The Secret Lives of Elephants. Hannah Mumby
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It’s often useful to view life histories as on a continuum. For example, in mammals it could go from a ‘fast-living’ creature like a mouse, which matures rapidly, has many offspring and a relatively short life, to animals that have a longer development, space out their offspring more and have a longer life, like humans. All of this can be influenced by body size: large bodies take longer to grow, so we have to take this into account. Without celebrating myself too much, I was excited to discover that although humans are living in the slow lane even among primates, we humans aren’t an absolute outlier. We aren’t even the slowest of the species I researched.
I felt thrilled with my contribution to scientific knowledge, and the head of the Anthropology Department recommended that I publish it. I felt accepted and valued in a way that I hadn’t in several years of port and cheese parties (although I had managed to develop a taste for port and a fear it would give me gout, and a particular joy in truffled pecorino). Then, I thought more about it, and more, and then just too much. I realised how limited my study really was. I had a horrible, sinking realisation that I was effectively standing with my nose a couple of inches from a pointillist painting and happily telling everyone I could see the big picture. I could in fact just see some lovely green dots, but I could definitely not see a picnic scene by the River Seine (or whatever your favourite pointillist scene depicts).
At the time, I was working on an alumni database at a Cambridge college. Twiddling my thumbs, romanticising about becoming an academic, but not ready to inhabit that life. I began to unpick my failure and re-evaluate my approach. Really, I had put humans into their primate context, but humans aren’t just primates. And how much do we have in common with more distantly related primates like lemurs? What I needed to do was forget about relatedness and just look for the slow life-history pattern across animals. If I could find an animal that had evolved on a separate trajectory and wasn’t related to humans, it would be all the more interesting. I could investigate the similarities and differences between lives without having to worry that I was just describing the general primate pattern. I started a list. I wrote down ‘whales’. I grimaced at the thought of seasickness and crossed it out. I wrote down ‘elephants’, and changed the direction of my life.
A few months later I arrived in Kenya. I had never been on a flight with request stops before, never mind on such a tiny plane. A stroke of luck meant that the former master of the college where I had been working had been an influential elephant researcher in the 1960s and 1970s and had recommended I seek out a PhD student he had examined. The PhD student was Iain Douglas-Hamilton, who had become a giant of elephant research. Before I had even met Iain, I had been told he was an ‘elephant’. I knew by reputation that he was superlatively intelligent, incredibly productive and passionately committed to his work. But I thought that being an elephant sounded mad. I had heard about him being chased around a thorny bush by a female elephant and being lucky that he had only ended up with a few scratches. The real mystery, he told me, was her intention. ‘Did she actually intend to kill me, when she overran me and plunged her tusks nine inches into the ground above my head? Did she change her mind after I was under her, at her mercy, or was it only her intention from the start to frighten me? Either way, she was certainly successful in increasing my heartbeat!’
Despite these fortuitous connections, Kenya was more alien than Cambridge had ever been. When we landed in Samburu I was in equal parts happy I was alive and proud I had kept down my breakfast, particularly because one of the younger passengers had not managed the latter. I hauled my backpack off the plane and dragged it through the sand to the edge of the runway. I glanced at the rickety table of knick-knacks bearing a ‘duty-free’ sign, unsure as to whether it was a spirited attempt at a shop or a joke. The airstrip was deserted. I sat on my backpack and wished I had water. The sun was getting higher in the sky and I squinted. I thought I should have reminded someone I was coming here. Could it be they didn’t know, and I was going to have to get back on that terrifying little plane? Luckily, my anxious musings were broken by two men asking where I was staying.
‘Save The Elephants,’ I told them.
The representatives arrived half an hour later: two smiling young men, Jerenimo and Benjamin. I felt uncomfortable that I must have been several years older than them and asked myself if I was being ridiculous by following them, but I realised my alternatives were non-existent. They didn’t seem the least bit uncomfortable. On the contrary, they were grinning at me. We chatted in the vehicle as we bumped along the sandy roads. My overwhelming first impression of Samburu was of toasty orange sand and thorns. Thorns so impressive that I didn’t want to think of stepping on one. I retreated into my safe space, scientific knowledge, and reflected that plants must have to strongly defend themselves against plant-eating animals to evolve those five-centimetre protective prongs. While I was lost in my thoughts, Jerenimo stopped the car. He was still smiling.
‘We have to walk the rest of the way.’
I looked at the river that he had parked beside and the remains of the bridge spanning it. Benjamin told me that the river had flooded earlier in the year and destroyed the bridge and much of the camp. It had plenty of crocodiles, so we were better off climbing over what was left of the old bridge. Gallantly, Jerenimo and Benjamin took my bags. I wished I had a better sense of balance, another thing I should have been focusing on instead of all that reading. I began coaching myself. Hannah, this is fieldwork. You said you wanted to do it. You want to understand elephants? You need to live in a tent, go on those dirt roads and climb over this bridge! I convinced myself that I was not an attractive meal to a crocodile, without giving the idea the scientific scrutiny it might have merited at other times. I climbed clumsily up the side of the bridge and peeked over the top.
Baboons!
The flashing canine teeth of the larger male baboons impressed me much more in the flesh than I had expected. I knew they were mainly for display, but I ducked back down. Jerenimo and Benjamin put their knowledge of animal behaviour into action and pulled themselves up to their full height, puffing out their chests, clapping their hands and shouting out loud. The baboons duly dispersed and I made a mental note to behave more like a baboon when I was around baboons.
A few days later, I had settled into camp life. Despite having been devastated by the flood that had destroyed the ‘Baboon Bridge’ just five months earlier, the camp was tidy, well-equipped and functional. The days quickly took on a form and rhythm that became familiar, and I realised that I could more easily adapt to living anywhere than I had imagined. I was staying in a tent underneath a corrugated iron roof, to protect me from the vervet monkey excrement dropping from the tree when I woke in the morning. I had an orange plastic bucket to wash in, which a small antelope with a spring in its step known as a klipspringer had also taken to using as a fresh water supply. I would go to the water pump every morning and fill up a transparent bottle. I would leave this in the centre of the camp, exposed to the sun, in order to warm the water for my afternoon bucket shower. I became used to the long drop (even thankful for the breeze it created) and to making sure I put the rope across the entrance so that people knew I was in there. I played checkers using the tops from beer bottles; the gold Tusker brand tops got me thinking of the symbolic power elephants have over us. As well as the curious klipspringer, I met some of the other animals that frequented the camp: a wizened pair of hornbills, still striking in their senescence with white and black feathers and curved orangey-yellow beaks; a band of mongooses hunting by the dining area. The troop of baboons I had first met on the bridge appeared calmer as they traversed the slope next to our breakfast table undisturbed. There was a group of rock hyraxes, fluffy mammals that look a bit like oversized guinea pigs but are actually some of the closest living relatives of elephants. They slept a lot, and sometimes took a break from basking in the sun to investigate the bags of flour in the food store. But however charming these characters were, I hadn’t yet seen an elephant. After all, that’s why I had come all the way to Kenya.
The following morning at breakfast, I got much more than chai, toast and honey: my first wild elephant sighting. To this day, I can’t imagine a better gateway to watching elephants. I can’t begin to explain how lucky I was that it happened when I was on foot and in the camp. The former because it allowed me to sense the scale of the elephant in front of me and my own fragility, which is just not possible in a vehicle. And the latter because I was familiar enough with the camp not to let the