Gorongosa 2024-FULL-FINAL - Flipbook - Page 48
|
The Mozambican civil war,
which raged from 1976 to 1992,
saw 95 percent of Gorongosa’s
large animals killed. The impact
on elephants was especially profound. Slaughtered by warring
troops who traded their tusks
for more guns, the park’s prewar population of elephants
dwindled from 4,000 to only
about 200 by the time the conflict ended. Thirty years on, says
Gonçalves, that population is
bouncing back and now numbers a little more than 1,000.
The crop raids are a side effect
of that recovery.
But straying elephants cause
havoc for small-scale subsistence farmers in Gorongosa’s
buffer zone, the liminal area
that stretches around the 1,500
square miles of the park and is
home to more than 200,000
people. The more elephant
numbers bounce back, the more of them there are to
go on nighttime ransacking missions.
“It’s a question of how humans and elephants are
overlapping,” says Gonçalves. “If there are agricultural
plots, that can create situations of conflict, when elephants either eat or trample or destroy. That has a huge
economic security impact for farmers.”
Most subsistence farmers don’t have the resources
to surround their plots with expensive wire fences,
and often must resort to less effective deterrents like
banging sheet metal to scare elephants away, burning
tires to produce acrid smoke, or lying in wait in the
bushes at night with flashlights and fireworks to startle
the animals.
These confrontations can prove lethal for both
sides. In July of 2022, five people harvesting their crops
in the Mozambican province of Cabo Delgado—870
miles northeast of Gorongosa—were trampled by elephants from the Quirimbas National Park. On occasion,
humans retaliate. In Kenya, for instance, wildlife authorities shoot between 50 and 120 elephants per year.
GORONGOSA SP ECIAL
LIVING FENCES Dominique
Gonçalves, manager of the park’s
elephant ecology project, says
that using beehives as an animal
deterrent is “a beautiful idea.”
It not only stops elephants from
destroying crops, it provides
people with the sweet reward
of honey.
“That’s the worst-case scenario,” Gonçalves says. “Both
people and elephants end up
being dead.” So she and her colleagues at Gorongosa decided
to intervene to keep the two
sides happy.
It began, as many science
things do, with an experiment.
In 2017, researchers strung
a series of fences at well-trafficked elephant crossing points
along the Pungwe River. Some
of the fences relied on methods
of elephant deterrent already popular among smallscale farmers, such as twine soaked in chilis.1 But
between others, the researchers ran bailing twine from
which they suspended hives populated by the famously
irascible African bee, a species nearly identical to its
European and North American cousins—but for its
more aggressive tendencies. Still others combined chilicoated twine and bee hives.
The researchers then tranquilized and fitted 12 male
elephants—males being more apt to forage in croplands—with GPS collars. Satellite data pinged from
the collars, combined with the observations of local
community members, allowed the researchers to keep
exacting tabs on where the elephants wandered and
whether the experimental fences prevented them from
stumbling into neighboring farmsteads to rummage.
Sure enough, the fences worked. The chili fences
reduced elephant river crossings by 80 percent—while
the beehive fences thwarted a whopping 95 percent
of cross-river forays by the animals. (Beehives strung
on twine coated in chilis were, surprisingly, the least
46
COURTES Y OF GO RONGO S A N AT IONA L PAR K
E N V I RO NM EN T
