Speke’s gazelle is a very rare small antelope that is similar in appearance to the Thomson’s gazelle encountered by tourists on the Serengeti Plains in Tanzania. It inhabits a 20-40 km wide grassy plain along much of Somalia’s coast. In the mid 80’s it also occurred in the northern Ogaden of eastern Ethiopia. cc-by-sa-2.0. FlickreviewR 2
This announces the availability of another batch of free downloads of hard-to-find documents on the rangelands of Somalia: Twenty-six reports on subjects ranging from the Trees of Somalia, a sand movement inventory, and the traditional Deegan ecological classification, to the Yeheb nut and Spekes gazelle. Publication dates range from 1907-2013. Several reports, originally published between 1954 and 1976, are translations of articles in Italian journals (1954-1976).
“Tembo!” exclaimed one of the men. A large elephant had unexpectedly materialized from the bamboo a few hundred feet away. Like a spirit, it moved silently across an arm of the glade and vaporized into the thicket on the other side. If the laborer hadn’t happened to look up when he did, we would have missed it completely.
Buffaloes by My Bedroom: Tales of Tanganyika
Elephants in a glade of manyatta grass.
It was 1964. My African crew and I were scouting a route for a track that would allow tourists to view wildlife on the rim of Ngorongoro Crater. The proposed route ran through light green bamboo thicket, spotted by dark-leaved pillar wood trees, and punctuated by sun-filled glades of tall manyatta grass. That this was buffalo and elephant habitat was evident from the abundance of their dung, tree trunks worn smooth by the rubbing of large bodies, trails forced through the dense bamboo, and mud wallows. (Refer to last page of blog for maps of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, and of the vegetation of Ngorongoro Crater.)
Smoothing a stump while easing an itch.Photo by David Bygott.
Sometimes we heard them, especially elephants: snapping branches as they browsed, the low rumbles of their stomachs, an occasional sharp, thrilling trumpet. . . But we also saw them, and not just the elephant in the first paragraph, but also buffaloes.
Three times, while sticking tall lengths of bamboo into the ground to mark where the new track would go, we jumped buffalo herds of forty to fifty animals. Luckily however, we scared them more than they scared us. What a noise they made as they blundered away, grunting and snorting, heavy hooves rumbling across the ground–they were big animals. They always paused at the edge of the bamboo to look back at us. We could see the sun glinting off their horns. They were mean-looking critters!
Buffaloes by My Bedroom: Tales of Tanganyika
Mean-looking critters.
Elephants and buffaloes also used open, grassy habitats. For instance it was not unusual to see elephants grazing the grasses, sedges, and herbs of Munge and Gorgor swamps on the floor of Ngorongoro Crater. However, most of my encounters with the two species were either in or near forest.
Gorgor Swamp. The large plants are Cyperus immensus, a species of sedge.
Elephant in Ngorongoro Crater’s Lerai Forest. Fed by a stream flowing down the crater wall, the forest is dominated by yellow barked fever trees (Acacia xanthophloea).
For instance, there was that cool sunny afternoon, following a rainstorm, when several elephants on the crater rim, seemingly stimulated by the rain, became amusingly animated: trumpeting, and pushing one another about. I could hear the click of their tusks–ivory on ivory–as the large animals playfully sparred. The dry season was coming to an end and they were happy to see the rain.
Elephant near my house on the rim of Ngorongoro Crater.
“In or near forest” included my small house, around which buffaloes often grazed at night.
The rooms of the house (a main room, two bedrooms, and a bathroom) didn’t interconnect. Instead, each opened directly onto the yard. On foggy mornings, after carefully checking for the presence of buffaloes, I groped my way to the bathroom through heavy mist. At night, I checked again with a flashlight before going to bed.
Buffaloes by My Bedroom: Tales of Tanganyika
My “yard” was mown at night by grazing buffaloes.
Not what one wants to meet while groping through fog to the privy. Photo by David Bygott.
At night, buffaloes also grazed the grounds of the Ngorongoro Crater Lodge. To prevent mishaps, the lodge hired Maasai warriors, armed with spears, to escort guests to their scattered cabins, following the evening meal in the main building.
