Page 33 - FWG Issue 11 December 2021

Nature

Many recall this when it was open forest, a parklike landscape of tall, stand-alone mopane trees. Did elephants reduce it to shrubbery, deliberately?

reached so far over that it snapped off mopane trees, another species favoured programmed to turn open forests into
near its base. by elephants. In those days the single- easily browsed head-high fodder banks?
stemmed 15 to 20m high standard As one team of scientists put it: Have
The tree’s wide crown blocked the route mopanes with their tall green canopies elephants gone into farming?
to Skukuza. It was only then that we were rose from the meadow-like landscape
able to see the elephant that had killed providing shade for creatures grazing I recall, in the mid-1970s, being invited
it. It was a male and, surprisingly, not a beneath. The scene was park-like, the sort as an observer, to join a team seeking a
particularly big one. As it strolled on to of open woodland that Pierneef liked to strategy to defend South Africa‘s last ilala
the road, a second male appeared and paint. palm forest. These 15 to 20m high trees
the two began picking at the branches in produce spherical shiny hard nuts (from
what used to be the tree’s crown. Grazers abounded. Elephants, being which vegetable ivory is extracted) which
major grazers, also have a huge appetite elephants also enjoy. The forest stood just
Did they extinguish this giant tree simply for mopane leaves and will sometimes before Letaba’s main gate.
to nibble at its top branches? Surely stand on their hind legs and stretch their
not. One hears of elephants during trunks to six or seven metres high to The scientists hardly slept a wink on
droughts knocking over trees to get at browse among the branches. their first night because of the sound of
their succulent roots but to habitually kill palms crashing down. Next morning they
large trees for a few minutes’ gratification Those hundreds of square kilometres stood shaking their heads: the country’s
makes no ecological sense. of this one time ‘parkland’ have, partly, last palm forest had been demolished by
thanks to elephants but also because of elephants.
Yet, according to one authority, elephants unplanned veld burning, been converted
in Kruger Park have, since the 1960s, killed into an almost unbroken sea of hedge- I was told many years ago, when ethology
off 95% of the park’s big trees. high mopane scrub. Elephants no longer (animal behaviour) was in its infancy and
need to stretch high up to browse. entailed a lot of surmise, that elephants,
I recall, in the 60s, north of Satara, as a kind of instinctive ‘civic duty’, often
seeing kilometre after kilometre of tall Are elephants, perhaps, genetically push trees into dongas thus checking

Fourways Gardens • 31 • December 2021