Last Knysna tusker falls in love with a machine
Lone female filmed interacting gently with logging device
● And then there was one. The last Knysna elephant is a wandering 46-year-old female that runs from thunder and appears to have befriended a logging machine deep in the forest.
The clearest picture to date of the sole remnant of Knysna’s legendary elephant herd has emerged from a 16-month infrared camera study that reaped more than 5,000 photographs and video clips.
The lone cow was filmed repeatedly in 185km² of state forest and private plantations bordered by ravines and crisscrossed by farm roads. She is all that remains of Africa’s southernmost elephant group, which retreated into Knysna’s famed natural forests, probably to avoid humans.
The South African National Parks (SANParks) study is the first since a 2002/2003 survey identified five elephants from genetic tests of droppings. The video evidence suggests either the previous survey was inaccurate or the population has dispersed or died.
Analysis of the footage shows just one cow with distinctive serrated ear-notch patterns, asymmetrical unbroken tusks, a highly wrinkled forehead and, worryingly, a secretion from glands between her eyes and ears that is often associated with stress.
“She is basically the last remaining elephant of a continuous population — the original elephant population that moved along the coast,” said SANParks wildlife ecologist and lead researcher Lizette Moolman, who took charge of the Knysna elephant project a decade ago.
Historical records suggest hundreds of elephants once roamed the forested foothills of the Tsitsikamma mountains. Scientists are unsure why their numbers dwindled, though human encroachment is the most likely cause. Much of the elephants’ former range has conservation status but hiking trails and mountain biking-tracks penetrate deep into the once largely inaccessible area.
Moolman’s passion for pachyderms — she previously worked at Tembe Elephant Park in KwaZulu-Natal — was rewarded in 2015 with a R500,000 budget to set up a matrix of cameras based on historical elephant activity data.
Seventy-two cameras were deployed at 38 locations, most of them attached to trees and triggered by large visitors. The elephant was not fooled. “She was skittish of the cameras but then she got to used to them,” said Moolman. One film clip shows the elephant knocking the camera with her trunk.
But the real surprise was the elephant’s behaviour late at night when infrared footage captured her interacting with gates and fences, and more gently with an abandoned forestry vehicle. Footage shows her pushing, inspecting and even lying down next to the Bell machine as if developing some form of attachment. She ignored the tractor parked next to it.
“It wasn’t aggression — she just seemed to be interacting with it,” said Moolman. “You can see at one point she goes and lies on her side between the tractor and the logger. Maybe [it] looked like another elephant. Why does she ignore the one thing but not the thing that looks like it has a trunk?”
Another clip shows the elephant becoming furious at the sight of a locked gate that she had previously knocked over.
Moolman is now conducting a survey to help SANParks decide on a conservation strategy. Possible interventions include bringing in a captive “tame” herd, an orphaned calf or a wild herd from Addo Elephant National Park in the Eastern Cape.
“If the status quo is kept, the risk will be that once the elephant dies her memory and knowledge of how to survive in the Knysna area will be lost, without an opportunity to pass on this knowledge and to teach another elephant (if bonding is a possibility),” Moolman writes in the survey introduction.
However, any intervention is risky. “Translocation may be stressful for the new elephant(s) or new eles may not behave like our Knysna elephant and potentially be aggressive towards people, and also there are no fences,” she said.
In 1994, three young females were brought in from the Kruger National Park but had to be moved to a private game reserve after five years because they refused to stay within the Knysna range.
Another relocation may add impetus to a project to restore a 400km natural corridor that could benefit both wildlife and humans by protecting biodiversity and creating an international tourist attraction. The plan is to link the Garden Route National Park, the Baviaanskloof World Heritage Site and Addo to give roaming wildlife breathing space.
Eden to Addo CEO Joan Berning said: “Lizette and I have become even more convinced through the elephant’s behaviour in the Knysna forest how vital these corridors are for the safe movement of species.”