Een Hartslag in de Bush: Een Blog van Janneke Spijkerboer
Van 14 tot 24 september sloot Bring The Elephant Home een zeer betekenisvol hoofdstuk af met onze allereerste laatste vrijwilligers-onderzoeksexpeditie in het Kariega Game Reserve in Zuid-Afrika. Een gepassioneerd team van 8 vrijwillige onderzoeksassistenten sloot zich bij ons aan in het veld om het gedrag van olifanten te bestuderen en onze technieken voor individuele identificatie te verfijnen. Om de sfeer van dit onvergetelijke avontuur vast te leggen, deelt onze specialist wetenschapscommunicatie Janneke Spijkerboer, die mee was op dit avontuur, haar persoonlijke reis in het onderstaande blogbericht (in het Engels).
Chasing Moments of Awe
Chasing adrenaline rushes in order to “feel alive” is what most people crave and live for. Some try to create this feeling by bungee jumping, skydiving, riding a rollercoaster, or watching a scary movie. For me, almost all of my adrenaline rushes have been due to experiences in nature with animals. There are not many animals that are able to make me feel everything and anything all at once like elephants. Coming eye to eye with the largest land mammal on the planet is almost a spiritual experience, and not one that many people will be lucky enough to experience at least once in their lifetime. I have had the privilege of having these experiences already, but the problem with adrenaline rushes is that they are addictive. Therefore, I am very grateful to Bring The Elephant Home for the opportunity to join them on their last research volunteer expedition to Kariega Game Reserve in South Africa this past September.
Coming Back
The first thing I always notice when I come back to Africa is the distinct smell once you step out of the plane. I have heard some people say that there is something in the air that makes it smell that way, which is the same thing that makes Africa addictive once you’ve stepped foot on the continent. Then, when I finally get back in the bush, I start noticing the other sounds, smells, and feelings associated with Africa’s wildest places. Some of my favorite sounds are the sounds of elephants rumbling, lions calling, cheetahs chirping, and all of the different bird calls that we do not have in the Netherlands. Being in the bush makes you feel at ease and at the same time makes you feel alive with all of the different experiences and moments you encounter. Not one day will be the same.
Elephant School
Learning about the bush and its animals is just as exciting as being and living in it. To be able to do fieldwork correctly and therefore, to help with research on elephants, we need to learn what it is to be an elephant. Which is why we were enrolled in Elephant School on one of the first days of being in Kariega Game Reserve. We learned how to identify individual elephants based on gender and individual ear and body markings, and how to classify elephants based on age. Since focal observations would be one of our main focuses, we learned all about elephant behavior and practiced performing 10-minute focal sampling on little calves. This turned out to be more difficult than expected, since babies are always busy doing something and switch behaviors really quickly. But it was a lot of fun to look at one calf for 10-minutes straight since they are very funny to watch, especially with their “silly trunk”.
Best Job in the World
Looking at elephants as a job is as good as it sounds. Who wouldn’t want their workdays to be spent in the African bush in the sun (or rain) looking all day at (or trying to find) elephants behaving in their natural habitat. Where lunch breaks are spent under a beautiful and otherworldly tree from which you can see giraffes, zebras, and eland on the horizon, and snack breaks are sometimes mandatorily forced by a leopard tortoise that decides to make your vehicle its shelter. Here, the only traffic jams you would encounter are giraffes that also prefer to walk along the roads and do not really understand the concept of us waiting for them to move off of the road before we can drive off again. And since their predatory response is to stand still and stare to show us that they have seen us, this sometimes took longer than expected. This in combination with our regular lion toll master who decided nap times were best spent in the middle of a road that was the only way to get to the other side of the reserve, made our field days always interesting. It also reminded me once again that as a researcher you don’t get a say in how your fieldwork days are going to go; the field will always decide for you. It is the art of being able to go with the flow and not be afraid to divert from the original plan or path that will prove to be a very useful skill.
Taking in Moments of Awe
Apart from doing fieldwork, we were also reminded that it was equally important to take moments in the field to just sit there and experience. One of those moments was the swimming party. We had been looking for elephants the entire morning with no luck. Only after we had crossed a river crossing which was pretty rough, causing some of us to have escape routes planned beforehand, did we find that all of the elephant herds were together in this one part of the reserve. After observing them for a while and doing some focal observations, the herd decided it was time to cool off in the overflowing river. So we sat there watching these elephants playing in the water. It felt like a bunch of kids wrestling and having fun in a pool until mom or grandmom said it was time to go. This shows that elephants are not so different from humans after all!
Spiritual Awakening
The most amazing, adrenaline packed, and spiritual moment, however, was the first moment we encountered all of these herds together. Once we drove almost in the middle of the herds, you could immediately feel the tension in the air. We all knew that Charlie, one of the big bulls in the reserve, was in musth at that time. Musth is a periodic condition in male elephants, characterized by aggressive, impulsive, and unpredictable behavior, along with a sharp rise in testosterone levels. It serves the purpose of establishing dominance or securing mating rights. Normally, bulls are solitary and stay away from matriarchal cow herds. But now, Charlie was in the middle of these herds, which is possibly why the tension was noticeable.
We parked the game viewer on the side of the road to not block the passage for the oncoming elephants, also in the hope to perform some focal observations on the little ones passing by. Then, Charlie came walking up behind two adult cows on the road. We watched him come closer until he stopped about three meters from the front of our game viewer and just stood there. In the beginning, my first thoughts were: “I hope this goes well” and I already saw some doom scenarios flashing in front of my eyes. But these thoughts and feelings washed away as soon as they came. While filming Charlie up close with my phone for a while, I felt these intense emotions wash over me like a wave. It felt like some sort of invisible energy force that was coming from Charlie in that moment was making me feel all things at the same time. Then I decided, this was my moment of awe and that I needed to put my phone away and experience it completely with my full attention and let my feelings and emotions pull me under. It is hard to describe what emotions and feelings these were exactly. It felt like I was being shown a mirror reflecting myself back at me and that it was showing me that all of the worries and fears I have in my “normal” life do not matter at all. They do not define who I am as a person. It felt like a therapy session of an hour or more, even though Charlie stood there for maybe twenty minutes. The fact that a bull in musth decided to share his energy with us in such close proximity was mind-blowing to me. The tears that I shed in that moment were full of my love for elephants, my appreciation for their intelligence and emotional connection, as well as gratitude for being able to work with elephants in the future, which is a life-long dream of mine.
A Heartbeat in the Bush
All in all, this experience has given me more motivation to keep doing what I am doing and try to make a difference for elephant conservation and protection. It was a spiritual, emotional, and healing journey that I needed to show me again why I chose this path in the first place. My heart really does beat stronger when I am in Africa.
