After a few preliminary circles at high altitude, we descend again to a few hundred feet above the forest canopy; the trees flow down to the gallery forests along the Sangha River, bursting and shimmering with morning light. The ironwoods are burning bright in the sea of greens, and the strange semaphore of white-winged birds turn out to be groups of the huge brown-cheeked hornbills, crossing the cool glades of the forest.
To our surprise, not all these trees are evergreen, though there are many less deciduous species than one sees farther north. Even here near the Equator, the Congo Basin, unlike the upper Amazon and Borneo, has fleeting dry seasons, like faint echoes of the long dry seasons to the north and south, but what is probably more important to its ecology are the extended climatic changes, recorded in lake sediments as well as in fossil pollen and termitaria, that have occurred here ever since the Tertiary. These wet and dry periods were more extreme and of greater frequency than in Southeast Asia and South America, which have been largely undisturbed since the Cretaceous. The last great dry period, ten thousand years ago, entirely eliminated the forests of the central basin in what is now Zaire. The forest was limited to relict areas to east and west, known to ecologists as “Pleistocene refugia,” from which fauna and flora spread out again as the rain returned. By comparison to the refugia, however, the central region remains “impoverished forest” to this day, although a pygmy chimpanzee is found there that does not occur anywhere else.
Our first forest elephant, a bull seen in a slough near the Dzanga Pan, shakes its head at the banking airplane as if in disapproval, but it does not run—a sign that ivory poachers must be rare here. Another good sign is the almost total absence of forestry scars other than narrow logging roads already overgrown. Later we learn from Slovenia employees that this advanced lumber operation, which exploits only four of the myriad tree species (three red hardwoods are cut for export, and a white wood is used in local construction), rarely removes more than one tree every few acres.
Selective logging, excellent in principle, often does great damage to the forest because of the network of forestry tracks and roads required to remove the trees, but, to judge from the minimal effects observable from the air, Slovenia Bois is taking unusual pains. By opening many small new clearings, this selective operation may have the same beneficial effect as the fall of ancient trees, which from the air look like giant skeletons on the forest floor. The sunlight streaming down through the tear in the forest permits a burst of second growth, providing accessible browse for many animals that cannot reach the nutrients high in the canopy.
Richard Barnes, who did his master’s thesis on the bush elephant in Tanzania’s Ruaha Park, is being sponsored by the NYZS in a study of techniques for censusing the forest elephant, which is very difficult to observe. Until now, the vague estimates of its numbers have been influenced by the bias of the guessers, and a much more accurate census will be needed before international conservation efforts can be mustered on its behalf. Dr. Barnes’s study area, which we shall visit, is in the Ivindo River region of northern Gabon, perhaps three hundred miles southwest of Bayanga, and before he is finished he will have made the first comprehensive census of forest elephants in Gabon, the methods of which can then be applied to the African rain forests as a whole. “We haven’t worked out precise figures as yet,” Barnes informs me in his usual precise tones. “There are certain anomalies in our dung-density data having to do with dung decomposition rates. But it is already safe to say that rain-forest populations will work out to less than one animal per acre, even in this region where elephants are reported to be common.”
Dr. Western nods. “And this is the region, southern C.A.R. and Congo, south Cameroon and north Gabon, where cyclotis populations are apparently highest. I’m told that elephants are already scarce in eastern Zaire, as I think we’ll establish when we visit the Ituri, and it must be assumed that in large tracts of the Congo Basin there are scarcely any.”
At Bayanga, Dr. Barnes will use his techniques to arrive at some estimate of elephant densities in both primary and secondary forest, and after the reconnaissance flight on our first morning he and Dr. Western, with Monsieurs Doungoubey and Babisse and three Babinga trackers, set off on the first of his foot transects, in which elephant droppings over a predetermined distance provide the main basis of the count.
