It was during this latter period, last October, when Rigby's Jim Crawford and I hunted the Ruvuma drainage in southern Tanzania with Michel Mantheakis and Bernard Sehabiague of Miombo Safaris. Michel, an old friend, had pioneered hunting in and around the Lukwika-Lumusilla Game Reserve on the Ruvuma River, and over the course of the previous six seasons he had taken a number of fine tuskers there. Southern Tanzania and adjacent northern Mozambique have large elephant populations. The ivory in this region is rarely extremely heavy, but tusks tend to be long and beautiful. It's a vast and extremely remote area, and the elephant move around as water and feed dictate. There are almost certainly seasonal concentrations of big bulls yet to be located.
Damage done by elephant to subsistence farmers is unbelievable. This village had been terrorized and abandoned, its grain bins totally destroyed. In elephant hunting, information from local villagers is often critical.
Late in 2005, Michel made a scouting expedition to the Sasawira Forest off to the northwest, and he believed this was one of those areas. We started our safari there, all of us filled with great expectations but understanding it was an experimental hunt. The Sasawira is an exceptionally beautiful area of high ridges and lush valleys--some of the best habitat I have ever seen. The newly constructed camp was magnificent; a neat row of tents in a shaded little valley alongside a gurgling mountain stream.
As the days passed we came to realize that, although incredibly beautiful, the area was sterile. There were a few exceptionally wary sable and a couple of herds of really wild buffalo, and we found leopard tracks in the valleys. There were a few elephant around, but not the concentration Michel had seen the previous year, probably because at this higher elevation, the cashews and mangoes were not yet ripe. As for the rest of the game, Michel had put in antipoaching teams as soon as the game department allocated the area to him, but the area had been badly abused and would take a long time to recover.
Jim and Bernard passed up a couple of small elephant. Jim and I were disappointed and Michel was distraught: Building camps, opening roads and conducting antipoaching represents considerable investment. With half the hunt remaining, we cut our losses and moved nearly 200 miles southwest to Lukwika, which is easier said than done. The camp was not intended to be mobile, and the effort required was Herculean. Michel's crew did an amazing job, and Michel himself deserves much credit as an outfitter for even attempting such a move.
The Lukwika-Lumusilla Game Reserve is named for two small rivers that feed into the Ruvuma. Our new makeshift camp there improved every day, but it never became as comfortable as the beautiful and ill-fated camp at Sasawira. Our tents looked out on the Ruvuma, and our dinner table and campfire were on the sand a few feet from this important waterway. The country was lower and much hotter, but our chances were better. Not only was elephant movement known from previous safaris, in the warmer climate the cashews and mangoes cultivated by nearby villages were fully ripe, and crop raiding was a nightly occurrence. Perhaps most important, Miombo Safaris had protected this area for six seasons.
THE HUNTING IMPERATIVE I didn't know you could still hunt elephants!
Yes, you can, and in certain countries that are managing their elephants, you can bring your ivory home. In these countries elephant must be hunted. These are two irrefutable facts about elephants in modern Africa, and both are diametrically opposed to what most people have heard and believe.
"Decimated" is a common term for what happened to Africa's elephants, but it's totally inadequate. In the 1970s and '80s, widespread ivory poaching nearly destroyed elephant populations in many African countries. Sport hunting has never had a significant impact on elephant numbers, but the insatiable lust for ivory has. Most elephants taken by the greats that we still revere today (Bell, Sutherland, Taylor, Selous) were technically--if not actually--poached, the subtle difference being that some early hunting was done in the total absence of law rather than in violation of it.
In the vastness of 19th century Africa the impact was small, but by the later 20th century Africa's wild lands where elephant roam had shrunk, and ivory poaching had shifted from a few skilled individuals to large bands armed with automatic weapons. By the mid-'80s the African elephant was genuinely in trouble in many areas, and organizations like the World Wildlife Fund did a good job educating the public on the growing crisis. In fact, they went too far; twenty years later the nonhunting public still thinks of elephant as "endangered." The African elephant was never truly endangered, though they were, and are, locally threatened in areas. At the height of the outcry there were estimated to be 700,000 wild elephant in Africa, a number that does not suggest even remote danger of extinction.
Even so, in the 1980s elephant were hard pressed and relief was essential. In 1989 an international ban on commercial ivory trade was enacted and remains in effect today. This, plus much tougher enforcement on the part of African governments, has genuinely turned things around. Poaching still exists, but nothing like the organized mayhem of twenty years ago. Some estimates now place Africa's wild elephant population at more than 1.3 million.
The international body, CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species), allows exclusion to the ban for importation of sport-hunted trophies for personal use from certain countries that manage and can demonstrate a surplus of elephants. The reason for this exclusion is too compelling to ignore: Elephants hunted by foreign sportsmen have huge value. Safaris create local employment, the meat is fully utilized, and crop raiding is reduced. Stiff license and trophy fees enable improved antipoaching efforts, and in today's Africa a significant portion of these fees go straight to the local villages to build schools and buy fertilizer and farm implements, and places a direct value on those often-pesky elephants. At this writing, subject to quota and with proper documentation, U.S. hunters are allowed to import elephant trophies from Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania and Zimbabwe. Limited elephant hunting is also open in Cameroon, Mozambique and Zambia, and perhaps in time these will be added to the list.
Here elephants travel along a movement corridor, from the Selous Reserve to the north to the Nyasa Game Reserve across the Ruvuma in Mozambique. So "new" elephant bulls may show up any time, but with almost no poaching and permanent water, there is also a considerable resident population. As we would see, these were some of the calmest elephants I've ever seen. When the wind cooperated, we could get very close.
