Summon the Heroes

Every so often a story comes along that inspires hope. And then takes it away. And then gives it back again. This is one such story.

This is a tale about an orphaned elephant calf, found alone and terrified in Kenya’s Tsavo West National Park.

It is a tale about fortuitous timing and a remarkable rescue, and how, just when the situation appeared at its bleakest, fortune — and park rangers with the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust elephant orphanage in Nairobi — intervened. The date was 21 November 2010.

Hardly anyone could have known it then it there would be a happy ending — of sorts. Not entirely, but happy just the same. For a moment there, anyway.

Nairobi’s Sheldrick elephant orphanage was already on the world map, owing to a widely seen CBS 60 Minutes segment hosted by veteran war correspondent Bob Simon. The segment first aired in 2006. (A grainy, time-worn video is still up on YouTube, some 20 years later.)

I had visited the Sheldrick Trust from halfway round the world twice, in 2008 and again in 2009. At the end of 2010, I decided to co-sponsor an elephant of my own, and by timing and chance, the elephant I sponsored was that very same elephant who, having been orphaned by ivory poachers, was saved from a group of lions.

Tsavo is a vast, untrammelled region of red dust plains and doum palms that stretches an hour’s drive from the Indian Ocean one side to the Nairobi-Mombasa highway that links Kenya with Uganda and from there to Lake Victoria.

Tsavo was once home to some of the largest elephant herds in Africa and site in the late 1980s of the infamous “Ivory Wars,” a pitched years-long war between heavily armed ivory poachers, many of them from neighbouring Somalia, and militarized park rangers with the Kenya Wildlife Service, then under the direction of palaeoanthropologist turned environmental crusader Richard Leakey.

Kenya’s elephant population was being wiped out to feed the illegal ivory trade across in Southeast Asia, Japan and, most notably, China.

Kenya’s then president, Daniel arap Moi, mindful that Kenya’s tourism industry hung in the balance — poachers had started killing tourists at that point, in robberies gone wrong and to silence witnesses — told Leakey to do something about it.

Leakey, for his part, told Moi that global feel-good wildlife conferences, hysterical op-ed pieces in the New York Times, and cutely designed posters at zoos around the world weren’t going to cut it.

The only thing that would work, Leakey told Moi, was to fight the poachers on their own terms — to meet gunfire with gunfire. At that point, unarmed park rangers were tired of being threatened — and killed — by armed bandits.

Moi was reluctant at first.

African politics are famously volatile, and no leader, democratically elected or not, willingly agrees to arm and equip a fighting force that could conceivably one day pose a rival to that country's actual armed forces.

Moi was taking a gamble, and he knew it. Kenya needed some positive headlines for a change. The tourism trade was hanging by a thread. You’d better not mess this up, Moi told Leakey.

We’ll do our level best, Leakey assured him, but we need the guns and support equipment — and decent salaries — to do it. (This is all detailed in Leakey’s remarkable 2001 book, Wildlife Wars: My Battle to Save Kenya’s Elephants, a harrowing read if ever there was one.)

The subsequent conflict was bloody, violent, protracted, and long. And decisive.

Kenya’s  wildlife authorities and park rangers regained control of Tsavo; elephants enjoyed a brief respite from being killed for their tusks; and overseas tourists started coming back, a trickle at first and then back to their pre-‘80s levels.

©Alex Strrachan/Strachan Photography

Decades later, poaching is still an issue — the ivory trade in China has never really gone away — but the scale of poaching in Tsavo is nothing compared to what it was then. Today, NGOs like the Sheldrick Trust, named after David Sheldrick, Tsavo’s founding park warden, have boots on the ground, and assault rifles to match. They’re there to do what they can, and conservation organizations like the Sheldrick Trust and the community-owned and run Reteti Elephant Sanctuary in northern Kenya — Kenya’s first large-scale program founded and managed by strictly local communities — help save orphaned elephants, one elephant at a time.

Ishanga’s tale was remarkable from the outset.

