Chapter 3
Time runs backward
Magical as the southern Kruger National Park
seemed to me when I first visited it as a small boy in 1954,
it was a biologically impoverished area. Of the four biggest
animals which had lived there up until the late nineteenth
century, (elephant, hippo, white rhino and black rhino)
only hippos survived. There were still elephants in the
Park’s remote northern end, but black rhinoceroses
and their giant relatives, white rhinoceroses, had disappeared
from the entire area.
I pleaded with my parents, of course, during that 1954 visit,
to drive up to Kruger’s northern end so that we could
have a chance of seeing the elephants. Like the vast majority
of visitors to the Park during the nineteen-fifties they preferred,
however, to stay in the south. Looking back I suppose it could
have been a matter of time and convenience for them –
we would have had to drive more than a hundred miles to reach
the Park’s northern regions, and that would have taken
more time than they’d planned to spend away from Johannesburg.
There was more to it than that though – a trip to the
northern part of the Kruger Park was regarded, at that time,
as a kind of expedition rather than a family vacation.
The feeling I got as a child was that Kruger’s northern
end wasn’t only remote but even dangerous. It was closed
to the public for much of the year because of the risk of
malaria, and the elephants themselves were thought of as a
hazard. My well-worn copy of Our South African National
Parks, published in 1940, told me that you might see
bull elephants alone or in small groups next to the road if
you went up north, but
[t]he large herds, containing females
and young, are shy and keep away from the roads; which is
fortunate; since the former might react dangerously did they
suspect any threat of harm to their children.
By the nineteen-fifties breeding herds were being
spotted from the roads, but they were still thought of as
dangerous. “Do not stop to photograph a herd of elephants
with cows and calves,” Eric Robbins warned visitors
to Kruger in his 1961 Africa’s Wildlife “but
make haste to get away.” I remember promising myself
after that first trip to Kruger that, when I was a grownup
with my own car, I would travel to those mysterious and inaccessible
northern regions. Perhaps I might even get a look (off in
the distance, as my imagination saw it, through gaps between
the green trunks of the fever trees) at the cow elephants
and their young.
I remember, too, assuming that there had never been
elephants in the southern part of the Kruger Park –
that it just “wasn’t elephant country.”
That was quite wrong. Elephants had been abundant there until
ivory hunters equipped with firearms started operating in
the area in the 1840s. The last elephants were seen there
sometime in the early 1880s. By 1900 there were – apart
from odd individuals wandering in from what was still “Moçambique”–
very few elephants anywhere in the territory that would later
become the Kruger Park.
In the early years of the twentieth century, conservationists
managed to put an effective stop to hunting in that territory.
As far as the elephants and rhinos were concerned, they were
closing the stable door after the horse was gone. Elephants
started filtering back, however, into the protected area from
neighboring Mozambique as a result of the hunting ban. By
the time South Africa’s northeastern frontier area was
legislatively proclaimed as the Kruger National Park in 1927,
the northern end of that area contained about 100 of them.
At the time of my first visit to Kruger in 1954, that 100
had grown to about 700, and a small number of elephants had,
in fact, already re-entered the southern end of the Park.
Few people had, however, heard about these returnees, let
alone seen them.
* * *
Fast-forward to 1991. I’m in the Kruger Park again
– this time with my ex-spouse and close friend Delphine,
and our teenage son Nick. Branches are cracking like rifle
shots as a herd of elephants feeds about fifty yards from
the road. I’m watching a young female through my binoculars.
She’s prying a piece of bark off a 15-foot Acacia
nigrescens tree with one of her tusks. Clamping it between
her enormous, six-pound molars, she backs up and pulls. The
tree bends to near-breaking before its foliage lashes violently
upright as a sheet of bark rips free.
The 700 elephants that lived in Kruger at the time of my
first visit nearly forty years before, have now become 9,000,
and the animals have long since completed their re-occupation
the southern part of the Park. The southern end is, in fact,
where I’m watching the young female stripping the nigrescens.
Delphine – our best animal spotter – says that
there’s a baby with the herd we’re watching. I
haven’t seen it yet, but that’s not surprising
– the elephants are feeding in thick bush. Delphine
has noticed, too, that the herd is moving along a path that
will intersect with the road a few hundred yards behind us.
She suggests that Nick turn around, drive back a quarter-mile
or so, do another U-turn, and wait for them.