At Bangui the nurse had warned me that I must not walk more than absolutely necessary until my spectacular ankle swelling had gone down, and since I wish to be more or less fit by the time we arrive in the Ituri Forest, I decide to limit my forest walking to the afternoon. Slaus Sterculec, the man in charge of Slovenia’s local construction, has kindly offered to accompany me to the Dzanga salt pan, a haunt of elephants perhaps two miles by forest path off an old logging track. Mr. Sterculec, a lifelong bachelor and wiry jungle veteran of a breed less often seen these days in Africa, has been out here since the founding of Bayanga thirteen years ago, and he has not left the forest in the last five years. He turns up to fetch me with two Babinga hunters, Bisambe and Lalieh, who are markedly smaller than the three who have gone off with the other party. Bisambe, the elder of the two, is yellowish and hunched, with a big head, and both have incisors filed down to sharp points.
I am not displeased that Mr. Sterculec has brought along his rifle. “It is not for hunting,” he explains disarmingly. “It is for my fear.”
At supper the night before we had discussed the pygmy elephant (Loxodonta pumilio), which is known to the native peoples throughout the tropical forest as a creature even smaller than the small forest race of the African elephant that we are here to study. Richard Barnes tells us that in Gabon nobody doubts the existence of this reputedly pugnacious little elephant, which is called assala. A Field Guide to the Mammals of Africa, published in 1977, provides a detailed description of this creature and cites its widespread reputation for aggressiveness. However, it notes that “the existence of a species of pygmy elephant is not generally recognized; the animals described are believed to be small members of the Forest Elephant.”
The first description of a “pygmy elephant” appeared in 1906, based on a small animal (1.2 meters at the shoulder) taken in Gabon the previous year and shipped to the New York Zoological Society’s Bronx Zoo. The would-be discoverer, Theodore Noack, a German professor, claimed it as a new subspecies of the African elephant Elephas [Loxodonta] africanus pumilio. Unfortunately it had doubled in size and was a normal forest elephant when it died nine years later—still an adolescent—but by that time it had been forgotten, its place in the scientific limelight having been usurped by a second “pygmy” of an allegedly separate subspecies, E.a. fransseni, collected in 1911. There was also a well-received report of a herd of five miniature elephants from the same locality on the north bank of Lake Leopold II, in the Congo, where the exciting new animal was known as the “water elephant,” and was alleged to have amphibious habits, like the hippopotamus. Two more small elephants killed there in 1923 were identified as pygmies by no less an authority than the New York Zoological Society’s celebrated director, Dr. William Hornaday, and in 1936 another pair of “midget pachyderms,” arriving alive in New York City, caused a great stir in the press and among the populace. One of these was still alive in 1947, by which time, like Dr. Noack’s specimen, it had grown remorselessly to full forest-elephant dimensions.
Nevertheless, reports by reputable observers continued, although the pygmy appeared to share almost the entire known range of the forest elephant, and did not seem to occur where the latter was absent. The local Africans in all equatorial rain-forest countries without exception agreed that there were two distinct elephants, the smaller of which was notoriously less wary and more aggressive than the larger. Furthermore, they said, it made a different sound, had more sedentary habits, and generally preferred swampy terrain, often in association with raffia palms, leading some authorities to speculate that even if it was not a separate geographic race, it was separate ecologically, and therefore entitled
to subspecific status.
Those who doubted the existence of a separate race of “pygmy elephant” pointed not only to the tendency of captive specimens to grow up in captivity but to the absence of dependable sightings of juvenile animals in reports of pygmy herds. But if the existence of such a creature was unproved, so was the statement that it did not occur where the forest elephant was absent. Or so claimed its partisans, including a controversial Belgian zoologist, Dr. Bernard Heuvelmans, author of On the Trail of Unknown Animals, in which he states that “to deny that the pygmy elephant exists, even as a subspecies of Loxodonta cyclotis [sic] is absurd.” Also, the late W. D. (Karamoja) Bell, among the most celebrated of all African elephant hunters, described a herd of pygmies from Liberia. Bell made a drawing of these animals from memory, and the drawing revealed a female pygmy with a baby alongside. Others had also reported evidence of baby pygmies—the afterbirth of a killed female, a female in lactation—to which the naysayers retorted that evidence of sexual reproduction was no evidence of maturity, and that these reproducing females would continue growing and exceed the six-foot limit usually applied to the hypothetical adult pumilio.