The Sheldrick Trust’s Ziwani anti-poaching unit, tasked with finding and removing snares in the deep bush, happened on the stricken  orphan just as lions were eyeing her up for the taking. In moments, a routine poaching patrol turned into anything but routine.

Just as the team circled her, to try and capture her, a lion raced out of the underbrush and grabbed the terrified elephant by the neck. An accompanying Kenya Wildlife Service park ranger fired gunshots into the air and the lion let go of its intended victim — fortunately for all concerned. The elephant calf was now both paralyzed by fear and injured.

The team were able to restrain her while the lion, now joined by companions, circled a safe distance away — “safe” being a relative term.

The elephant, bleeding from its injuries and terrified by what was going on around it, was shepherded aboard a waiting rescue plane  and airlifted to Nairobi, an hour away by small plane.

On arrival, she was rushed to the Sheldrick elephant nursery outside  Nairobi National Park. Veterinarians gave her a 50/50 chance of surviving. They would later admit they rated her chances closer to 20/80 that she would make it through her first night, let alone beyond that.

In the tradition of the orphanage, her new minders gave her a name — Ishanga: a word in Eastern philosophy used to describe that part of the larger universe that invites us to invite grace as a constant presence in our lives.

Ishanga did survive that first night as it turned out, but her early days at the nursery were fraught. She was wild, temperamental, and would not let anyone near her, not even to give her water or milk.

The keepers, for their part, were patient, quiet, and tireless. After a regimen of injections of Selenium, Vitamin B12 and the intervention of an intravenous drip, Ishanga once again found her feet.

More than a few new arrivals to the orphanage succumb from their injuries, shock, an underlying medical condition, or — and this is strangely human — sadness from losing their family.

In an effort to welcome Ishanga into the fold, keepers brought the other orphans to her recovery stockade. Elephants are social, curious and welcoming by nature, even at that age, and the other orphans were eager to meet the newcomer. Ishanga would not respond to people, at least not at first, but she might respond to other elephants, especially those her own age.

She did.

In the following days, she worked up the nerve to leave the confines of her stockade and follow the other orphans into the bush on their daily early morning walks — supervised by orphanage staff — into Nairobi National Park. (Elephants can never be released into Nairobi National Park, because it’s too small to sustain an elephant population over the long term, not even a small herd, but they can explore, during daylight hours and under supervision.) Nairobi National Park, unique because it’s the only real wildlife reserve in the heart of a major metropolis, is home to giraffe, rhinos, zebras, hippos, buffalo, crocodiles — and lions.

But not elephants.

Ishanga’s rescue / ©Photos courtesy Sheldrick Wildlife Trust

It took time, but as the days turned into weeks, the weeks months, and the months a year, Ishanga filled out, regained her confidence and took on a personality of her own.

Her weekly progress reports show it was a slow process, though — she was “desperately thin” in the veterinarians’ own words, during those early weeks, and suffered from nightmares.

(The Sheldrick Trust assigns a specific keeper to each orphan, and the keeper is often in the srockade with the elephant as it sleeps through the night.

The recovery process can take as long as two or three years; it depends on the individual.

The bond between a keeper and an elephant orphan has been shown to play a crucial role, one of many important discoveries the Sheldrick Trust has made since the nursery was first established in 1977.)

With the onset of adolescence, elephant orphans are relocated to Tsavo East National Park, where they’re placed in a “half-way house” at Ithumba Camp, a reintegration centre in a remote wilderness area where newly released elephants are slowly introduced to wild herds, in the hope they will eventually be taken in.

Most are. Eventually.

Space is no longer an issue. Nairobi National Park is a mere 45 square miles (117 square kilometres); Tsavo East on the other hand is 5,300 sq mi (14,000 sq. km).

Big difference.

Once in Tsavo, the rehabilitated orphans will — in theory — lead full, productive lives as self-sufficient adults, capable of fending for themselves and eventually raising their own families.

Some of the released elephants return to Ithumba briefly, to check up on old friends (human and elepahnt); some are never seen again.

