Page 31 - Waterfall January 2022

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

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

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