While we’re doing this, I’m struck again by how
different the bushveld looks now that elephants have returned
to the area. The southern Kruger Park was a neat, literally
park-like place when I first saw it as a child, but now there
are dead trees all around us, and many of the living ones
are coppiced or growing at odd angles. Even trees that have
been pushed into a prone position can survive, I’ve
noticed, if some of their roots have kept a hold on the ground
– the horizontal trunks send up vertical branches that
eventually look like a row of new trees.
Delphine has guessed right about where the elephants are
planning to cross the road – they emerge from the bush
right ahead of us. We’re excited to see that they’ve
got not one, but two babies with them. A station
wagon drives up and stops on the opposite side of where the
animals are preparing to cross. The matriarch signals the
other elephants to wait, and walks onto the road alone. Turning
toward the station wagon, she spreads her ears and raises
her trunk. The station wagon gives a little jerk as its driver
shifts from park into reverse, but it only backs up a yard
or two. That, I’m interested to see, is enough for the
elephant – she seems more concerned with acknowledgment
than with space. She swings her enormous body around and walks
over to our car. Now it’s Nick’s turn to shift
into reverse. Towering over us, the big cow extends her ears
stiffly. We’re all a bit nervous, and Nick pushes the
gas pedal too hard. The wheels spin on the dirt road, showering
pebbles at the elephant’s front feet. For a second or
two she looks down at us impassively through her long, crinkly
eyelashes, then she turns away and signals the rest of the
herd to follow her across the road.
The matriarch is perhaps the biggest of the ten or so elephants
whose soft, ponderous steps are taking them between our car
and the station wagon. Up close we see that the larger of
the two babies is six months to a year old. The smaller one
can’t have been around for more than a few weeks. Its
legs twinkle back and forth as it runs between the great,
slow-moving limbs which surround it.
* * *
In a world in which more species are disappearing with each
passing year, time runs backwards in the Kruger National Park
– not only elephants but Africa’s two rhinoceros
species have come back from near-extinction to form viable
populations there.
The white rhinoceros is a giant which weighs, on average,
just on twice as much as the black rhinoceros. Perhaps because
many people’s ideas about African wildlife are shaped
by the fauna of the East Africa, the white rhino – which
isn’t found in Tanzania or Kenya – remains a relatively
poorly-known animal. The drama of its restoration from near-extinction
to a state of relative abundance took place, moreover, in
South Africa, which was, until the early 1990s, cut off from
the rest of the world by the policies of its former government.
Fifteen thousand years ago white rhinoceroses did
live in East Africa. Like the savannas themselves, with their
characteristic acacia, combretum and commiphora scrub, the
white rhino’s range stretched unbroken between Southern
Africa’s Kalahari desert and Northern Africa’s
Sahara. Then, starting around fourteen thousand years ago,
Africa was abruptly subjected to a regime of enormously increased
rainfall. This wet phase was the result of a world-wide climate
shift which we’ll look at in more detail in the appendix
to this book. The forests of the Congo Basin advanced into
East Africa in response to it, cutting the grassy savannas
of northern Africa off from those of southern part of the
continent and dividing the grass-eating white rhino’s
population, in the process, into a northern and a southern
group.
The pluvial or rainy regime gave way to a drier climate four
thousand years ago, allowing grassland to re-occupy what were
once again becoming the Serengeti plains, but the northern
and southern white rhino populations have not yet re-entered
East Africa to rejoin each other. Along with a great many
other dry-savanna species, ranging from the pygmy falcon Polihierax
through the bat-eared fox to Kirk’s dik-dik, white rhinoceroses
are still divided into widely-separated northern and southern
pockets. Before human hunting reduced it to virtual extinction,
the northern pocket of white rhinos was situated in an area
where Chad, the Sudan, the Central African Republic, and the
northern ends of Uganda and the Congo come together. The southern
pocket lay some two thousand kilometers away, in southern
Africa south of the Zambezi river.
The southern pocket of white rhinos was the first to face
the destructive power of firearms. Dutch colonists had established
themselves at the southern tip of Africa as long ago as 1652,
and, as they moved into the interior of Southern Africa during
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the white rhino was
among the first animals to disappear from the areas they settled.