In some cases, a returning orphan will bring its wild herd with it. This is a remarkable sight to see in person, and shows just how effective  the Sheldrick program has proven to be in its near 50 years of existence.

Ishanga graduated to Tsavo’s Ithumba reintegration unit in August 2012, some 18 months after being rescued from near certain death. She would have been roughly two and a half years old at the time of her being moved to Ithumba.

It took Ishanga little more than a year to find a wild herd. Keeper reports from Ithumba — the Sheldrick Trust keeps meticulous records of which elephant goes where, and records its movements after that — show that, once she had joined a wild herd, Ishanga was a regular visitor to Ithumba, and would bring some of her wild friends with her. I’m looking at a report from October 2017 as I write this.

Her appearances became fewer and further between in the intervening years, a natural turn of events. It wasn’t all smooth sailing. In one visit, keepers noticed that she had somehow sheered one of her tusks in half. No one knows how or why. It couldhave been an accident, it could have been a joust with a rival elephant, it could even have been an encounter with lions once again. A report from January 2021 showed that, her tusk aside, she appeared to be in good health and now a fully grown 11-year-old.

Then she vanished entirely.

Gone.

No one knows how or why but the assumption was that, now leading the life of a wild elephant, she had simply moved on to the next phase of her time on earth.

Her Sheldrick past was now just that: the past.

And then … a miracle.

That story, told in Ishanga’s Tales: Middle Endings, is next.

Ishanga at Ithumba, 2018 (Photos courtesy Sheldrick Wildlife Trust)

Ishanga, now semi-wild, visits Ithumba, 2021

One Hundred Years of Solitude revisited

Alex Garcia López’s adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez’s ode to life returns with its second act, and seldom has nature looked so haunting — or fragile. The Netflix version of Cien Años de Soledad is a moveable feast … stunning to look at, deeply moving and, at times, unspeakably sad.

One of the many grace notes of Alex Garcia López and Laura Mora’s film adaptation of Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez’s literary magnum opus comes at the very beginning.

In all Márquez’s works, nature is a living presence that breathes through character, story, myth, and magic realism — a story, as Márquez might describe it, as inherited memory, told in prodigious moments.

For all the human drama, and of that there is plenty, nature — rain, droughts, storms, eocological decline and species extinction — is never far from Márquez’s mind. Toward the end of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1982,  Márquez warned of a stark future for the natural world. He used the word ‘nature’ to represent all organic existence on Earth; he warned that prosperous nations had assembled destructive arsenals of weapons capable of wiping out “not only all the human beings… but also the totality of all living beings that have ever drawn breath on this planet of misfortune.”

Márquez closed his speech with his hopes for the “Utopia of Life,” a new world in which the natural order of life is respected, love is true, and marginalized people are given a lasting “second opportunity on earth.”

When Cien Años de Soledad — filmed entirely in Spanish in Colombia with a largely Colombian cast and crew, as per the stipulation of Márquez’s family (Márquez’s sons Rodrigo Garcia and Gonzalo Garcia Barcha were co-executive producers on the 16-part, 18-hour Netflix drama) — first aired in 2024, a friend admitted that the opening — a desiccated corpse, burrowing ants, the rust and mould of perpetual rains, a faded print of a multilayered family tree with countless branches, all faded in time — gave her the chills.

She had read the novel at 13 and it had moved her in the way only the great novels can, but she doubted a filmed version could, or would, do it justice. She was wrong, she says now.

The series has been broken into two chapters; the second chapter, seven hour-long episodes, began streaming just days ago. A feature length, two-hour finale will stream on Netflix starting Aug. 26.

Márquez himself did not believe Cien Años was filmable. He suggested in interviews, with a touch of the wry playfulness that marked much of his writing, that he wrote Cien Años precisely to prove that the written word has a wider sweep than cinema.

Mauro González/Netflix

Cien Años  was a challenge to film snobs. A dare. Try this, amigo, and don’t come running to me when it doesn’t work out the way you expected.

