Caitlin OConnell - The elephants secret sense: the hidden life of the wild herds of africa

Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

R ALPH W ALDO E MERSON

I ALWAYS HATE TO LEAVE E TOSHA , but it was early August and the winds were picking up. It was time to pack up the site and head north. Sitting in the back of my truck, I looked through my binoculars at the scrubby horizon dappled with giraffe necks, trying to work up the energy to get my equipment organized when I heard a thick, leathery, swishing sound right next to me. I looked up to see 100 tons of pachyderm pass by, almost tiptoeing, heads bobbing in their Nordic Trackstyle gait. It was Broken Ear and her family, a group of twenty elephants, headed purposefully toward the water.

I noted when Broken Ear arrived and watched as her family assembled around the water. Being the matriarch, Broken Ear occupied the outflow of the artesian well, which was controlled in the dry season to sustain the large number of animals that depended on it to get through this difficult period. The dominant elephant always got the best water.

Broken Ear took a few long draws, rolling up her trunk and placing the water far back in her mouth, head tipped up. A few splashes escaped back into the pool. The howling gusts of wind had stopped, so I could hear the intermittent trickling of water escaping thirsty mouths. They were returning to the waterhole after their visit had been cut short the day before by the arrival of another family group led by a very intolerant matriarch that I called Collar.

Once the little ones had had their fill, they started to play. Young elephants are just as mischievous as lion cubs, always testing their boundaries with adults and jockeying for rank with siblings and other relatives. They stood at the pans edge, knee-high in water, and tipped over onto their sides to make as much contact with the mud as possible. Then they began to wallow, swatting at each other with their wet-noodle trunks. Their mouths were turned up in what seemed to me like smiles as they wailed and cavorted in the water. The mothers merely looked on and continued drinking.

Reluctant to break camp, I savored the moment. I jealously guarded my visits to this splendid waterhole that the Owambo people called Mushara, after a tree common to this sandy forested habitat, or sandveld, a large terminalia with papery magenta pods ( Terminalia prunoides ). Mushara is located in the eastern corner of Etosha National Park, Namibia, one of a few waterholes restricted to the public, with the added benefit of having a protected cement lookout, which provided me with a great vantage for my elephant studies. I had a few other favorite waterholes where I would sleep, either in the back of my truck or in a hide. But I had developed a special bond with Mushara because of its remoteness and the number of elephants visiting on a daily basis. As much as I enjoyed the isolation, I was conscious of its potentially negative effect on my preception of reality. I was looking forward to being clean again, having not been able to shower for more than a week, but I was also dragging my feet about leaving the tranquility.

I was not looking forward to returning to my life in the north of the country, the Caprivi, where, despite its remote location, an exhausted community game guard might knock at my door at any minute, having bicycled 12 miles in the heat to assuage the anger of his fellow villagers to report another incident of a crop-raiding elephant. I would miss the elephants of Mushara, which were more isolated from the threats of war and civilization, and head to a place where they were different animals altogether. Many elephants in the Caprivi were still reeling from a war-torn past, exposed to land mines, automatic weapons, and poaching, partly to feed the hungry Angolan soldiers for the last twenty years. And at Mushara, I, too, could be a different person.

I first came to Etosha National Park in 1992, contracted by the Namibian Ministry of Environment and Tourism to study elephant movements, demography, ecology, behavior, and interactions with humans. My partner, Tim, and I were stationed in the Caprivi region of Namibia. This day job allowed us to spend our winters in Etosha, where Tim would analyze the movement data he collected from nine elephants fitted with satellite and radio collars while I would have the luxury of focusing solely on elephant communication and behavior. I hoped to use that research to help farmers in the Caprivi to prevent elephants from raiding their crops, which sometimes amounted to a whole years worth of food consumed in one fell swoop.