Nevertheless, I pulled out my phone to capture
the moment, but as I fumbled around with it,
hoping to fulfill this trivial, human wish, a huge
bull elephant standing less than a hundred feet
to our right trumpeted aggressively, its trunk
raised in the air.
“We need to go!” Makaga said briskly, putting
the jeep back in motion.
The rainforests of Gabon are one of the last
strongholds for forest elephants, whose num-
bers in Central Africa have suffered a dramatic
decline in recent decades because of poaching.
Smaller than African savanna elephants, forest
elephants are enigmatic beasts that roam trails
they have traversed for generations, feeding on
grass and leaves and fruit. They tread softly,
moving quietly among the trees, like ghosts in
the night. They appear to plan their search for
food, much like humans once planned their food
gathering around seasons, returning to the same
trees when the fruit is most likely to be ripe.
Just as the elephants depend on the forest to
survive, many of Lopé’s trees rely on elephants
to disperse their seeds through the animals’
dung. Some even produce fruit that cannot
be digested by any other animal, suggesting a
fragile interdependence with origins deep in
evolutionary history.
Despite being remote and relatively
untouched by people, Lopé National Park and its
elephants appear to be in trouble. Researchers
have discovered that Earth’s warming tem-
peratures could be lowering the fruit yield of
many species of trees at the park, which inA FRAGILE REFUGE FOR FOREST ELEPHANTS 105