In order to gather evidence of the landscape in earlier times, David spent hours reading the diaries of the early explorers. He analysed the descriptions of Lord Lugard, the first white man to walk the length of the Galana River from the coast inland through what was now Tsavo; of Joseph Thomson, who walked through Masailand; of Krapf and Redman, the first to notice the snow-clad dome of Kilimanjaro as well as the snowy summits of Mount Kenya; of Meinertzhagen and Selous, who hunted in what was now the Park and wrote of enormous herds of ungulates which were extremely low in numbers when the Park was proclaimed in 1949. Through the analysis of such details, David believed that the demise of the commiphora-dominated thickets was perhaps being lamented out of all proportion, and that what we were witnessing was simply the reoccurrence of a perfectly natural vegetation cycle: woodland thicket to grassland and grassland back to woodland thicket, all triggered by the elephants having knocked out the trees to enable grasses to emerge for the grazing species, having planted another generation of trees in their dung, etc. He believed that the emerging grasslands would be beneficial, favouring an increase in biodiversity and generating a greater tourist appeal from easier viewing. It seemed ironic, in the aftermath of a successful anti-poaching campaign undertaken during times when we feared the annihilation of elephants, that we should now be accused of having too many.
Fortunately, we had an important ally visit us around this time. Dr Vesey Fitzgerald, an elderly naturalist, turned up unexpectedly and asked if he could spend a few days with us. He had recently cautioned the director of Tanganyika National Parks against a recommended buffalo cull that would have had far-reaching repercussions on many other species of the Lake Manyara National Park in Tanzania, bordering Lake Manyara, where David and I had spent our honeymoon. His belief that grassland in Tsavo would prove far more beneficial than dense commiphora thicket came as a welcome relief. Tourism would evolve into an important money-spinner for the country, and the new more open country provided easier tourist viewing. Like David, he thought the elephants should be left alone, that we should observe and learn from Nature’s way of redressing any imbalance. This, he said, was the enlightened management of the future.
Shortly after this heartening visit, ‘Chickweed’ Parker came to see David to try and persuade him to support the tender of his firm Wildlife Services. He had just culled elephants in Uganda’s Murchison Falls National Park, a grisly but lucrative task. Having abandoned the experiment of trying to create a viable occupation for the Waliangulu ex-poachers by way of the Galana Game Management Scheme, ‘Chickweed’ had established himself as a professional elephant cropper and in Uganda had worked closely with the scientist Dr Richard Laws. He hinted that the spin-off from any possible Tsavo culling contract could prove financially beneficial for all involved – including David. It was his view that some 10,000 elephants would probably have to be removed from the Tsavo population, three times more lucrative than the cull he had just undertaken. ‘The elephants are going to go anyway,’ he predicted pessimistically, ‘and those of us who protected them all these years deserve some of the spoils.’
Parker was not alone in beginning to understand that corruption was creeping into the top echelons of independent Kenya. Prominent personalities and their relatives were beginning to dabble in ivory, rhino horn and charcoal as a means of enrichment. In fact it was this new development, coupled with the subtle innuendoes of Parker’s conversation, that convinced David that if Tsavo’s elephants ended up having to be culled, this would have to be done by officers of the National Parks Service rather than being handed out to private enterprise influenced by financial incentives. So David flew to Nairobi to try to pre-empt any decision that could have adverse long-term repercussions on elephants in Kenya overall.
He returned with the news that the grant-awarding American-based Ford Foundation had come up with money to finance an elephant research project in Tsavo, in which the dynamics of elephant population in relation to vegetation growth, climate and other related factors would be studied, and that Dr Laws, Ian Parker’s colleague, would be heading Tsavo’s research programme. In one way we were relieved that the burden was to be shared and that the matter was to be scientifically addressed. Our focus switched to building more staff houses, offices and laboratories to accommodate the new researchers. Under David’s supervision, after much frenzied building, within a matter of weeks we were ready for the scientists.
With their arrival came controversy, not least startling assertions contradictory to our own views based on many years of experience. And so began a turbulent and difficult period of our lives.
10. Conflict
‘It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again, who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotions and spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.’
– Theodore Roosevelt
Dr Laws seemed pleasant enough – a large, soft-looking man with striking pale blue eyes, an English scientist known for his studies of whales. At first the work carried out by his team was not too invasive, but it wasn’t long before he dropped a bombshell, announcing that he needed data from 300 dead elephants, a ‘sample’ cull.
We were baffled as to why Dr Laws would need uteruses, teeth and eye lenses for a scientific assessment of population dynamics in relation to vegetation, but he was so emphatic that the Trustees went along with it. He was equally insistent that Wildlife Services had to do the job, arguing that having been involved in the Murchison Falls cull, ‘Chickweed’ Parker and his colleagues were highly competent at taking and preserving body parts. Again, the Trustees agreed but decreed that the slaughter be done in a place determined by David, well away from the tourist circuit.
