string and a
piece of meat. Expert handling was required to avoid claws
that could – and did – draw blood. I was usually
satisfied with a standoff, allowing the crabs to retreat backwards
into the water with raised claws after I’d pulled them
up onto the bank.
It wasn’t necessary to use a hook to catch the crabs
– they simply hung on to the meat that I’d tied
to the string. I noticed, though, that the meat would sometimes
be grabbed by hard-to-see grayish creatures which would
let go before I could pull them clear of the water. I solved
the mystery of the gray meat-eaters by presenting the bait
on a bent pin: they turned out to be “platannas”
(Xenophus laevis) – frogs which were so exclusively
aquatic that they kicked along on their bellies on land, unable
to sit or hop.
Dipping a net made of a sheet of fly-screen into the creek’s
biggest pool to catch tadpoles, I was amazed to see it come
up with small silver fishes bouncing on its mesh. They were
the first wild freshwater fishes I can remember seeing. I
slipped some of them into a bottle to take home to my parents’
fish-pond. The thick glass near the bottom of that old-style
coke bottle magnified their heads enough for me to notice
that they had two pairs of delicate, semi-transparent “barbels”
hanging like mustache hairs from their upper lips. Those mustaches
rang a bell. My grandfather, a zoologist-paleontologist at
South Africa’s Free State University, had given me a
book on fish and fishing in India by a nineteenth-century
colonial official called H. S. Thomas – and the position
and relative size of my little fishes’ barbels exactly
matched those of a huge Indian freshwater fish called “mahseer”
whose illustration I’d seen in that book.
Looking again at the illustrations in Thomas’ book,
I found that the resemblance between my little Johannesburg
fishes and the great Indian mahseer was astonishingly close.
It wasn’t only visible in their barbels, but also in
their relatively long and round bodies, the position of their
eyes and mouths, and the shape of their fins. How, I wondered,
could my little one-and-a-half-inch fishes be so similar to
a fish which regularly reached four feet in length and had
been known to reach ten?
The two species were similar enough, I suspected, to be closely
related. I knew from Thomas’s book that the mahseer
was Barbus tor, so I guessed that my little fishes
might also be Barbus something or other. That turned
out to be right – when Rex Jubb’s Freshwater
Fishes of Southern Africa appeared some years later,
I found out that they were Barbus motebensis. Like
many of the big nineteenth-century genera, Barbus
has now been broken up, leaving the mahseer in the genus Tor,
but that doesn’t invalidate the accuracy of my guess
about the close relationship between my little fishes and
the Indian mahseer. It struck me that my barbs and those which
inhabited India must have a relatively recent common ancestor,
and that the descendants of that ancestor must therefore have
spread from Asia to Africa or vice versa. (Asia is, it happens,
their ancestral home.) This gave me a fresh understanding
of the fact that the natural world has a real and complex
history – a history which was, of course, no less real
and complex just because I didn’t happen to know anything
about it. Making the connection between Barbus motebensis
and Barbus tor, made me realize, too, that I could
unearth bits of that history. The pleasure of seeing those
bits for myself was not, moreover, the least bit diminished
by the fact that other people might have seen them before
me.
* * *
Back in South Africa in the year 2000 after an absence of
twenty-five years, I decide to see what the pools in which
I caught my little barbs look like now. Johannesburg has changed
so much that I have a hard time finding the creek. When I
finally do, I see that townhouses have been built along its
banks. The complex on the south bank, where I’ve parked
my car, is called “Glenwood,” – a name as
denatured and bland as the environment itself has become.
“Glenwood” is surrounded by a tall, spear-pointed
palisade fence bearing announcements that its security company
provides a 24-hour armed response. I’m told at the entrance
that there’s no access to the water, but I’m able
to get through to “my” section of the creek, nonetheless,
from the Linden Street bridge with nothing but a small razor-wire
scratch on one leg. The fish disappeared from this creek years
before, so I know I’m not going to find the ecosystem
I experienced here in the mid-fifties, but I’m still
not prepared for the extent of the change.
The creek is still flowing, but the pools I knew as child
are hard to recognize because of the bricks and chunks of
concrete that have been dumped into them. The ravine through
which the creek runs is darker, too, than I remember it –
the open veld with its wild carnations and amarilluses, and
its Triandra red-grass, has been replaced by a gloomy
weed-forest of willows and poplars from Europe, Solanum
from South America, and eucalypts from Australia. With a start
I recognize, however, the shapes of the reddish quartz outcrops
that surround the pool in which I caught my first Barbus
motebensis.
The water in that pool has a nauseating smell now, and it’s
covered with bobbing flotillas of styrofoam. The alien vegetation
on its banks is festooned with the shreds of flood-borne plastic
bags. Those shreds wave like sad pennants over drifts of tin,
styrofoam and plastic containers. I pick up a rusty aerosol
can, and make out the barely-legible Afrikaans phrase hou
buite bereik van kinders – keep out of reach of
children.
Why am I braving the sewage smell to poke through this debris?
Am I expecting to find a clue to the cause of the disaster?