Tourist cabins on the grounds of the Ngorongoro Crater Lodge. The main building, which included the dining room and bar, is at the far right.
While I commonly saw elephants in the swamps on the floor of Ngorongoro Crater, there were few buffaloes there in the 1960’s. In contrast, in terms of biomass, they are now the dominant herbivore, and for a very interesting reason. This significant change probably resulted from the removal of Maasai from the crater in 1974. With the Maasai went their traditional grassland management in which grazing and controlled burning kept grasslands short, palatable, and suited to small and medium sized grazers, such as wildebeests. Subsequently, grasses on the crater floor became longer, less palatable, and more suited to less selective grazers, such as buffaloes. Consequently, buffaloes became more abundant while the numbers of wildebeests, once the crater’s dominant herbivore, significantly declined. The Ngorongoro Conservation Area Authority has since returned grass fires to the crater ecosystem through a program of controlled burning. (Also see https://storiesofeastafrica.com/2022/09/27/maasai-pastoralists-of-ngorongoro-as-they-are-now/)
Buffaloes are more difficult prey than wildebeests. Will this cause lions to prey more heavily on the latter? Photo by David Bygott.
The Ngorongoro Conservation Area is thought to contain over 300 elephants. However, much of the habitat of Ngorongoro’s elephants is dense forest. This makes them hard to count. Thus, their true number is unknown. Although elephants are endangered throughout Africa by loss of habitat, and by poaching for ivory, little elephant poaching has been recorded in the NCA over the past several years. That said, on my last visit to Ngorongoro, in 2004, I was startled to see a tuskless adult elephant, something I had never encountered before.
Notice something missing ?
In well-protected areas, elephants without tusks may comprise as little as 2% of a population. This may be the case in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area. Let us hope so, anyway, because populations with significantly higher amounts of tuskless elephants (especially if the amounts are increasing), reflect heavy, unrelenting poaching. Simply speaking, elephants without tusks are less apt to be killed by poachers. Over time, therefore, their genes will dominate the population. Even thirty years ago, up to 25-38% of some African elephant populations were without tusks. A more recent study in Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park reported over half of all female elephants in to be tuskless. For more information on this subject, check out the on-line articles by Garrigan, Preston, and Associated Press in the reference section.
MAPS
Ngorongoro Crater is in the Crater Highlands, east of Tanzania’s famous Serengeti Plains. Graphic by David Bygott and Jeannette Hanby.
Ngorongoro Crater vegetation. Light blue (wet meadows), dark blue (reed swamp), yellow (medium grassland), light yellow (short grassland), light brown (bushland), dark brown (high woodland), green (forest). ( Herlocker, D.J. & H.J. Dirschl. 1972.)
Herlocker, D.J. 2009. Buffaloes by My Bedroom:Tales of Tanganyika. iUniverse.
Herlocker. D.J. & H.J. Dirschl. 1972. Vegetation of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, Tanzania. Canadian Wildlife Service– Report Series Number 19.
Oates, L. & P.A.Rees. 2013. The Historical Ecology of the Large Mammal Populations of Ngorongoro Crater, Tanzania, East Africa. Mammal Review 43(20013) 124-141.
Suddenly, ahead, a soft clunk sounded. Cowbell! The chief forest guard, an older man whose stiff curly hair was sprinkled with white, whispered that we should be especially quiet now. He and I were leading a group of forest guards and game scouts on a patrol for livestock trespassing in the forest reserve. Easing our way slowly around stumps, we carefully pushed branches aside to look ahead, studying each clearing before entering it, tense with anticipation.
“Wewe! Simama!” You! Stop!
“Kamata yeye!” Catch him!
Guards and scouts alike charged into the bushes . . .
Buffaloes by My Bedroom: Tales of Tanganyika.
Now that I’ve grabbed your attention, and you’re wondering what happens next, I’m taking the opportunity to introduce some important background information before resuming the story. In my previous post, I promoted the scenery and wildlife of Tanzania’s Ngorongoro Conservation Area (NCA) to the extent that some readers probably wondered why, if it was so great, it wasn’t a national park. The answer is that it once was. From 1951-1959 it comprised the western part of the Serengeti National Park.