On our trek into the forest, I ask Bisambe if he knows about the pygmy elephant, and he says he does. Asked if it was “plus méchant”—nastier, more aggressive—than the others, he murmurs, “Ils sont tous méchants!” at which both he and Lalieh burst out laughing.
The trackers wear ancient shorts and child-sized and decrepit red plastic sandals, but on entering the forest both go barefoot, carrying their sandals, with great delicacy between their fingertips. Bisambe, who takes the lead, stops frequently to listen, poising right in the middle of a step, foot off the ground, turning his head to pick up some fleeting sound or smell amidst the raucous squawk and hooting of turacos and hornbills, the pungent dung and foliage aromas of the forest. “Moku” he whispers, or “gandi,” with a slow mysterious smile, eyes dancing with delight. Moku is monkey (which monkey is the question; there are thirteen different species of diurnal primate in this forest, including the gorilla and the rare red colobus) and gandi—to judge from his deft mime—a species of duiker, a small forest antelope. Like many traditional hunters, the Babinga communicate in the bush with what seems to be a kind of soft ventriloquy; sometimes Bisambe, twenty yards ahead of me on the leafy path, murmurs something in his deep, soft voice without bothering to turn his head, and there comes an answering soft sound from Lalieh, twenty yards behind.
Dancing ahead of us along the narrow path are male diadem butterflies with big white dots on black wings (the female, very different, has her own name: yellow pansy) and big cobalt-and-black striped daneids. Smaller forms have cobalt spots or are entirely cobalt, and the same brilliant color—perhaps the one that shows up best in the forest darkness—flares again in the rump and tail of a green-breasted pitta, a secretive bird of the forest floor which I feel very fortunate to see.
Nearing the Dzanga Pan, Bisambe stops short again, and a moment later the snap of a heavy branch, like a pistol report, cracks the green silence, signaling the presence of a browsing elephant or a gorilla. Bisambe remains motionless for a little while, long fingers pointed like antennae. Then he moves on in dead quiet to a place where the thick canopy opens out, and afternoon sunlight pours into an open pan, perhaps four hundred yards in length and a hundred across. There he turns his big head with a smile to end all smiles, his hand pointing straight ahead between the trees.
From the west end comes a family group of elephants, a cow and three juveniles, and to the east a female with small calf and a large bull skirted each other. To my astonishment, the large bull has the high shoulders, huge ragged triangular ears, and heavy forward-curving tusks of the bush elephant. Another gathering of perhaps ten animals is far down at the west end of the pan. Directly in front of us, two very small male elephants with disproportionately big tusks are snuffling deep in a mudhole in the pan, which is broken by shallow pools of stagnant water.
I have scarcely focused on this odd pair with my binoculars when I see the faces of two Africans in the trees behind them. Poachers! I think, but a moment later I pick up a white face behind binoculars, and then another, observing the same two little elephants. Richard and Jonah, completing their transects through the forest, have been led into the Dzanga Pan from the far side. Just prior to my arrival, they tell me later, one of these feisty little tuskers had actually skirmished with the large savanna bull. Though there are other elephants in the pan, these small males with outsized tusks turn out to be the most intriguing of all the elephants we are to see throughout our journey.
In the near-windlessness, the female with three young has caught our scent and led her small group without hurrying into the forest, as Gustave Doungoubey and his armed men, spotting our Pygmies for the first time, come hurrying across the pan, suspecting poachers. Slaus and I step out into the open, eliciting sheepish grins from our African friends, and soon Jonah and Richard come across the pan to compare impressions of our first forest elephants, in particular the big “bush elephant” and the two small males.