Despite the fact that malaria and sleeping-sickness delayed
the intrusion of European settlers into the wilderness protected
by the present-day Kruger Park, the area was, as I’ve
mentioned, heavily hunted toward the end of the nineteenth
century. The last white rhinoceros was seen there in 1894.
By 1895 it was generally assumed that the entire southern
population of white rhinos had ceased to exist. Because the
existence of the northern pocket was not yet “known”
at the time – i.e. known to non-Africans – it
looked as if humans had just exterminated the planet’s
third-biggest land animal.
It was then discovered – “to everyone’s
surprise,” Ian Player tells us, – that a handful
of these giant rhinos had survived about 100 miles south of
the present-day Kruger Park at the confluence of the Black-
and White Umfolozi rivers in Zululand. A certain C. R. Varndell
responded to this discovery by organizing a hunting expedition
into the area. Varndell and his friends shot six white rhinos.
Judging from what he wrote about it in his Nature and
Sport in South Africa, published in 1897, H. A. Bryden
seemed to think that this was a good idea:
There can, I fear, be little doubt
that this rare and interesting quadruped will within the next
two or three years have become quite exterminated –
a creature of the past. Naturalists will have to thank . .
. Mr. Coryndon and Mr. Varndell for their skill and success
in procuring the first – and probably the last –
complete specimens of this mammal before its final extermination.
Others reacted in a more rational way to this attack on the
last population of giant rhinos. A conservationist by the
name of C. D. Guise wrote to the Governor of Natal, Sir Walter
Hely-Hutchinson, demanding that the animals be given protected
status as “royal game.” When Sir Charles Saunders,
resident commissioner of Zululand, issued a proclamation to
that effect in April of 1897, there were probably somewhere
between forty and eighty white rhinos left in the Umfolozi
area. Even if an isolated animal or two still survived in
the remote areas of what are now Botswana or Zimbabwe at that
point, it was quite clear that the Umfolozi survivors constituted
the southern white rhinos’ last viable population.
That population responded so well to protection that, by
the start of the 1960s, there were almost a thousand white
rhinos in Zululand. The small reserves which had been created
for their protection were, however, filling up at this time,
and it seemed that the remarkable resurgence of their population
might start to level off. Not far away from them, however,
the Kruger National Park – bigger than Tanzania’s
Serengeti National Park and Kenya’s Masai Mara put together
– still lay empty of rhinos. Beginning in 1961, therefore,
something which conservationists had been urging since the
1920s was finally undertaken: white rhinos were captured in
Zululand and released into Kruger. The Kruger population has
grown with gratifying speed, and there are, as a result, now
well over two thousand of them there (and, as I mentioned
in Chapter 1, over 12,000 overall).
* * *
The smaller, more secretive black rhino managed to hang on
in the Kruger area longer than its giant white cousin. By
the time hunting was prohibited there at the end of the nineteenth
century, its population had, however, fallen to a critical
low. Isolated individuals survived in the Kruger Park into
the nineteen-forties, but the species had, years before, declined
to the point of no return. Beginning in 1971, therefore, black
rhinos (which had survived in viable numbers in the Umfolozi
area in the shadow of the protection given to their giant
white cousins) were translocated to Kruger from Zululand.
Other black rhinos were brought in from Zimbabwe. Kruger is,
as a result, now home to a small but fast-growing population
of just over 300 animals.
Returning the black rhinoceros to Kruger was originally seen
as a matter of restoring the area’s original fauna rather
than a way of saving the species itself – there were,
after all, still at least fifty thousand black rhinos in east
and central Africa when that species was brought back to Kruger
in 1971. During the next twenty years, however, the black
rhino was eliminated from the east and central African savannas
as rapidly and completely as the bison were wiped off the
North American prairies a century earlier. Uganda, Kenya,
Tanzania and Zambia lost well over 95% of their black rhinos
during the 1970s and 80s. Even a famous sanctuary like the
Serengeti National Park – still thought of by many people
as an inviolable African wilderness – lost virtually
all its rhinos. The few hundred black rhinos in Kruger (where
poaching has, so far, been kept to an insignificant level)
has become one of the few viable populations of this species
in Africa.
The rhino-killing spree of the 1970s and 80s also pushed
the northern pocket of white rhinos to the edge of extermination.