However, difficulties encountered from having people, in this case Maasai pastoralists and non-Maasai cultivators, living in an area strictly devoted to the conservation of wildlife forced the then territorial government to remove the eastern Serengeti Plains and Crater Highlands from the park and place them within a separate entity, the Ngorongoro Conservation Area. This allowed the Maasai to continue their pastoral existence while the government controlled the use of certain key areas, including Ngorongoro and Empakaai craters, the eastern Serengeti Plains, and the archeological site at Oldupai Gorge. Thus, the Ngorongoro Conservation Area became a multiple-use management area, the only one in Tanzania to protect wildlife while allowing human habitation.
A relief map of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area (NCA). Yellow (grassland), gray (bushland and woodland), green (forest), and brown (agriculture). Courtesy of David Bygott and Jeannette Hanby.
The NCA’s montane forests provide an example of multiple use. Ranging in elevation from 5,000-10,000 ft (1,600-3,000 m), most forest cover occurs within the Northern Highlands Forest Reserve, a 50 mile (80 km) band of green on the southern and eastern slopes of the Crater Highlands. Here, monsoonal air masses off the Indian Ocean 200 miles (320 km) away are forced to rise, cool, and condense into mist, clouds, and rainfall. This, together with cool high-elevation temperatures, is conducive to a moist environment. Thus, unlike elsewhere in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, where green foliage is a seasonal phenomenon, montane forest remains green throughout the year.
Lichens and other epiphytes trailing from branches are associated with abundant mist.
The first thing that struck me upon entering an undisturbed (by cutting, fire, etc.) stand of montane forest was the dim light filtering through the dense canopy 50 to 60 feet overhead. Only here and there did a beam of sunlight slant down to brighten a patch of he forest floor. The next was how a dense understory of shrubs and small trees often hampered my movements, while at other times it was so scattered (or absent) that I could walk freely across the forest floor, the latter made soft and springy by several inches of decomposing organic matter. This made it easier to appreciate the trees, which I differentiated by their many types of bark, which ranged from silver to black, and from smooth to rough, including fissured, corrugated, scaly, flaking, and peeling.
Montane forest within the Northern Highlands Forest Reserve.
Ngorongoro’s forests comprised many tree and shrub species. Some were worthy of note, if only for their descriptive names, including pillar wood (Cassipourea malosana), cheese wood (Pittosporum viridiflorum), brittle wood (Nuxia congesta), and black ironwood (Olea capensis). The latter, also called Elgon olive (for Mt. Elgon on the Kenya-Uganda border), stands out because it is so dense and heavy that it will not float. (Check out the world’s ten heaviest woods at https://www.wood-database.com/top-ten-heaviest-woods/).
Cape chestnut.
Cape chestnut (Calodendron capense) has beautiful flowers. East African pencil cedar (Juniperus procera) is the largest species of Juniper in the world. Mountain bamboo (Arundinaria alpina) is a very large woody grass. The fresh leaves and shoots of Khat or Miraa (Catha edulis) were chewed as a stimulant throughout much of eastern Africa, especially the Horn of Africa. Podo (Podocarpus milanjianus), African mahogany (Entandrophragma angolense), and East African pencil cedar woods were highly prized for construction and other uses. However, these species were not abundant enough in Ngorongoro’s forests to attract commercial operations.
East African pencil cedar forms pure stands in high-elevation ravines within the NCA. The wood of this species was once extensively used to make pencils. Photo by Sema Tu. Creative Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License.
Dense stands of mountain bamboo on Oldeani Mountain (Oldeani is the Maasai word for bamboo). Mountain bamboo has the strange habit of gregariously dying out over large areas every 15 to 40 years or so.
In the case of the Northern Highlands Forest Reserve, a lack of commercially exploitable tree species didn’t matter because its principal purpose, ever since its establishment in 1927, was the protection of forest catchments for water production. Thus, although the forest fulfilled local domestic wood product needs, such as building poles, and firewood, it was far more important for the water (twenty-four small streams and seven springs) it provided beyond its boundaries to coffee and wheat estates, tourist facilities, Mbulu farmers, and Maasai pastoralists. Water infiltrating into the forest’s soils also sustained important groundwater forest habitat over ten miles (sixteen km) away in Lake Manyara National Park (see earlier post, On the Road to Ngorongoro: Part III)
Farms abutting the Northern Highlands Forest Reserve. Most are new since 1965. Photo by David Bygott.
