Gorongosa 2024-FULL-FINAL - Flipbook - Page 41
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GORONGOSA SP ECIAL
Brad M5542 and Beca M5550 are a part of the Gorongosa herd, and are satellite-collared so rangers, veterinarians, and scientists can keep track of their
movements. But they don’t believe in the boundaries humans have drawn on
a map. The people in Vinho and in the necklace of villages along the Pùngué
River, which forms the southern boundary of the park, often wish that the
pachyderms could learn to respect those limits, those frontiers between the
wild and domestic, since interactions between the two parties range from
the benign-but-annoying to the deadly. As do the villagers’ dealings with the
buffaloes and the hippos, and, of course, the crocodiles.
Gorongosa National Park prides itself on being a fenceless park. Fences
can reduce human-wildlife conflicts in many cases, but they come with
their own ecological and social costs by separating ecosystems and alienating the people who live around such protected areas. The lack of a physical
perimeter fence around its 1,500 square miles of wilderness creates a sense
of boundless landscape both for animals and visitors. But this also means
that animals such as Beca and Brad are free to seek their fortunes or meals
in the nearby villages of the park’s 2,000-square-mile buffer zone, where
approximately 200,000 people live. Marcelino Denja, who manages the
park’s reaction team of rangers dealing with human-wildlife conflicts, said
that it’s a dynamic situation, since the animals are moving and the people
are moving, too. Any area outside the park has the potential of becoming
a locus of potential conflict. “In the village, we have the farms and crops,”
Denja said. “We have the houses, we have people interacting with [animals]
on the roads, we have school children.”
Every day, Denja and the rangers on his team receive alerts from villagers about a wild animal in their communities. Occasionally, the distress call
tells of an active conflict: an elephant destroying a traditional granary to get
at the corn, who might knock down that villager’s house, possibly with the
family inside; a buffalo in a bad mood who decides to charge at a passerby;
a crocodile stalking the people who linger by the river. In response, Denja
dispatches a ranger from a nearby outpost to investigate and, if necessary,
intervene.
In 2022, nine people died in conflicts with the animals in and around
the park, principally with elephants but also with buffaloes and crocodiles.
Elephant attacks strained the park’s relations with some communities,
and some park staff were confronted by villagers. The park also supported
a ceremony in one village, a ritual to calm the elephants. Maybe the ritual
worked, but some people still wanted more accountability. Denja told me
that, to appease some of the affected communities and over the objections
of some researchers and park rangers, national parks authorities selected
two elephants to shoot and kill from a helicopter last year. He said the
bodies of the pachyderms were butchered, and the meat distributed to
neighboring villages, a boon for communities whose crops had been compromised by elephant appetites and attacks.
But Denja believes that encounters between humans and animals do
not have to end in tragedy. “They can coexist,” he said.
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