The entire population of that pocket had by the year 2006
been reduced to some twenty individuals in Congo’s Garamba
National Park, and another handful of animals – aging
now, and not breeding – in zoos in the United States
and the Czech Republic.
The unthinkable has happened: South Africa, where rhinos
once hung on by the slenderest of threads, has become the
last bastion of both the white and the black species.
* * *
In addition to being re-introduced to the Kruger Park, rhinos
have been brought back to some of the other South African
localities they used to inhabit in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. In 1992, for instance, a group of black rhinos
was translocated from the Kwazulu Natal province on the eastern
side of the country to the Lapalala game reserve in Waterberg
mountains in South Africa’s “midwest.” Stressed
by the move, a pregnant cow gave birth and abandoned her calf.
Fortunately for the calf, it was found by humans rather than
by one of the brown hyenas or leopards that inhabit the area.
Weighing only 46 pounds, the little animal managed to survive
on fat-free cow’s milk to grow up in the world of human
beings. When I went to meet him recently, Bwana, now a seven-year-old
adult, came running up to the log barrier which separates
him from his human visitors to have his nose rubbed. His back
felt as rough and cool as the bark of a tree, but the skin
around his mouth and ears was soft and warm. I rubbed carefully
over one of his eyes, expecting him to pull away, but he shut
the eye instead, and leaned into my hand.
Bwana’s neighbor in the next boma was an adolescent
female white rhinoceros. She’ll be much bigger than
Bwana when she’s fully grown, but for now she’s
the same size. The placid nature of white rhinos is often
contrasted with the dangerously irascible disposition of their
smaller black cousins, but Bwana is so attached to human company
that it’s hard to see him as a dangerous animal. As
he strained across the log barrier to get closer to me, we
tried to touch noses. His front horn fetched up against the
peak of my baseball cap. I turned the cap backwards, and found
myself nuzzling a soft, dry stretch of skin between two huge,
runny nostrils.
It’s widely repeated, these days, that the name “white
rhino” is a “corruption” or “mistranslation”
of the Dutch name “wijde renoster.” The word “wijde”
(“wide”) is thought to refer to the white rhino’s
top lip – the grass-eating white rhino has a straight,
lawn-mower-type top lip, while the tree and shrub-eating black
rhino’s top lip is pointed into a kind of mini-trunk.
I don’t think this can be right. Firstly, the South
African Dutch or Afrikaans name for the white rhinoceros isn’t
(and has never been as far as I can tell) “wijde renoster.”
It is, in fact, “wit renoster” (which means, simply,
“white rhinoceros”). And nobody has argued that
the smaller species has ever been called anything else than
“swart renoster” (black rhino).
It seems to me, therefore, that the names “wit renoster”
and “swart renoster” originated, simply, in the
color difference between the species. Bwana, the black rhinoceros,
was a noticeably darker animal than the white rhino standing
a few yards away from him. Both animals had bathed in the
same wallow, and were covered with the same dust, but the
“white” cow was a light brownish-gray animal with
an unmistakably chalky sheen to her, while Bwana was a dark,
sooty gray. If you’d told a group of Muscovites with
no special knowledge about African wildlife that one of those
two rhinos belonged to a “black” species and the
other to a “white,” 90% of them would unhesitatingly
have picked Bwana as the black rhino.
While we were visiting with him, Bwana tried to open the
latch on the boma gate with his pointed, prehensile upper
lip. He obviously knew what he was doing, and might well have
succeeded if the latch wasn’t secured by a padlock.
He had gotten out, I was told, a few months before. Looking
for company at the nearby house of his adoptive parents Clive
and Conita Walker, he’d put his head through a bedroom
window. The occupant had just left the bedroom, but it must
have been a startling occurrence nevertheless, because the
window happened to be closed at the time.
Bwana has also “played with” cars during his
periods of freedom. Since I wrote this account of meeting
and rubbing noses with him, he escaped again, damaged an aircraft
on the reserve’s landing strip, and seriously gored
a ranger the next day. It’s ironic that the people in
Lapalala have become far more nervous about encountering this
“tame” black rhino during one of his periodic
escapes, than they are of meeting up with one of the area’s
wild black rhinos who can (almost) always be relied on to
run away when they sense the presence of our species.
PART 2
A closer look at some of mammals, reptiles and birds which
disappeared from Eurasia, Australia, and the New World after
our species entered the regions in which they lived.