However, the main reason for including the Northern Highlands Forest Reserve in the Serengeti National Park (1n 1951) and then the Ngorongoro Conservation Area (1959), was its value as wildlife habitat, especially for buffaloes, elephants, and rhinos. At the time it was thought that the large animals living in the forest seldom left it, although tourists would often see them along the road. However, subsequent studies revealed that rhinos often traveled back and forth between the forest and the floor of Ngorongoro Crater. Furthermore, before their access routes were blocked by new farms, elephants once moved between the Northern Highlands Forest Reserve and the Rift Valley floor near Lake Manyara .
Picture encountering this while pushing your way through dense undergrowth. Photo by David Bygott.
Finally, the montane forests of Ngorongoro supported yet another use, a great deal of it illegal. Much of the forest within the Northern Highlands Forest Reserve was discontinuous, separated by secondary scrub and grassy glades. Possible causes included cultivation carried out many years ago, fire, and grazing/browsing by livestock. Maasai herders were sometimes allowed, under permit, to pasture their livestock in forest glades during droughts. Fires, set in the glades to remove dry grass often escaped into the forest, damaging trees. Browsing by livestock destroyed tree seedlings. Trampling hooves compacted soils, reducing their ability to absorb rainfall. These impacts had the potential to seriously reduce the forest’s water catchment value.
It was for this reason that Henry Fosbrooke, the conservator of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, wanted me, the NCA’s assistant conservator (forests), to stop forest trespass by Maasai livestock. “The forest guards aren’t doing their job properly. You must shape them up.” This explains why, in the first paragraph of this post, I and a group of forest guards and game scouts are portrayed sneaking through the trees trying apprehend trespassing herders and their animals. We now return to that story.
Cattle illegally grazing a glade within the Northern Highlands Forest Reserve. The tall grass, manyatta grass (Eleusine jaegeri), is unpalatable to livestock. The other grasses have been grazed and trampled so heavily that in places only bare soil remains, Fires set in the glade have, in the past, burned away parts of the adjacent forest, giving it an irregular, often open appearance.
The person caught by the scouts and guards was a Maasai herd boy. Soon afterward, they caught another herder, and then another. We nabbed six herders and roughly a thousand cattle that day. Together with those apprehended a few days earlier in another part of the forest, this made ten people and two-thousand cattle. No wonder the forest reserve was degraded. Three days later, the herders and I appeared in a magistrate’s court in the town of Karatu where the African magistrate levied such a small fine that a relative of the herders paid it on the spot.
“They treat these fines as grazing fees” whispered a senior staff member of the NCA, Solomon ole Saibull, into my ear. “They would willingly pay even greater amounts.” Keeping his voice low, he told me that in his experience, African magistrates seldom imposed heavy fines for forest trespass because they didn’t think it was a very important offense. Most Africans, educated or not, considered forest reserves to be relicts of colonialism, set aside by the ‘wazungu’ for their own purposes, not the African’s. “He [the magistrate] probably thinks the reserve should be converted to farms,”Solomon hissed.
Buffaloes by My Bedroom: Tales of Tanganyika.
Here was another factor contributing to degradation within the forest reserve. Now I understood why the forest guards weren’t interested in braving elephants and buffaloes to catch trespassing livestock. Why bother if it did no good? Consequently, despite our efforts, I and the forest guards were to have little impact on the numbers of trespassing livestock during my time at Ngorongoro.
Maasai herders caught trespassing with their livestock in the Northern Highlands Forest Reserve. They were so engrossed in chewing honeycombs that they didn’t hear us approach.
We now jump ahead thirty years. The Ngorongoro Conservation Area Authority (NCAA) general management plan, published in 1996, emphasized, among other things, the continuing need to better control both fire and forest grazing. Apparently, the NCA foresters who came after me also had trouble controlling forest trespass.
