There is more to management of the elephant population than putting a bullet in their heads, writes Sheree Bega.
Johannesburg - Seven years ago, the elephants of the Kruger National Park were very angry with Dr Sam Ferreira. They defecated in the driveway of his home in Skukuza and shoved his car around like a toy at least four times.
Ferreira, a large mammal ecologist, had joined the Kruger’s team of conservationists in the midst of one the most fractious periods for elephant conservation: SANParks was locked in a hugely emotive debate over its plans to restart culling after a 13-year ban.
“That was also at the time they were starting the abattoir and the elephants were very angry with me,” remembers Ferreira, smiling. “But I haven’t had an elephant do that to me in years and it’s because the Kruger’s elephants are now in the space they need to be.”
And, after all the years he has spent shielding elephants, the khaki-garbed scientist, who sports a gold earring, still takes his guidance from the enigmatic, powerful creatures.
Don’t talk about culling. That’s because there’s a lot more to managing the elephants in the Kruger than putting a bullet in their heads, he believes. But between 1966 and 1994 that’s exactly what authorities did – killing over 16 000 elephants to limit numbers.
Ferreira is pleased that there has been a shift from the agricultural mindset of culling which has been “absolutely embedded in the SA psyche”.
Conservationists are far more interested in encouraging diversity, he says, and he is proud to be part of a team that is “thinking outside the box” about elephant conservation.
“If you want to manage the effects of elephants, what you’re really interested in is managing the landscape and restoring the natural variation in landscapes.”
Just how many elephants are there in Kruger today? It’s a question Ferreira is asked all the time. A formal survey last year identified around 16 000 elephants roaming the park. A better question for Ferreira is how do elephant densities vary across the park?
In 2005, SANParks recommended wiping out thousands of elephants in what would have been the largest slaughter in the world, citing how elephant populations in parks like the Kruger were negatively affecting biodiversity. But it unleashed fury among some conservationists and animal-rights activists who called for tourism boycotts.
By 2008, former environmental affairs minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk, after declaring it a “devilishly complex” problem, ruled that culling would only be allowed once all the other available options including contraception, translocation and wildlife corridors, had been ruled out. Since then, explains Ferreira, only “problem” elephants have been shot.
In the Kruger, it is about encouraging high and low elephant densities to develop in different areas of the park. “There is no such thing as an ideal number,” he believes.
“If you have a forest and a grassland making up the Kruger, do you expect we’ll have the same number of elephants per km2? No. Kruger happens to have 35 different landscapes.”
Earlier this year, conservationist Salomon Joubert, who headed up the Kruger between the 1980s and 1994, demanded culling urgently resume as elephants were “knocking the daylights” out of important ecosystems in parts of the park.
But even as concern grows that elephant numbers are reaching a crisis point, an amazing thing is happening. In parts of the Kruger, the numbers are stabilising, and even levelling off.
Ferreira explains that, although elephant population size is increasing, it is doing so at a slower rate due to declining birth rates. A big part of this is because SANParks has closed more than two-thirds of its boreholes in the Kruger since 1997, and is now mimicking more natural water distribution.
“Two things are happening,” says Ferreira. “The elephant growth rate is dropping. It’s now 2 percent and it was 6 percent when we stopped culling… By the time we stopped, cows were having calves an average of every three to four years. At the moment we’ve worked it up to every 4.2 years. The year-on-year variation in elephant numbers is larger. There’s a bigger bouncing up and down of numbers.
“Generally what we’re seeing is that elephants are using landscapes differently than they did before. They are actually going to some places often, some places sometimes and others very little, and that’s the variation we want to see.”
SANParks says management actions like culling that forcefully keep animal numbers constant are unnatural. It’s a far cry from the decades where it fixed numbers at between 6 000 and 8 000 elephants.
Professor Norman Owen-Smith, of Wits University, who served on the Elephant Science Round Table, a collection of the world’s top elephant scientists to lead the elephant assessment process, projects that the Kruger could potentially support over 30 000 elephants.
This is based on comparisons with Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe and Luangwa in Zambia, which are currently carrying densities around or exceeding two elephants per km2, he explains.
“For the growth of the elephant population to eventually cease, elephants must experience the effects of food shortages on their rates of reproduction and survival of calves.
“By restricting water supplies, food shortages become acute during the dry season when elephants must drink regularly, but are alleviated once the rains come and elephants can move more widely.
“It is evident that this mechanism is slowing or perhaps even halting the growth of the elephant populations in Hwange and Luangwa.”
Ferreira agrees. “If an elephant gets to a tree too regularly, what happens? The tree dies. What causes an elephant to get to the same tree very often? Where its key resources are. Food, water, shelter or being away from people.
“If you have now gone and put additional water in a landscape, they can stay in the dry season in areas they would not normally have been and those trees have elephants all the time and that is elephant impact. If you want to manage elephant impact, you manage the landscape, and allow droughts to happen.
“You allow natural variability to start. We need to work around the things that were done wrong in the past. We’re already seeing how elephants respond differently in different regions of the Kruger. In some regions there are some signs of it stabilising.
“In the south there has been a reduction in the birth rate. Cows have to walk long distances between water and good food and are finding it harder to reproduce. In the north, we’ve really increased the distance to water, affecting the survival of calves who are just weaned. They are having a much harder time. Some people are saying the Kruger is starving thousands of young elephants. We’re not. You would see bodies lying all over.”
Thousands of elephants in the Kruger mean a substantial opening of the tree canopy cover, says Owen-Smith. “This is clearly evident in fenced enclosures established within the park. However, we are unsure how the vegetation changes will vary over different regions of the park, and what the consequences will be for other species.
“There is much that we still need to learn about the factors governing elephant movements and what causes them to concentrate in particular places at different times of the year.
“But it is also crucially important to study how tree species cope with the impacts of elephants and where these trees might persist in places where elephants concentrate less densely during the dry season when most tree damage occurs.”
Culling, says Owen-Smith, is crude and impractical, while contraception does not alleviate the impacts that the elephants will continue to have on vegetation. “Wildlife corridors can be helpful in alleviating local densities, provided the area available is large enough, but allowance needs to be made for resolving conflicts with humans living near the corridors. There is no longer space left for elephants to be translocated.”
Jason Bell, the elephants’ regional director at the International Fund for Welfare, lauds SANParks’s rethink.
“The key issue is that they’re no longer focused on managing elephants, they’re looking at managing the landscape and so it’s more about how elephants interact with their environment, understanding that and managing that. Elephants are having an impact. What is driving that impact? They’re trying to manipulate the way elephants use space.”
Ferreira says while elephants do push down trees, this also creates habitat for other species.
“Yes, they could pull down one tree, but leave a whole bunch standing. It also creates opportunities for diversity.”
He has spent the past few months running through 48 risk assessments for elephants, including planting chilli peppers, detonating firecrackers and chasing elephants with helicopters from areas where there is concern over possible impacts.
“It’s an experiment that’s about to get under way. You have to learn by doing.”
But he is certain about one thing. “There’s no way you can practise conservation for conservation’s sake. You have to improve people’s livelihoods by sensible natural resource use. You have to put people first and do it in a way that the conservation benefits are accidental.”
Saturday Star