Dr Laws was in a hurry, and not surprisingly Wildlife Services were poised to start work. Both David and I burnt the midnight oil discussing this new development, both of us deeply saddened to have to be party to this great elephant betrayal. It had taken so much to gain their trust as to the sanctity of the Park, that this was a refuge where they could feel safe. There was pressure on David to select the killing field and it was with a heavy heart that he chose Kowito, on the north bank of the Galana River, off the tourist circuit and suitably remote. He imposed strict restrictions regarding access to the cull, mindful that elephants were a popular species and that images depicting the massacre of elephant families were bound to generate outrage among the animal-loving international public. Even though the ‘cropping’ was done by proficient marksmen on the ground, the Kowito cull was gruesomely efficient, and as I went about my daily routine on the appointed day, I couldn’t help visualizing the chaos there, rivers of blood spilling out to blend with the red soil of Tsavo. The slaughter of an entire elephant family took only around three minutes. David returned from the massacre grim-faced, beset by contradictions that churned constantly in his mind. We would talk well into the night, unsettled by what was taking place. David was becoming convinced by the results of his own investigations that the natural role of elephants was one of recycling, rather than destruction, and that what was taking place was simply part of a natural cycle that had happened before.
Ever mindful of public criticism, the Trustees had considered it imperative that maximum use be made of the carcasses, a rather ironic twist of priorities in my view. In a procedure that reminded me of my father’s biltong days, the meat was dried for sale; the feet sent to be converted into waste-paper containers or stools; the ears turned into handbags, briefcases or wallets; the hide cured to luxury leather; the bones crushed into bonemeal; and, of course, the ivory sold swiftly t
o dealers in Mombasa, with a share of the profits benefiting Wildlife Services. Pointing to his brand new plane some time later, ‘Chickweed’ Parker said, ‘Your elephants.’
Dr Laws was soon immersed in a study of the collected body parts, during which he uncovered evidence of some remarkable facts. One old matriarch – now a statistic of his sample – had been totally blind from birth, eye lenses absent in both eyes. Yet for all those years she had led her family to water and to feeding grounds, negotiating difficult terrain. She had survived the poaching onslaught of the fifties and kept her family intact and safe. Now, just when the Protected Area was there to make her feel secure, she and her entire family had been gunned down. It did not bear thinking about, and when Dr Laws decided that he needed a further sample of the dead from a different elephant population for comparative purposes, David and I were overwhelmed by a feeling of helplessness. The Tanzanian authorities granted Dr Laws permission to supervise a cull in the Mkomazi National Reserve, which is part of the Tsavo ecosystem, and once again, Wildlife Services were ready with their heavy calibre rifles. This made no sense at all to David, who believed that the Mkomazi elephants did not in fact belong to a ‘different’ population but in his view merely formed part of the greater Tsavo population that moved within and without an ecosystem at least twice the size of the Park itself.
Nor did it end there. Having only been in Tsavo for three full months, Dr Laws boldly asserted that there were in fact ten discrete elephant populations in Tsavo, not just the one from which he had killed 300. He needed a similar sample of 300 elephants from each of the remaining nine; in other words a staggering 2,700 dead elephants, just for starters! David was incensed. From twenty years of practical observation of known elephants easily recognizable by their unusual tusk configuration, and as a result of our early marking experiments, we knew that an elephant could be in Voi one day or way north of the Galana River the next, sometimes in Tsavo East, sometimes in Tsavo West, or even sometimes in Mkomazi in Tanzania.
During a recent safari to the Serengeti in Tanzania, the Warden – our old friend Myles Turner – had warned David on the impending invasion of scientists in Tsavo. ‘They’re a bloody menace. Since they are about to invade your Park, make sure you lay down a stringent code of conduct about what they can and cannot do, before they spin out of control and have a field day, as they did here.’ Something clearly was unfolding in Tsavo, not only due to the threat of a new onslaught on the elephants, but also because of the frequent clashes between David and the team of researchers living in the Park, whose behaviour had become somewhat problematic. Despite David’s imposition of a strict code of conduct, they seemed to feel free to do whatever they liked – break the speed limit, enter the closed northern area without permission, fill their private vehicles from the Park’s petrol pumps, order furniture to be made in the Park’s workshop, etc. It was as if they were beyond the Warden’s jurisdiction and that Park rules did not apply to them. Eventually, David decided that he had had enough. He publicly challenged Dr Laws’s assertion that more elephants needed to be culled, and when the argument between the two men threatened to flare up in the public domain, the director of the National Parks Service summoned them both to Nairobi.
The Trustees listened to both sides, making allowances for the fact that twenty years of field experience was considered the equivalent of any doctorate. However, the argument became so heated that Dr Laws threw down the gauntlet, declaring that either David Sheldrick, who was the ‘most un-cooperative Warden’ he had ever come across, must leave or he and his team would have to do so. After a brief closed-door session, the Trustees delivered their verdict – while Dr Laws could be easily replaced, David Sheldrick, as Warden of Tsavo East, was irreplaceable. When David returned from Nairobi, I was on the verandah with Angela and he came towards us, smiling for the first time in ages. Looking out, he said: ‘The elephants are safe, Daph, at least for the time being.’
