National Geographic Traveller - UK (2020-07 & 2020-08)

Walking from Zimbabwe into Botswana

last summer, I spent a month living and

breathing elephants. I walked alongside

a herd as they followed their migration

route towards the Okavango Delta,

accompanied by a San Bushman called

Kane. Like Kane, the other local people

I met lived alongside elephants, the

numbers of which have plummeted

across Africa as human populations have

risen, encroaching into wild habitats.

My views on elephant protection used

to be pretty simple: the bad guys were the

ones killing elephants for the tusks, and

the good guys were the people out there

trying to stop it. But the people I met in

the villages and farms along our journey

weren’t bad or unsympathetic; they

were struggling to feed their families and

make a livelihood. A herd of marauding

elephants eating crops, destroying fences

or threatening people is a real danger.

The complexity of elephant conservation

is that of humans and elephants needing

the same stretches of land to live. It’s

a tough question to answer, let alone

to solve. Kane put it neatly: “If you love

elephants so much, why don’t you take

some back to England and put them in

the Queen’s parks. See how long they

last.” He had me there. At one point

during our search for the magnificent

beasts, on hearing a faint, deep rumble,

Kane’s eyes lit up. “Lions,” he whispered.

“They’ve got a kill.” It was a buffalo being

gorged on by three fully grown male lions.

“When I was a child,” Kane said, “we’d

wait for the lions to have their fair share,

then go and help ourselves to some meat.

Are you hungry?”

I thought he was joking but, following

him, we sneaked towards the lions until

we were just three metres away. Standing

up quickly, the lions grunted: there was a

tense stand-off, then, suddenly, the cats

ran for the shade of a nearby tree, almost

as if to say, ‘Go on then, if you must’. We

crept up to the dead buffalo to inspect

the carcass, lions looking on.

“We know how to live with animals,”

Kane shrugged with the air of a

philosopher. “If you want to save them,

you have to work with the locals.”

That trip taught me an important

conservation lesson: glossy wildlife films

are meaningless without the true story

of how people survive and thrive in the

same environment as wild animals.

Adventurer, author and broadcaster

Levison Wood is an ambassador for the

Tusk Trust. Walking with Elephants, a

three-part Channel 4 documentary set in

Botswana, aired in May. levisonwood.com

WALKING WITH ELEPHANTS

LEVISON WOOD

“ I walked the length of

the River Nile, where

I saw with my own

eyes the reality of

conservation on the

front line.”

Chobe National Park, Botswana,

provides a migration corridor

for elephants to protected

areas in the north east

IMAGES: GETTY; ALBERTO CACERES

BOTSWANA

Jul/Aug 2020 71

THE POWER OF PLACE