Reduced to its essentials, Cien Años tells the life story of José Arcadio Buendía, his hard-pressed, long-suffering wife Úrsula, and their sprawling, wildly differing progeny and their descendants. It tells, too, the generations-spanning tale of the imagined, idealized jungle village of Macondo, not so much a town as a state of mind — temporal and magical at the same time.

The visuals are haunting, gorgeous.

Swarms of monarch butterflies flutter around one character; a travelling parade of carnival workers cavort and dance with carefree abandon through the town square, while their leader dabbles in alchemy and the weirding ways of the occult and Old World magic in the shadows.

Úrsula frets that she will give birth to iguanas or — worse — children with pigs’ tails, because she and her husband, José Arcadio, are first cousins; their families have warned them that marrying and having children will bring a terrible curse on them. Destiny has hidden surprises for them all.

The writing — in both Márquez’s original and in scriptwriters Camila Brugés, Alba González, José Rivera and Maria Camila Arias’ restless and poetic adaptation — is beautiful and witty by turns, as when José Arcadio tells Úrsula: “If you bear iguanas, we’ll raise iguanas. But there’ll be no more killings in this town because of the two of us.” (Interestingly, that line is subtly changed from Márquez’s original, “If you bear iguanas, we’ll raise iguanas. But there’ll be no more killings in this town because of you.”)

Toward the end of the first act, those bright, early chapters take a dark turn, as Macondo and the people who live there find themselves in the crosswinds of political upheaval — imposed on them from outside — civil unrest, and social upheaval.

The violence in Cien Años’ back half is often brutal and hard to watch. Utopia proves elusive, as ever.

Márquez cared deeply for the natural world; he viewed the environment not as a passive backdrop for melodrama but as a character in its own right, indelibly linked to human survival, culture, and family memory.

In One Hundred Years of Solitude, nature is wielded as a disruptive, mythical force against human arrogance, from an “insomnia plague” (just what it sounds) to a torrential downpour that lasts for four years — a direct, not-so-subtle critique of capitalism’s disregard for local ecosystems and family communities.

Yes, Márquez faced threats to his safety, life, and freedom on multiple occasions, starting with his forced exile from his native Colombia as far back as 1955, when he was a young reporter with the Colombian newspaper El Spectador and wrote a series of investigative reports exposing government corruption and military incompetence surrounding a navy shipwreck.

Just days ago, Colombia voted yet again for a hard-right ultranationalist government. Márquez had avoided that for much of his life; he passed of natural causes, age 87 in Mexico City some 12 years ago. He headlined there for the better part of three decades, preferring the cultural environment and social freedom there over what had become of his homeland.

Mauro González/Nteflix

Márquez embraced Mexico City as a creative haven and a stable base for what would become one of the defining writing careers of our time.

(Márquez’s 1985 novel Love in the Time of Cholera was also adapted to the big screen, in a 2007 feature film directed by the English filmmaker Mike Newell, featuring Javier Bardem, Giovanna Mezzogiorno and Benjamin Bratt in a tale about love, obsession, and the healing power of time.)

Cine Años’s cinematography, by Paulo Pérez, Maria Sarasvati Herrera, Camilo Monsalve and James L. Brown, is full of long, languid pans, and slow, sweeping tracking shots  the camera follows one character through a crowd, then follows another character without pausing, and then a third, and so on —  just one long, fluid flowing moment. Like life itself.

Early photography, in the form of the daguerrotype, a shiny silver-coated copper plate process invented in 1839, makes a cameo appearance in early episodes — a reminder, perhaps, of how family memories are stored over generations.

“Wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good,” Márquez wrote.

“In that Macondo forgotten even by the birds, where the dust and the heat had become so strong that it was difficult to breathe, secluded by solitude and love and by the solitude of love in a house where it was almost impossible to sleep because of the noise of the red ants, Aureliano and Amaranta Úrsula were the only happy beings, and the most happy on the face of the earth.”

Márquez once said that it is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old; they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.

What better way, then, to close than with Márquez’s own words:

“The adolescents of my generation, greedy for life, forgot in body and soul about their hopes for the future until reality taught them that tomorrow was not what they had dreamed, and they discovered nostalgia.”