Just as the forest elephant may follow the river trees into the savanna, and sometimes is observed in open country, the bush elephant penetrates deep into the forest. Richard Carroll had also seen “bush elephants,” assuming that they were fugitives from the ivory trade slaughters to the north, but Jonah thinks it is the savanna genes that have penetrated so far south; this particular animal, in all likelihood, has never seen the open grasslands.
The other elephants, in varying degrees, display the characters of the forest race, L.a. cyclotis, in which the highest point of the body is behind the middle of the back, and the head tends to be held lower, so that the small rounded ears on the small head (which make them look like very young bush elephants) do not reach higher than the neck. In cyclotis, the tusks tend to be narrow, straight, and pointed straight downward. Presumably the low head and small ears are adaptations for forest travel, but the function of the vertical tusks, like so much else about cyclotis, is not yet known. (I speculate that straight tusks might be used for digging tubers, in the way that the walrus uses its straight tusks for digging clams, but Jonah appears unimpressed by this brilliant theory.) Nor is it known why the forest race lacks pronounced sexual dimorphism; in the bush elephant, a big male may be twice the size of an average female.
“I suspect,” Jonah says, “that dimorphism in elephants, as in other polygamous species, is related to male competition for females. In the savannas, which are strongly seasonal, herds aggregate during the rains, females come into estrus fairly synchronously, and bigger males will of course win out. Here in the equatorial forest, the seasons are much less pronounced, and food and water are more evenly spread. Under these conditions, we suspect, female elephant herds are tiny and more evenly distributed, and probably breed all year round. If this is true, males would also be widely spread, and would not compete so strongly in one place and at one time, so that the advantage of size is less.”
Richard, in his reserved, taciturn way, is discernibly elated by these interesting elephants, seen in the open, at close range. Never before has he had such a look at forest elephants, and this is only the second time he has been able to get photographs. “In Gabon,” he had told me over breakfast, “they are always hidden, sometimes only a few yards away. We can be right on top of one and not know he’s there. And even when we are aware of them, we make noise to drive them off, because”—and here he shrugged, as the relentless candor that is one of his likable qualities overtook him—“because, well, I’m afraid of them. I’m not prepared to take the risk of approaching strange elephants in the forest, and my fiancée has extracted a promise from me that I will not do so.”
Unlike Jonah and I, who go about in shorts and sneakers, Richard spends every day out in the forest, and therefore feels he cannot afford our casual attitude toward such jungle afflictions as thorns and biting insects. In this very hot and humid climate (though the forest is much cooler
than the clearings), he is fortified by a tight-buttoned and tight-belted dark green khaki field jacket, baggy trousers with large extra pockets, gaiters, and boots, together with a full compliment of canvas bags, canteens, and compasses, bags of dust to test the wind, binoculars, camera, and other useful and less useful accoutrements. Peering out through owlish glasses from beneath his heavy-gauge rain-and-sun hat, he brings to mind old photos of nineteenth-century naturalists, with whom he shares an old-fashioned meticulousness and dedication that is most impressive.
If Drs. Barnes and Western were surprised to see a “pure” bush elephant so deep in the forest, they were positively astonished by the tusk size of the two young males just in front of us, which, to judge from their height—no more than five feet at the shoulder—are probably about five years old. These creatures answered perfectly the description of the “pygmy elephant,” even to an aggressive nature, displayed when the larger of the two had instigated that brief skirmish with the savanna bull, which was several times its size. But a few minutes later, the same little male had approached a female in the large group at the west end and engaged in unmistakable filial behavior. Thus in an instant he had demonstrated that he was not a mature elephant of pygmy dimensions and outsized tusks but an extraordinarily independent young forest elephant. The reason for that independence may well lie in the complete absence of lion, hyena, and wild dog, the only predators that might attack young elephants of this size in the savanna (the leopard is simply not large enough to bring one down). Freedom from predators permits a very early independence from the mother, and might account for the obstreperous groups of juvenile cyclotis that are reported as “pygmy elephants.”