An ongoing project is monitoring the success of the reintroduction of elephants at St Lucia
Niki Moore
How much does an elephant charge? At today’s exchange rates, about 140m. That’s a lot of elephant to have coming at you from the forests of the Greater St Lucia Wetland Park.
“When you do this job, you have to have a reliable vehicle,” gasps research assistant Chantal Dickson, putting the green KwaZulu-Natal Wildlife bakkie into gear and pulling away, leaving a few tons of irritated elephant shaking its ears at us from a distance.
The curmudgeonly elephant is one of the animals relocated to the Greater St Lucia Wetland Park last year, and Dickson is in charge of monitoring the fledgling herd as it settles into its new home. Twenty-two elephants were introduced into the park from the Hluhluwe Game Reserve over a period of a few months, and 20 remain, after one young bull broke out within days of introduction and made a bee-line back to Hluhluwe, and one calf died.
The introduction of elephants into the Greater St Lucia Reserve is part of a government initiative to create a world-class tourist attraction out of the ragbag of conserved areas along the Zululand and Maputaland coast. However, the Lubombo Spatial Development Initiative (SDI) has a limited shelf-life, and once the infrastructure is in place, the reserve is supposed to become largely self-sustainable. Looking after the elephants has become the preserve of KwaZulu-Natal Wildlife, the University of Natal and private enterprise.
“They are taking a long time to settle down,” says Dickson. “They move around a lot, they spend a lot of time next to the fence, and they are quite jumpy.” Dickson’s job is to go out every day sometimes twice a day track the elephants with radio-telemetry, watch them for a short while to check their behaviour, take samples of dung and whatever trees they are browsing, and deliver a monthly report to biologist Rob Slotow at the Life and Environmental Sciences Department at the University of Natal in Durban.
“There could be several reasons why the elephants are stressed,” says Slotow. “The first could be dietary that is why we are monitoring so closely what they eat. This is a new habitat for them. Secondly, they are moving around a tremendous amount because this is new terrain the movement could be physically stressing them.
“The problem is that there is no precedent in conservation for elephants on the shores of Lake St Lucia. So the purpose of our research is to formulate a management strategy for elephants in the park.”
The radio collars that some of the elephants wear were Slotow’s initiative.
They were sponsored, along with the vehicle and tracker, by KwaZulu-Natal Wildlife and the University of Natal. Other running costs have been sponsored by the Wildlands Trust. The monitoring of the elephants is supposed to last for six years before a comprehensive management strategy can be formulated.
“We are hoping to make this research self-sustainable,” says Wildlands CEO Dr Andrew Venter. “The Wildlands Trust was created to promote conservation projects as empowerment exercises, so we are hoping to include the residents of Khula Village in this research project.”
Khula Village is the settlement of former squatters from the Dukuduku Forest, which lies on the border of the St Lucia reserve and is the focus of several projects to create community-based tourism for the people in the village.
“The monitoring of the elephants is something that the public would like to see,” continues Venter, “so we are currently negotiating with a sponsor to get a proper viewing vehicle and to create an experience for tourists. We will then train guides and research assistants from the village. Apart from creating work for the residents, and generating some income for the research project, it will also teach the communities the economical value of protected areas. This is the Wildlands Trust’s ongoing purpose.”
Dickson sets out very early in the morning to avoid the heat of the day.
“The elephants are being seen by visitors to the western shores of the lake,” she says. “They crossed the lake immediately after they were let out of the boma and they have stayed there ever since. But they are travelling enormous distances along the western fence of the reserve.”
On this Sunday morning, the telemetry tracking device finds the elephants in a thick plantation of gums on the south-western side of the lake.
“Sometimes they are in such thick bush we don’t see them at all,” she says, “although the radio collars tell us they are there.” It is amazing how effectively a multi-ton elephant can disappear.
After about an hour we spot the animals grazing in a gum plantation. “There they are,” says Dickson, and begins to back the vehicle up to the herd. The group of 20 animals includes several smaller animals and very young calves and makes a picturesque family group as it slowly wends its way into a thicket of indigenous bush.
The reintroduction of elephants into the park was hailed at the time as the first step towards creating a world-class Big Five tourist attraction in one of South Africa’s poorest regions. But it is not wholly certain that the elephants are all that comfortable with the part they are playing.
“As more information is being gathered, it is possible that the SDI will review plans for future introductions,” says Slotow. “However, there are plans to extend the area available to the elephants, and may include the incorporation of other parks such as the Mkuze Game Reserve and other private reserves.”
There is still considerable debate as to whether the elephants of St Lucia actually lived on the shores of the lake, or whether they just used the shoreline as a migratory route. Perhaps the restoration of all the land along the coast to game-reserve status will clear up the debate, and perhaps it will restore those possible migratory routes of more than a century ago.