Cien Años de Soledad unveils its final act on Aug. 26.

Mauro González/Netflix

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At Loliondo with Corbett Bishop

One from back in the day.

Corbett was not well known, not a household name, but he was a friend, and for a brief time there we had Loliondo all to ourselves.

The Loliondo Game Control Area was established in 1951 as one of Tanzania’s numerous wildlife protected areas, and covers an area of some 4,000 square kilometres.

It was one of the original keystone heritage sites, set aside for sustainable conservation and tourism development in the Greater Serengeti-Mara corridor that links northern Tanzania with southern Kenya.

We made our way there after an early morning trek through Ngorongoro Crater, several hours’ drive north against the wildebeest migration. Pouring rain all the way — no one else there around but hundreds upon thousands of wildebeest.

Visiting Ngorongoro was always a stressful experience for Corbett, despite his frequent guiding expeditions up Mt. Kilimanjaro. He no longer took clients into Ngorongoro, he admitted, favouring a few extra days in Serengeti instead. Ngorongoro had a reputation for being overcrowded with tourists and notorious for its bad drivers. Bad drivers behaving badly, especially around lions.

I had been to Ngorongoro years earlier, and had found it — provided one was willing to overlook the occasional sight of dozens of 4x4s converging on a single browsing rhino.

From a photographer’s point of view, and this is my own perspective, Ngorongoro is the one of the few wild places in Africa — offhand I can’t think of another — where crater walls rise sheer in the background, providing the perfect backdrop for perspective and depth-of-field. Those green-limned cliffs create an almost three-dimensional effect.

The animals themselves — lions, elephants, rhinos, buffalo and countless others — are habituated to people, and their bad habits.

One early morning — we made a point of being up and about, and in the crater at first light, before the post-breakfast crush of tourists from the luxury lodges that line the crater rim — Corbett stopped and began waving frantically out the window.

Far away, at the foot of a rock face, a lion researcher he knew, a young woman from California, had a puncture in her Land Rover Defender and was change a tire … and struggling with it. Far above, atop of the rock — unseen by her, but clearly visible to us, — a lioness was looking on, lying flat on her stomach, watching the lion researcher,  unperturbed.

Corbett tried raising his friend on the radio — no doubt headlines like, ‘Lion Kills Lion Researcher in Africa’ flashing through his mind  … but she wasn’t answering.

No matter.

The lioness didn’t seem to care one way or the other, but that didn’t stop Corbett from fretting.

“I get stressed!” he shouted, at no one in particular — though I was sitting right beside him.

Then there was the time he berated the driver of a tourist-filled 4x4 for nearly running over a lion’s tail. Ngorongoro lions, to get out of the way of the blistering at midday, often crawl under the floor of a stopped 4x4 for shade.

This driver had suddenly gunned his engine and was about to crunch the cat’s tail in the grass. “Hey!” Corbett shouted. “Wake up! There’s a lion under your car!”

“I hate coming into Ngorongoro,” Corbett admitted, moments later. “My blood pressure pops every time …”

©Alex Strachan/Strachan Photography

And so … onto the relative peace and quiet of Loliondo, a day’s drive to the north, where the only other person we saw, coming the other way on the muddy, rain-soaked track, was an older man with a full white beard and the battered, weather-beaten mien of an old Africa hand.

They stopped and talked out the driver’s window, then continued on our separate ways.

”That was Richard Estes,” Corbett explained.

Estes, writer of The Safari Companion: A Guide to Watching African Mammals, considered by many to be the indispensable guide to viewing wildlife in East Africa. “The best behavioural field guide ever,” said Sy Montgomery, author of Tamed and Untamed: Close Encounters of the Animal Kind. But don’t just take Montgomery’s word for it. “This book is more than a field guide; it is a valuable tool for conservation,” Kathryn Fuller, then president of the World Wildlife Fund (USA) said.

Running into Estes himself on the vast African plain, with nobody else around for miles … what were the odds?

