Page 27 - Irene Farm Village 12 2021

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

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

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