LEFTFIELD
Fodder for thought
Zoologist Petro Botha did wonder if the five full-grown eland she’d raised since they were knockkneed calves would stop trusting her after her visits dropped from daily to weekly. Before that, the lockdown had forbidden contact for weeks. But after a hard morning’s grazing and data collection, the eland — antelope that can weigh as much as a buffalo — curled up like cats around her. Liquid eyes closed, noses tucked into flanks, they drifted off for an afternoon nap. An eland, dreaming deeply by your side? That’s when you know you’re still part of the herd.
The eland — Mike, Gibbs, Bernie,
Uniqua and Little P (yes, P for Petro) — strolled onto 10ha of renosterveld on Vergelegen wine estate in Somerset West in late July. Despite the overwhelming impact of their presence, they are not the primary target of an innovative conservation project, but its tool.
The thing about ecosystems is that nothing exists in isolation. Along the Cape Town coast, remnants of what’s called False Bay strandveld hang grimly on in the face of ever sprawling development, never mind land invasions. It’s not a sexy biome in terms of its species list, and as a system, only 14% is conserved. It’s been stripped of large herbivores for centuries, which means certain plants are running riot.
To draw an unscientific comparison,
just as reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone National Park in the US made elk too nervous to hang about all day on one patch and so prevented overgrazing, conservationists hoped reintroducing eland to the strandveld would change plant behaviour.
“Fear is an ecological driving force,” says City of Cape Town nature conservation regional manager Dalton Gibbs as we watch the newly released eland taking their first mouthfuls of bietou bush.
Plants protect themselves in one of three ways, he explains. They grow thorns. They produce nasty chemicals. Or they grow like crazy to make up for being eaten. Take large herbivores out of the strandveld, as humans have done, and these fast growers sprawl out, drowning other species.
Five years ago, the Cape Town Environmental Education Trust’s Gantouw (“way of the eland”) Projectwas created to tackle bush encroachment. The five eland were introduced to the 290ha Rondevlei Nature Reserve in Grassy Park in a pilot study.
It was when it came time to move them to Vergelegen that things got extraordinary. Wild eland can’t be caught by rattling a bucket of feed and murmuring “kos, kos”. But this herd includes human eland monitors who the eland trust so implicitly that they, eventually, simply walked into the trailer that took them to their new home. Postmodern migration: a mobile herd that can be whisked to different places to stir up static ecosystems.
OTTERS AND LEOPARDS
Botha, whose experience includes working with orang-utans at Joburg Zoo, says everything about the habituation project was new. They didn’t know the age or sex of the calves they’d get from a capture; the first night in the boma in Rondevlei was sleepless. But soon they were literally eating out of her hands. “They’re social animals. Habituation is all about observing them, giving them space but also interacting when you need to. They groom each other, and you help with a rub, or removing a tick; a small interaction to say I’m here, trust me, you’re safe.”
She and the monitors interacted with the eland daily, walking them to the study site to graze, comforting them when they got a fright, practising walking into a trailer.
“I’ll never forget those first days doing baseline data studies, and crawling through these dense thickets,” says Botha. But the eland did their job. With their “pruning”, certain prolific species were reaching up to the sky, rather than spreading out.
At Vergelegen, the herd’s new habitat is renosterveld, another endangered vegetation type endemic to SA. More data is being collected. Vergelegen completed the country’s largest privately funded alien clearing project in 2018, and the recovery is joyous. New species, from otters to leopards, have returned; the bird list has grown by over 60 species, and now the placid eland can roam a small section of this ancient landscape in the shadow of the Hottentots Holland.
If lucky, visitors might spot them — as well as bontebok — on a new environmental tour of the 320-year-old estate.
The Rondevlei pilot project proved that what had seemed a mad plan was anything but. At Vergelegen, the project has entered a new phase, and the “herd” is smaller.
Farrell Francis is one monitor who will move on. He wanted to be a pilot, not a conservationist, when he got the job in 2017. The eland were already grown, and “scary” at first. “I had to learn to stand up for myself,” he said. He started with gentle Gibbs and Uniqua, “learning to be quiet, and not show fear and groom them gently”. Now he rattles off the Latin names of the plants the eland savour, and Botha said he became one of the best monitors they had.
PART OF THEIR LIVES
People find the eland irresistible. At Rondevlei, Mike and Gibbs et al became ambassadors for the beleaguered, less visible plants. When the team walked the eland down inside the reserve fence to the study site, motorists would pull over; traffic jams formed. Residents from Grassy Park and Zeekoevlei would come out specially to see them.
“I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned strandveld to so many people,” Botha says. One wonderful morning, a whole nursery school of tots was led to the fence by their teacher to see the giant animals with their spiralling horns walk by.
This is the wonderful thing about bringing nature back to urban environments. Synapses fire, new connections form. People begin to care. The Gantouw eland have changed lives as well as biomes. Fracis suddenly talks about the bigger picture, and pollution, and the need to care for nature, as if he’d studied conservation all his life.
Will he miss his herd? “So much,” he says. “Bernie in particular. She’s very caring and was always on the lookout for me. She’d rub her head against my head or chest, sort of saying everything’s going to be okay. I think animals can tell if you’re stressed out. It was almost like a friendship, or I was part of the family. We were part of their lives.”