How do you handle the elephant in the room?
Wildlife biologist Stephanie Schuttler had a shocking wake-up call when a herd of angry giants paid a visit.
In 2008, I was doing PhD research on African forest elephants in Lopé National Park, Gabon. I would identify them by tusk shape, ear tears and ear vein patterns, note their group size, and collect dung for DNA analysis. The goal was to determine if they have networks and associate with relatives over other individuals.
The elephants would often come into our field station camp late at night, once our generator was turned off. The cabin walls were paper-thin with screen windows, and I enjoyed listening to them and watching them eating the fruits of the Sacoglottis gabonensis trees outside.
However, one night I was woken by the elephants and immediately they sounded much more bellicose than usual, thrashing about the camp. Before long, they were round by the kitchen area – I could tell by the sound of glass breaking. Then I could hear them outside the bathroom, bending the metal pipes. They were beginning to circle the building, aggressively tapping their trunks along the walls.
Suddenly, one of them was right behind me. As I jumped out of bed and across to the door, I heard rips and the sound of
planks dropping coming from my room. It was breaking through the wooden window.
I rushed out into my colleague’s room next door. We didn’t know what to do. You can shoo elephants by banging pots and pans, but these seemed much too aggressive for that. We lit a candle so we could at least see what was going on, but then we heard a rumble – a call used by elephants that is largely infrasonic, below the human level of hearing. Clearly the elephants didn’t like the candle, so I quickly blew it out.
A loud trumpet sounded, followed by the sound of heavy footsteps. Luckily, they were going in the right direction. I don’t know exactly what happened, but that candle or maybe our talking made them want to leave.
In 25 years there had never been an attack on the field station. My DNA analysis later showed that their dung matched no other elephants in the study, and we were never able to identify which group they were, or why they damaged our cabin that night.
I heard rips and the sound of planks dropping coming from my room.