Levison Wood - The Last Giants

T HE L AST

GIANTS

Also by Levison Wood

Walking the Nile

Walking the Himalayas

Walking the Americas

Eastern Horizons

An Arabian Journey

Incredible Journeys

LEVISON WOOD

T HE L AST

GIANTS

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE AFRICAN ELEPHANT

Black Cat

New York

Copyright 2020 by Levison Wood

Illustrations by Tash Turgoose

Cover photograph Simon Buxton @simonbuxton

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First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Hodder & Stoughton An Hachette UK company

Published simultaneously in Canada

Printed in the United States of America

First Grove Atlantic paperback edition: November 2020

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.

ISBN978-0-8021-5847-5

eISBN978-0-8021-5848-2

Black Cat

an imprint of Grove Atlantic

154 West 14th Street

New York, NY 10011

Distributed by Publishers Group West

groveatlantic.com

For all the wildlife rangers and conservationists

who dedicate their lives to protecting all species

With special thanks to Dr Lucy Bates, Visiting Fellow at the School of Psychology, University of Sussex and Dr Graeme Shannon, Lecturer in Zoology in the School of Natural Sciences, Bangor University without whom this book would not have been possible. Their research and contribution has been invaluable, and their work instrumental in how we understand the world of elephants.

Contents

Once, when I was a young boy, my father took me to an art exhibition during the school summer holidays. At the time, my dad was a keen amateur painter, one of his many changing hobbies, and a famous artist called David Shepherd had brought his paintings to the local town of Leek where they were on display. Whats more, Mr Shepherd was in town himself, signing books and talking about his pictures.

Now at the age of eleven, I cant say I knew much about art, but I went along to humour my dad, who really wanted to meet this great man. When I got there, much to my relief, I found that the pictures were very good. There were lots of paintings of trains, planes and important people, but the ones I liked the most were the pictures of animals. There were tigers, zebras and rhinos although the paintings that intrigued me the most were the ones of elephants.

Do you like elephants? a voice called out from behind me, as I was staring up at the vast canvas.

I turned around to be confronted by a scruffy-looking, white-haired man, who appeared to me to be very old. I told him that I had never seen an elephant before in real life, but Id read about them at school and Id seen them on the David Attenborough documentaries. Well, one day Im sure youll see them for yourself, in Africa perhaps, he said, with a patient smile. He put out his hand and I shook it. It was David Shepherd, the artist himself.

Ask Mr Shepherd a question, my dad insisted. My mind went blank for a moment, before it occurred to me to ask whether or not he had always been a good artist. Mr Shepherd stroked his chin and smiled.

Young man, he said, shall I show you one of my first efforts at painting?

I nodded.

David Shepherd turned around and motioned for me to follow him to the corner of the room, where he had some bags and a large plastic folder, which he picked up and opened. He rustled around and out of it he pulled a yellowed piece of paper, no bigger than a normal A4 sheet. He handed it to me. I looked down and my astonishment must have been quite apparent.

Not very good is it? he said, beaming. I didnt know what to say. My dad had always taught me to be polite, but there was no hiding the fact that the sketch of some seagulls was in fact pretty bad. I shrugged and looked at the floor in embarrassment.

Dont be shy, young man. Its terrible. But you know what? I put my mind to it and spent all my time practising until I became good enough that people wanted to buy my pictures, and then I could call myself an artist.

I looked at the seagulls again. I was pretty sure I could do better than that myself, even at my age, and decided there and then that I wanted to become an artist too, and see for myself the wild elephants in Africa.

A year or so later, I found myself in the steamy coastal rainforests of southern Kenya, on holiday with my parents, surrounded by tall trees filled with glinting fish eagles and bewitching grey parrots. In the middle of the jungle lay a wooden treehouse made of cedar, which jutted into the canopy. Looking down from its beams in the half light of dusk, I could see the murky pools of Shimba Hills watering hole reflecting the tropical yellow moonlight.

The erupting orchestra of bullfrogs and cicadas sang a melody of exotic brilliance across the jungle and a magical scene began to unfold. There was movement below. Shapes teased the eye as blackened, boulder-like forms shifted through the foliage; huge yet silent ghosts seemed to float across the forest floor, gathering at the waters edge.

Elephants, dozens of them, appeared as if out of nowhere on their nightly pilgrimage to an ancient shrine. To the eyes of a child, it was wondrous and enchanting, and I stood transfixed my first glimpse of these magical beasts in the wild. I knew they could never be my last. It was the beginning of a lifelong love affair with Africa and its indigenous creatures.

Since then, although I never became an artist, I have travelled the length and breadth of the continent in various guises, and whenever Ive had the chance, Ive tried to make time to meet elephants. Ive been fortunate enough to go on safari in wonderful and exciting countries such as South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe, and to trek through wilderness areas and national parks as far afield as the Congo and Malawi.

Over the course of nine months between 2013 and 2014, I walked the length of the great Nile River, from Rwanda to Egypt, hiking over 4,000 miles and witnessing elephants in their natural habitat in Tanzania, Uganda and South Sudan, where I was lucky enough to be invited by the conservation charity The Tusk Trust to see their organisations work in protecting this species up close and personal on the ground.

Then again in the summer of 2019, I spent a month in Botswana walking with elephants on their annual migration towards the Okavango Delta, which gave me a great opportunity to see some of the very complex problems facing both local people and conservationists who strive to protect elephants.

As the twenty-first century progresses into its third decade, elephants are regarded as an endangered species. In my lifetime, the elephant population in Africa has halved from around a million in 1982 to only 415,000 in 2019. Between 20,00030,000 elephants each year are killed as a result of poaching and the illegal trade in wildlife. Thats one elephant slaughtered every twenty minutes. Many more are forced away from their traditional feeding grounds because of encroachment by humans onto wilderness areas, changes in land use, and the ever-greedy market for ivory and animal parts.