That’s not going to happen – this maroon jar tells
me only that Easy Waves Creme Relaxer has been specially formulated
to relax coarse to resistant hair, and this red plastic bottle,
that Valvolene Automatic Transmission Fluid type II D meets
the stringent requirements of General Motors. I can’t
blame Estée Lauder or Colonel Sanders for what has
happened here – it feels more like a tragedy than a
crime.
A few months before I got back to South Africa, my father-in-law
died at the age of 89. He’d remained charming and intellectually
stimulating to the end, and I miss him. His son emailed yesterday
from Cape Town to say that the family had received permission
to place a memorial bench to his dad on Robberg, a nature
reserve on South Africa’s southern coast where the old
man had fished and walked for years. I was asked for my thoughts
about the wording of the memorial, but, toying with phrases
like “In memory of Dr. ___ ___ who loved this peninsula,”
I realized that my mind was on another memorial – one
I wanted to erect on the Linden Street bridge next to my little
creek. It would say
In memory of Barbus motebensis,
a small fish species which inhabited this stream up to 1960,
when the water became too polluted to sustain its continued
presence
* * *
Degradation of the natural world by our species
feels so far beyond our capacity to remedy or even understand
that it seems impossible to say anything meaningful about
it. I confess that I sometimes turn away from the issue in
small ways. A few days before writing this paragraph I found
myself turning off my car radio in the middle of a story of
how farmers were destroying cheetahs in Namibia, and I regularly
skip over newspaper and magazine reports of tropical rainforest
destruction. I know I’m hiding my head in the sand,
but I feel a need to protect myself from obsessing over issues
which I can do nothing about. I feel trapped between a sense
that we don’t say enough about the all-encompassing
problem that we call “the ecological crisis,”
and the idea that we’ve talked about it so obsessively
for the past thirty years that it has become an empty cliché,
reduced to the sanctimonious “eco-friendly” advertisements
of corporations who’ve decided that green is good for
business.
The human-caused extermination of life-forms on our planet
is an unrelenting and accelerating process. During the nineteen
sixties, when the environmental movement started to gain momentum,
the stock of wild animals remaining on the earth was a pale
reflection of the one that had existed, say, at the beginning
of the Nineteenth Century, when there were less than a billion
people on earth, and when lions ranged all the way from North
Africa across the Middle East into India. Twenty-first century
conservationists would love, however, to turn the clock back
to the “biologically impoverished” 1960s when
vast tracts of forest which have since been destroyed still
existed in the Americas, West Africa, Madagascar and South-East
Asia. They would love to resurrect too, the huge and barely-known
range of living organisms that was “incidentally”
exterminated by the destruction of those forests.
Human hunting has affected far fewer species than this kind
of wholesale habitat destruction, but it has, nevertheless,
devastated several populations of large, well-known animals
in the past quarter-century. In the early 1970s there were,
for instance, somewhere around 60,000 black rhinos in East
and Central Africa. Today, that population has been almost
completely annihilated. Outside the Kruger Park, and a few
other reserves in the southern end of Africa, black rhinos
are effectively extinct. The last thirty years have also seen
intensive hunting in the Amazon Basin which resulted in steep
declines in the populations of alligator species, giant otters,
manatees, tapirs, jaguars, and ocelots.
From a purely quantitative point of view, human exploitation
of wildlife reached its all-time peak in 1989, when a record
worldwide catch of 86 million tonnes of fish was made. That
catch has never been equaled, and probably never will be,
because important and famous fish stocks (such as the cod
on Newfoundland’s Grand Banks) have been reduced to
a state of commercial extinction since it was made. Human-caused
reduction of the world’s fish populations has not, however,
been restricted to certain stocks or certain regions. From
the tropics to the poles, industrial fishing has seriously
diminished populations across the board.
As was the case with mammals and birds, the world’s
largest fishes have been among the first to be pushed
toward extinction. A study by Ransom Myers of Dalhousie University
in Nova Scotia, featured as the cover story of the May 2003
Nature, announced that no less than 90% of the world’s
biggest fishes – including bluefin tuna, marlins, swordfishes
and big sharks – have been killed off since the onset
of industrial fishing in the 1950s. “These,” writes
Myers’ co-author, Boris Worm of the University of Kiel,
..are the megafauna, the big predators
of the sea, the species we value most. Their depletion not
only threatens the future of these fish, and the fishers who
depend on them, it could also bring about a complete re-organization
of ocean ecosystems, with unknown global consequences.
* * *
Conservation initiatives such as those which saved animals
like the Arabian oryx and the Pacific gray whale from extermination
are unquestionably welcome developments, but success stories
like those must unfortunately be recognized for what they
are: isolated exceptions to an accelerating, planet-wide decline
in the diversity of living organisms. Species which are sliding
toward extinction don’t always succumb to clear-cut
threats that can be readily identified and dealt with. Nobody
can say, for instance, exactly which human activities are
causing the viral infections and cancers which are exterminating
marine mammal populations as widely separated as harbor seals
on the coasts of Northern Europe, striped dolphins in the
Mediterranean, and beluga whales in the gulf of Saint Lawrence.
