Yudhijit Bhattacharjee is a contributing writer.
Dutch photographer Jasper Doest documented
the life of Flamingo Bob, a tame bird popular with
children in Curaçao, in the February 2020 issue.contents onto a rectangular wire mesh and low-
ered it into the water, letting the finer poo wash
away while leaving behind seeds, stems, and
branches. From the seeds, Whytock explains,
scientists hope to discover which fruits—and
how much of them—the elephants are eating
and then compare that with the dung studies
White and others did three decades earlier.
“This is a more direct way to measure if the for-
est elephant’s diet has been affected,” he says.
On the drive out of Lopé early one morning,
not far from where I’d seen the elephants, we
saw a buffalo in the road, blocking our path.
We stared at it, and it stared at us, standing its
ground. A mist hung over the shrubs and trees.
In the hushed silence, I found myself wonder-
ing about a world being reshaped by warming
temperatures. The buffalo finally sauntered
away, and we drove on. As the hills and forests
receded, I was left with a troubling thought:
Could the fraying of the ancient bond between
trees and elephants in a place as pristine as Lopé
be a forewarning? Was it the case that other
seemingly untouched forests, with no Edmond
Dimoto to observe their trees, already were being
harmed in as yet unnoticed ways? jA FRAGILE REFUGE FOR FOREST ELEPHANTS 119