Dr Laws and his team left without much ado, but their departure caused a regrettable family fall-out. Peter and Sarah had become friendly with a group of the researchers and took their side in the dispute. This angered David, who viewed it as a betrayal and breach of loyalty. He felt that Peter should be transferred, since tension in the ranks was not conducive to a good working relationship. As Peter was my brother, David put aside his anger and hurt, recommending that he be promoted to the position of Warden somewhere else.
This dissension in the family deeply upset my parents. By now Peter and Sarah had two young children and it was understandably a wrench for them to have to leave their much-loved home, especially under such a cloud. Peter was transferred to Meru National Park, about 300 miles north of Nairobi, a former National Reserve that had recently been upgraded to National Park status. In terms of infrastructure, he faced a challenge, since he would have to more or less begin from scratch, but in terms of habitat, Meru was a smaller, more picturesque version of Tsavo, with the advantage of being better watered. Many crystal-clear streams flowed through the Park from the high reaches of the Nyambeni Hills, where the climate was conducive to growing crops such as tea. The Park was home to a wealth of animals, and a healthy population of black rhino and some 3,000 elephants that moved in and out, their migrations dependent upon where rain had fallen. In time Peter and Sarah came to love Meru, transforming it into a miniature model of Tsavo, but resentment against David, and by extension myself, never really dissipated.
With the departure of the Laws team, David and a team of colleagues set up the Tsavo Research Committee, with a clear brief that any scientific study had to be relevant to the requirements of Park management, rather than simply as a means of satisfying scientific curiosity or acquiring a quick doctorate. Lessons had been learned from the previous contentious few months, and out of this came important new guidelines for future scientists working within Tsavo. In this new spirit of cooperation, the botanist Dr Glover was appointed to head the new Tsavo research team and he was joined by Dr Walter Leuthold, whose brief was to study elephant movements and settle the question of discrete elephant populations within the Tsavo ecosystem, as well as to monitor the smaller browsers most likely to be affected by the vegetation changes wrought by the elephants. Dr John Goddard was to monitor the rhinos, and scientists from Holland, Oxford University and other parts of Kenya were recruited to study the impact of elephants on soil surrounding permanent man-made water sources, to study the contribution to the environment made by the dead and to study dung beetles and other elephant-related insects. This new injection of researchers working within the agreed guidelines formed a cohesive team with whom we were on good terms. Moreover, Dr Laws’s theory of ten discrete elephant populations in Tsavo was laid to rest when several elephants, both male and female, were radio-collared and their movements monitored over many months. It was established that they did, in fact, move vast distances, utilizing any area of the Park and beyond in response to rain, when the inland waterholes filled and green vegetation became available.
David had been correct on many fronts, although he was still being severely criticized for a laissez-faire style of management by those who remained convinced that the elephants would reduce Tsavo to a desert with the loss of many other species. But over time, as a result of the transformation of the commiphora thicket south of the Galana River into more open grassland, Tsavo in fact gained antelope species – the slender-legged, long-necked oribi and the dark-faced topi – neither having before been recorded there in living memory. Now that a large portion of the Park was more open country, the rangy Tsavo lions began to sprout sizeable manes and took to consorting in much larger prides. Buffalo emerged as the dominant grazer, forming herds that today can be numbered in the thousands. In the days of dense thickets it had been a talking point to see even a small group. Shy coastal topi made their debut and the fragile Hunter’s hartebeest prospered. Acacia seedlings sprouted within the open plains, their seed pods, which fall during the dry seasons, a rich source of food for all. The
elephants often shook the trees to make them fall, and I used to collect as many as I could and store them in a drum for my orphaned antelopes. To this day, Tsavo and its elephants owe a great deal to the courage of David’s convictions and his steadfast stand against culling, which would have undoubtedly been abused in years to come when corruption became a way of life in Kenya. I was so proud of my husband, and while I could see that the fight had taken a toll of his health, we were always there for each other and our inner strength, love, core beliefs and resoluteness saw us through that exceedingly stressful period.
Meanwhile, our own elephant family had changed with the departure of Aruba, who had joined a wild herd, and just after she left, two young bull elephants arrived. We named them Raru (short for Ndara) and Bukanezi. The smaller of the two, Bukanezi, was so named after the Orma – one of the tribes living along the Tana River – word meaning ‘the weak one’ and he was, indeed, very feeble; in fact, at that time he was the youngest elephant we had so far managed to hand-rear. We dared not feed him milk, but got him through on hand-picked greens and sweet potato tops bought from the Voi market, along with pieces of apple and orange. These two new orphans soon became part of Samson’s growing herd, settling into what was now a sizeable group, for in recent months three ostriches and half a dozen buffaloes had joined the ranks. The ostriches made us laugh. For some reason, they seemed to enjoy lining up with the Field Force rangers whenever they underwent drill inspections on the parade ground. As soon as the ostriches heard the sergeant-major bellowing, they would hurry along – ostrich style – to stand with the rangers, presenting a truly incongruous sight.
Love, Life, and Elephants Page 21
