THE POWER OF PLACE
Chobe National Park, Botswana, provides a migration corridor for elephants to protected areas in the north east
BOTSWANA
WALKING WITH ELEPHANTS LEVISON WOOD
Walking from Zimbabwe into Botswana last summer, I spent a month living and breathing elephants. I walked alongside a herd as they followed their migration route towards the Okavango Delta, accompanied by a San Bushman called Kane. Like Kane, the other local people I met lived alongside elephants, the numbers of which have plummeted across Africa as human populations have risen, encroaching into wild habitats. My views on elephant protection used
“ I walked the length of the River Nile, where I saw with my own eyes the reality of conservation on the front line.”
to be pretty simple: the bad guys were the ones killing elephants for the tusks, and the good guys were the people out there trying to stop it. But the people I met in the villages and farms along our journey weren’t bad or unsympathetic; they were struggling to feed their families and make a livelihood. A herd of marauding elephants eating crops, destroying fences or threatening people is a real danger. The complexity of elephant conservation is that of humans and elephants needing the same stretches of land to live. It’s a tough question to answer, let alone to solve. Kane put it neatly: “If you love elephants so much, why don’t you take some back to England and put them in the Queen’s parks. See how long they last.” He had me there. At one point during our search for the magnificent
beasts, on hearing a faint, deep rumble, Kane’s eyes lit up. “Lions,” he whispered. “They’ve got a kill.” It was a buffalo being gorged on by three fully grown male lions. “When I was a child,” Kane said, “we’d wait for the lions to have their fair share, then go and help ourselves to some meat. Are you hungry?” I thought he was joking but, following
him, we sneaked towards the lions until we were just three metres away. Standing up quickly, the lions grunted: there was a tense stand-off, then, suddenly, the cats ran for the shade of a nearby tree, almost as if to say, ‘Go on then, if you must’. We crept up to the dead buffalo to inspect the carcass, lions looking on. “We know how to live with animals,”
Kane shrugged with the air of a philosopher. “If you want to save them, you have to work with the locals.” That trip taught me an important
conservation lesson: glossy wildlife films are meaningless without the true story of how people survive and thrive in the same environment as wild animals.
Adventurer, author and broadcaster Levison Wood is an ambassador for the Tusk Trust. Walking with Elephants, a three-part Channel 4 documentary set in Botswana, aired in May.
levisonwood.com
Jul/Aug 2020 71
IMAGES: GETTY; ALBERTO CACERES
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