The Elephant Whisperer: My Life With the Herd in the African Wild by Lawrence Anthony (the ebook reader txt) 📕

and I werecamping outside the boma. A car engine would set the entire reserve in panic mode – with good reason, as I now realized.

No longer. Almost overnight, a radical transformation had occurred. Hyena became more brazen in the evenings and we even got occasional glimpses of leopard, lynx and serval, the beautiful tawny black-spotted cats of the night, whose pelts are unfortunately still highly prized. The more the creatures lost their fear, the more of them we encountered and with mounting jubilation I discovered that despite mass poaching, we still had healthy populations of almost all of Zululand’s indigenous animals thriving on our doorstep. The whole reserve was now truly energized, and us with it.

I found this totally astonishing. How could the simple removal of the guards have such an instant effect on the game? How could they know they were now safe; that the major poaching threat had been removed? Obviously this would not be regarded as evidence in a court of law, but to me, in the natural order of things, it was proof that the animals themselves now knew it was over.

Years later I was in the Sudan on a conservation project when I heard an incredible story on good authority that sounded similar to my own. During the twenty-year war between northern and southern Sudan elephants were being slaughtered both for ivory and meat and so large numbers migrated to Kenya for safety. Within days of the final ceasefire being signed, the elephants left their adopted residence en masse and trekked the hundreds of miles back home to Sudan. How they knew that their home range was now safe is just another indication of the incredible abilities of these amazing creatures.

Immersed in the bush each day with no pressing problems reignited another of my loves; birdwatching. With its diverse habitats Thula Thula has over 350 identified species of bird and is an absolute haven for ‘twitchers’, those unusualpeople obsessed with spending every free moment watching birds.

On one glorious Zululand morning David and I were following the herd on foot through thick riverine bush, our footsteps on the leaf litter the only sound, when we came across a troop of monkeys grouped on top of a tall, flat acacia robusta. They were chattering and screaming insults at a magnificent martial eagle circling just low enough to demand their attention, but high enough for them to show some bravado.

Or so they thought. Emboldened by the distance, the little creatures with their animated black faces were recklessly exposing themselves at the edge of branches instead of hiding within the foliage.

As we watched, another martial appeared, coming in low and fast on huge silent wings. Flying barely ten feet off the ground and skirting tree trunks with deft twists and turns, her fiercely hooked beak and snowy undercarriage were just a blur as she glided under the tree canopy, hidden from the raucous monkeys. With a wingspan of more than seven feet, a martial in flight is always a stunning sight. But up as close as this it was pure wizardry – as she came over us we could feel the wind from her wings.

With an imperceptible twitch of her tail feathers she suddenly pulled into an almost vertical climb heading straight up for the troop like a Stealth jetfighter. Before the monkeys could even guess what was happening she had plucked one off a branch, and was soaring through the sky to meet her mate with the still squirming primate hooked in her gnarled talons.

The tawny eagle is also a masterful predator and, often hunting in tandem like the martials, it is a particular threat to newborn fawns in the breeding season. One day, Nana and the herd were browsing off on our left when for some reason I glanced skywards and picked out two of thesemajestic raptors, just specks in the azure sky, swooping vertically in perfect synchrony and eventually blasting into the tree canopy at impossible speed. They are going much too fast, I thought, as they plummeted through the tangled green foliage – they can’t possibly stop in time.

But a tawny can plummet down from the sky, strike its prey, and then land in the space of just a few yards. As we rounded the corner we found them both with their claws sunk into a nyala fawn, flapping their giant wings in unison as they coordinated their take-off to lift the deadweight. The impact of the high-velocity attack had instantly killed the fawn, but the mother was determined to fight back with all her worth. She grabbed her baby’s foot in her mouth and with legs locked stiff as metal shafts, she anchored herself in an awful tug-of-war to prevent the birds from flying off. The eagles, startled by our sudden appearance, dropped their booty and glided back into the heavens.

No matter how heart-wrenching the situation, we never interfered with nature. Brutal as the food chain is, that’s the balance of life in the wild. Terrible as the tragedy was for the nyala mother, the eagles also had to feed their young.

But it’s not all blood and gore; there are also the brilliant colours and exquisite song in Zululand birds. Plum-coloured starlings, turquoise European rollers that winter with us, the gorgeous bush-shrike, blood-red narina trojans and countless others boasting plumages so flamboyant, the visual feast was unbelievable. Catching sight of a gwala gwala in flight, the only time it flashes its vivid scarlet wing feathers, can send the soul soaring.

It did mine. Poaching, elephant charges … well, that was all yesterday, I thought happily.

I didn’t know how wrong I was.

chapter fourteen

One morning Françoise joined me on the quad bike, a four-wheeled all-terrain motorbike, while I tracked the herd.

As we zoomed off on a dusty track, I marvelled at the profound transformation she had made in adapting to a life in the bush. Unlike me, her sophisticated upbringing in the buzzing metropolis and boulevard cafes of Paris were light years removed from the African