Fertilizer runoff is the leading suspect in the recent worldwide
increase in “red tides” which have caused the
poisoning deaths of other marine mammals, but it may not be
the only cause of those toxic alga blooms. Nobody can list
all the factors which are causing the decline of Britain’s
insect diversity. (A decline in insect diversity is, moreover,
almost certainly taking place over a much wider area than
the British Isles–Britain just happens to be the only
country which surveys its insect species systematically and
regularly enough to establish beyond doubt that, at least
in that country, a reduction of that kind is taking place.)
The ban on DDT (prompted in part by the appearance of Rachel
Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962) has resulted
in an increase in the numbers of bald eagles and other raptors
in the United States since the sixties, but, since the early
seventies, a broader decline affecting scores of that country’s
songbird, shorebird, waterfowl and grassland bird species
has become apparent. This “second wave” of threatened
and actual extinctions doesn’t result from a single,
“treatable” cause like the use of DDT, but from
a large array of partially-identified and difficult-to-change
human activities such as local and tropical deforestation,
the draining of wetlands, the use of non-DDT pesticides and
of fertilizers, prairie plowing, and the “suburbanization”
of habitat, which has exposed songbirds to “human-subsidized”
enemies like opossums, raccoons, cats, rats, blue jays and
cowbirds.
The immediate causes of some of the contemporary declines
and extinctions may be obscure, but there’s no doubt
whatever that human activity in one form or another underlies
almost all of them.
* * *
The extinction of Wallace’s “huge, fierce and
strange” beasts was like the death of a canary in a
coal mine: it provided the first indication that this enormous
human-caused mass-extinction had begun. Very, very recently
however – not much more than a century ago – another
extraordinary phenomenon started affecting the lives of the
planet’s remaining big animals; one that could also
be an early manifestation of a big future development: humans
started to work against, to check their tendency
to exterminate them.
During the Twentieth Century, we saved scores of big-animal
species from otherwise certain extermination by our own species.
The blue whale, the biggest animal ever to have lived on our
planet, provides the most compelling example of this phenomenon.
Because our species has made a collective decision to stop
hunting blue whales (and imposed that decision on its own
members in a more or less effective manner) this animal is
presently recovering – albeit very slowly – from
a hunting holocaust which saw more than 29,000 individuals
destroyed in 1931 alone. Its population is thought to be around
9,000 individuals worldwide; less than 5% of what it was before
humans started reducing it in the Nineteenth Century. That
number may be close to the minimum population this wide-ranging,
thinly-spread species requires to turn the corner, but our
species has, at least, given it a chance of surviving our
predation. It’s almost certain that gray, humpback,
bowhead, and right whales would also have been exterminated
by now if humans hadn’t made a decision to stop hunting
them.
A large number of land-dwelling animals would also have disappeared
during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries if we hadn’t
undertaken conscious and deliberate actions to protect them
from our own activities. American and European bison, all
five rhinoceros species, several North African gazelle species,
blackbuck, Pere David’s deer, blesbok, musk ox and saiga
antelope are in this category. So are the giant tortoises
of the Galapagos and the Seychelles, Arabian oryxes, black
wildebeests, addaxes, mountain gorillas, whooping cranes,
gharial crocodiles, and that icon of conservation, the giant
panda. Many other species – marine and terrestrial –
would at least have been close to extinction by now if humans
hadn’t started protecting them: fin whales, Bryde’s
whales, sperm whales, the two remaining elephant species,
many of the bear species, many of the larger deer and antelope
species, tigers, guars and manatees are a few which come to
mind.
The total number of species humans are killing off
is still increasing, of course,– and increasing catastrophically
as I’ve tried to point out – but the extermination
of the earth’s big mammals has, at least for the time
being, been slowed dramatically. Habitat destruction, especially
in tropical Africa and South East Asia, is threatening to
restart the process of wholesale large-mammal extermination,
and the fates of the Sumatran rhino and of several Asian river
dolphin species hang in the balance as I write this, but it
remains that dozens of big animals have been saved from extinction
over the last hundred years, and that they are, for now, still
in existence. Without appreciating either the magnitude or
the real nature of the task they’ve undertaken, humans
have begun to try and save the biosphere from themselves.
Even more remarkably, they’ve made that beginning by
saving the same kind of organisms whose extermination once
signaled the start of the human-caused extinction: the most
conspicuous, most charismatic members of the biosphere, its
big animals.
* * *
Consider this white rhino cow which we’ve
come across near the Phabeni “spruit” or creek
in the south-western part of the Kruger Park. She’s
distinctive because her long front horn curves forward rather
than back. There’s a small calf with her, as well as
a half-grown one. Under the big rhino-flies studded along
the animals’ flanks, are the kind of horizontal thorn-scratches
you see on a 4 x 4 that’s been driven through thick
bush. Nervous about our presence, the cow and her two calves
break into a trot as we draw closer. More than any other aspect
of this extraordinary wilderness around us, it is her improbable
presence which shows us that – regardless of whether
we think it can be won or not – the race to save the
biosphere has started.
Chapter 3 - Time
runs backward