Furthermore, the management plan also stated that Ngorongoro’s forests were under considerable pressure from illegal harvesting of trees for local domestic use. This to the extent that Mafu (Fagaropsis angolensis) and Khat or Miraa (Catha edulis) were listed as ‘threatened’ tree species in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area due to extensive logging of the former for building materials, and heavy harvesting of the latter for its drug properties.
This undoubtedly reflects rapid population growth, both within and outside the Ngorongoro Conservation Area (Tanzania’s population approximately tripled from 1960 to 1996), which has created a higher demand for forest products. (For information on population growth in Tanzania, go to https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/tanzania-population.)
I wonder what the situation is now, twenty-six years later.
Man, it was cold! Dense fog had formed during the night to wrap my little house on the rim of Ngorongoro Crater in a silent, gauzy blindfold. Peering through the window, I shivered, something I hadn’t expected to do so close to the equator. But then I also hadn’t expected to be living at 7,000 ft elevation ( 2,134 m). On the other hand, a fire in the fireplace was beginning to making its presence felt. Pulling up a chair to huddle near its warmth, I reviewed what I had learned from my first staff meeting as the Ngorongoro Conservation Area’s new assistant conservator (forests).
Ngorongoro’s forests and crater rim are often cold and foggy during the wet and early dry seasons. Photo by David Bygott.
Wearing a sweater to ward off the cool morning air, Henry Fosbrooke, conservator of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, addressed the assembled officers from behind his sturdy African olive-wood desk. He confirmed that I was to oversee a large forest reserve, ten forest guards, a tree nursery, and a small fuelwood plantation of eucalyptus trees. He emphasized the need to stop livestock trespassing in the forest reserve, but he also wanted me to locate game-viewing tracks for tourists in and around Ngorongoro Crater. Then, he said something I hadn’t expected. Pausing to wipe his glasses, Henry admitted that neither activity would be possible until he obtained more vehicle fuel and a bulldozer. In the meantime I was to take over the conservation area’s rain gauge system and set up a meteorological station near the office. Also, I was informed, Richard Leakey had ordered a lorry load of bamboo for the archeological site at Oldupai Gorge; buffaloes had broken the fence around the tree plantation again; and I needed to familiarize myself with the files in my office. After the meeting, John Goddard, a Canadian wildlife biologist, and my neighbor, invited me to accompany him into the crater while he studied rhinos. Checking the fog again through the window, I decided I was in little danger of being bored. I also decided to borrow a heavy sweater from John.
In fact, I was never to be bored for long at Ngorongoro, especially when my official duties expanded to take me throughout the entire Ngorongoro Conservation Area. And, what a place it was, too!
A relief map of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area. Yellow (grassland), gray (bushland and woodland), green (forest), and brown (agriculture). Courtesy of David Bygott and Jeannette Hanby (more about them later).
Bracketed by three rift valley lakes, Manyara, Eyasi, and Natron, the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, at 3,200 sq. miles (8,300 sq. k), is nearly as large as Yellowstone National Park, which it rivals in scenic appeal and biological diversity (both are UNESCO World Heritage Sites). And how could it not what with the high peaks, plateau, and volcanic calderas of the Crater Highlands in the east, the vast sweep of the world-famous Serengeti Plains in the west, and, in the southwest, Lake Eyasi and the rugged Eyasi Escarpment (not to mention extensive areas of thorn tree bushland and woodland).
Empakaai Crater dramatically backdropped by Oldoinyo Lengai, an active volcano rising from the rift valley floor. At 10,700 ft (3,200 m) elevation and 980 ft (300 m) deep, Empakaai is highly scenic. Views from the crater rim often include Mt. Kilimanjaro 90 miles (145 km) to the east.
The Melinda grasslands, a high plateau (including the Embulbul Depression) in the rain shadow of >11,000 ft (3353 m) Loolmalison and Olosirwa mtns. The trails reflect many millennia of use by wildlife and, for at the least the last 2,000 years, livestock of a succession of pastoral peoples. The area is now grazed by Maasai livestock. The distant peak is Oldeani Mountain.
Composed of numerous species, including bamboo on Oldeani Mtn., montane evergreen forest is sustained by high rainfall, primarily on the southern and eastern flanks of the Crater Highlands. It is a major habitat for rhino, buffalo, and elephant. The pictured tree is a species of Dracaena.
Thorn tree woodland on the drier, west slope of the Crater Highlands. The dominant tree here is a species of Commiphora. This is giraffe and impala country. The eastern Serengeti Plains are visible in the distance.
Migratory wildebeest on the eastern Serengeti Plains. During my time at Ngorongoro (1964-67), approximately 400,000 wildebeest moved onto the eastern plains every wet season to graze and calve, only returning to the Serengeti National Park when the grass and water dried up. (In 1980 they numbered around 1,400,000.)
The Eyasi Escarpment rising 1300 ft (400 m) above Lake Eyasi (barely visible at far left). Shallow Lake Eyasi fluctuates widely in area both seasonally and annually. Flamingoes and waterbirds visit the lake. Agriculturalists, Hadza hunter-gatherers, and Datoga pastoralists use the adjacent semi-arid thorn bush flats.
Pretty cool, eh?
(The authors/artists Jeannette Hanby and David Bygott lived for nineteen years in Mangola Village near Lake Eyasi’s eastern shore just a few miles east of the area pictured above. Their books, Spirited Oasis: Tales from a Tanzanian Village, and Beyond the Oasis: Safaris of Song and Stone, relate their experiences during this time. Check them out at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MU1L-sZJs8Q; David and Jeannette tell a good story.)
(For more information on the present-day Ngorongoro Conservation Area see https://www.ncaa.go.tz/
Summary of the past four posts:It’s September, 1964. I’m traveling with Henry Fosbrooke, the conservator of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, to Ngorongoro a hundred miles west of Arusha, Tanganyika to take up my duties as a forester. A newly arrived Peace Corps volunteer, I soak up impressions like a dry sponge: the Great North Road (Cape Town to Cairo); the Maasai Steppe with its spear-wielding cattle herders and air smokey from grass fires; buying bananas at a village named after mosquitoes; sweeping views from the Great Rift Escarpment; and, finally, crossing a once empty plateau now being settled by Mbulu farmers.
Several miles past the village of Karatu we came to Lodoare Gate, the entrance to Henry’s domain, the Ngorongoro Conservation Area. Beyond the gate’s wooden barrier, the road disappeared into the dense forest of the Northern Highlands Forest Reserve. In Arusha, Henry had complained about how the forest needed protection from illegal grazing by Maasai cattle but wasn’t getting it because the guards supervised by an African forester weren’t doing their job properly. As we waited for the gate guards to raise the pole and let us through, he abruptly switched from tour guide to boss mode and returned to the subject. Fixing me with a tight smile, he nodded toward the forest and declared, ” As the new assistant conservator (forests) this is your responsibility now. You must shape these chaps up!”
Lodoare Gate, entrance to the Ngorongoro Conservation Area. It has since been replaced by a larger, more modern structure. (Photo by David Bygott, co-author with Jeanette Hanby, of Spirited Oasis, and Beyond the Oasis.)
I needed no reminder. Cloaking the southern and western slopes of the Crater Highlands, the forest had been a brooding presence, a few miles to the north, for the last twenty miles, its dark green foliage sharply contrasting with the dried-up savanna of the plateau. Yes, I certainly intended to do something about those forest guards.
The road began to climb, passing through thickets of broad-leaved shrubs, vines, and creepers that reduced visibility away from the road to a few feet. Only where it crossed high on the slope were we able to look out and see trees with smooth silvery bark rising from a dense cover of shrubs.
Pillar wood trees (Cassipourea malosana) in the Northern Highlands Forest Reserve rising above a dense cover of shrubs dominated by Vernonia auriculifera
“Any wildlife here?” I asked. “Yes indeed,” Henry enthusiastically replied, back in tour guide mode again, “elephants, buffaloes, rhinos . . . We might encounter some at any time.” Then with a grimace, “I’m driving a government Land Rover today because I don’t want my private ghari damaged should we meet a stroppy rhino.” Well, that gave pause for thought; the shrubs lining the road sometimes were so dense that rhinos, or possibly even elephants, would be nearly invisible until they stepped onto the road. If we arrived just as this happened, we could easily hit one, or find ourselves dangerously close. I decided to keep alert, especially when we rounded blind curves.
An example of what we might have met while rounding a corner. Look at those horns! (Photo by George and Lory Frame)
Jack Meyers would have understood. A livestock marketing advisor traveling from Arusha to Mwanza, he passed along this same stretch of road in 1976. However, he did so in different circumstances. Rain was bucketing down, the road was muddy and slippery, and his driver, the manager of the project he was advising, was proving worryingly erratic. At one point where the road cut across a steep slope, the vehicle wavered so near the edge that Jack almost grabbed the steering wheel. But then something happened that made his partner slam on the brakes. Crack! Pop! Crash! Shrubs violently shook and swayed, and where an instant before had been only muddy road, there was now an elephant. Flat on its butt.
What had happened was that the big animal, finding the wet soil on the steep slope too slippery to safely navigate on foot, had simply sat down and tobogganed, crashing through bushes and ricocheting off trees, downhill to the road.* Peering through a rain and mud-streaked windshield, the two men watched, wide-eyed, as the tembo, leaves adhering to its wet skin and a broken branch balanced precariously on its head, heaved itself to its feet and shook off the accumulated vegetation. Then it ambled across the road, carefully sat down again, and disappeared, sliding farther down the hill. Jack and his partner did not linger. Seeing another elephant materialize from the bushes close behind them, they quickly moved on.
(*Elephants have more than one way to negotiate steep slopes. For instance, some friends of mine, Andrew and Barbara Clark, rode an elephant in Thailand a few years ago which drug its hind legs like a sea anchor while walking and steering with its forefeet. In another example, a pachyderm in a recent televised nature program [name forgotten] tucked in all its feet and slid down a hill on its belly. And, of course, many of the big animals just carefully walk, especially when the ground is dry or rocky. )
In our case, no large animals impeded our progress up the mountain. However, we did occasionally see their spoor on the road, and, funnily enough, it conjured up memories. Cape buffalo droppings resembled cattle pats I had stepped around in fenced pastures in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Piles of elephant dung looked to my untrained eye like those of horses, except that the fibrous brown boluses were the size of grapefruit. At one point I caught the scent of horses wafting in through an open Land Rover window. “Elephants,” Henry corrected me. “Somewhere close by.”
Dung beetles on a pile of elephant dung. (Author: NJR ZA. GNU Free Documentation License.)
Eventually, we arrived at the top where the road branched both ways along a narrow ridge. Henry stopped and suggested I look over the other side.
It took several minutes to absorb the details of that startling view. Expecting a forested valley, I was unprepared to see, far below, tawny grassland stretching away across the floor of an immense crater, Ngorongoro Crater! All through the forest, we had been driving up the Crater’s southern flank.
Buffaloes by My Bedroom: Tales of Tanganyika
Ngorongoro Crater as seen from its southeastern rim. The dry lake bed in the distance reflects drier conditions than when I arrived in 1964. (Photo by David Bygott.)
Wow!
We were near our destination now. Late afternoon shadows darkened the western walls of the crater and accentuated small hills on the crater floor. The road kept to the crater rim, passing through grassy glades, and dipping into forested gullies. Occasionally, wonderful views presented themselves northward over the darkening crater to the highlands beyond. Then we began to see animals–my first ever free-ranging African wildlife; two gray elephants daydreaming in an open glade, a reddish bushbuck standing startled at the forest edge, the massive rear end of a buffalo disappearing into dense green bush. And finally, the best: two lions walking down the middle of the road, so certain of their right of way that, as far as they were concerned, we weren’t even there. I started mentally composing my first letter home.
Buffaloes by My Bedroom: Tales of Tanganyika.
Elephants in a glade on the rim of Ngorongoro Crater.
Then we were there. Passing a tourist lodge, we turned onto a smaller road leading past office buildings with red corrugated metal roofs to a large cul-de-sac serving four residences. Parking beside the smallest, Henry turned to me and said, “This one is yours”