Corbett was like that. He was a magnet for unusual encounters. Close encounters of the wild kind.

He was the location coordinator for the 2002 IMAX film Kilimanjaro: To the Roof of Africa — he had a falling out with the producer (“Everyone did,” he said cheerfully, “she was … different”) and guided the Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl to the summit of Kilimanjaro — just months before Pearl was kidnapped and executed by Islamist extremists in Pakistan, an international incident later depicted in the 2007 Cannes Chopard Trophy-winning film A Mighty Heart, featuring Angelina Jolie.

What Corbett recalled most about his time on Kilimanjaro with Pearl, was the way the journalist, an obsessive golfer in his spare time,  packed a golf club in his mountain gear, together with a handful of garishly coloured pink golf balls to Kili’s summit, then took a couple of swings from the summit for posterity.

The pink, so bright it made the balls look practically radioactive, Corbett recalled, was so that Pearl could retrieve the balls from the snow afterwards and take them back with him down the mountain. Leave only footprints.

Compared with Ngorongoro, Loliondo was peaceful, a paradise even. Few animals — the migration had passed through weeks earlier — but vast, wide landscapes, wild Africa as it always was.

We pitched pup tents and sleeping bags atop a flat kopjie overlooking the  Loliondo plain as storm clouds gathered on the horizon, and for a moment all seemed right with the world.

Corbett Bishop passed away unexpectedly in the early morning of 1 May 2009 at his home in Arusha, Tanzania. Born and raised in Austin, Texas, he became enthralled with Africa on a family trip while he was in junior high school. He returned the following summer on his own, where he learned to speak Swahili. While in high school, he spent two summers in Latin America as a volunteer with Amigos de las Americas and became fluent in Spanish. On graduating from college he began a career as a climbing guide with Scott Fischer’s Mountain Madness in Seattle. Together with New Zealand guide Rob Hall, Fischer would become famous — though perhaps not the way he intended — as one of the climbers who perished in the infamous Into Thin Air expedition on Mount Everest in May, 1996.

©Alex Strachan/Strachan Photography

Corbett eventually settled in East Africa, where he became a local fixture as a climbing guide, thanks in no small part to his facility in speaking Swahili. By his own estimate, Corbett climbed Kili more than 100 times, clients in tow.

He established his own guiding company in the late 1990s, and founded a wildlife conservancy dedicated to helping Maasai villagers stem a tide of poaching in the wildlife corridor that links Lake Manyara with Tarangire National Park. Manyara and Tarangire are two of the most high-profile elephant sanctuaries on the entire continent.

And then there were the stories, such as the time he was denied entry into the bar at the stuffy post-colonial Mount Kenya Safari Club — founded by the late William Holden in 1959 — in Nanyuki, unless he was dressed in evening wear. Appropriate evening wear.

He borrowed a complimentary tuxedo from the room next to the bar that provided “gentlemen” who arrived without appropriate evening wear so they could join their upper-crust companions for a single malt — of the Scottish persuasion, please, none of that Loch Dhu 10-Year-Old Black Whisky muck from the remainder bin.

Corbett summarily picked out the ugliest, most garish tux he could find.

It was so ugly, Corbett recalled, it looked as if it had been made from black velvet, though in fact it was purple. And not just any purple, either, but a horrific purple that looked like something Barney the Dinosaur would wear on an off day.

As he wandered through the grand old pub, a throwback to the days of Lord Delamere, he distinctly heard gasps, accompanied by upper-crust English-accented voices gasping, ‘Who is that awful man?’

He’s An American. A Yank. Worse, he’s from Texas.

‘Oh.’

And then there was the story about the hunting party of Arab sheiks from the Arabian peninsular, who landed a Boeing jet on a tarmac airstrip somewhere near Loliondo and immediately went on a killing spree.

They had with them an unlimited supply of hunting permits — “bought and paid for in full,” as the saying goes — and enough hunting rifles to start a small war.

They were accompanied, in Corbett’s own words, “a planeload of hookers and booze.” Johnnie Walker Blue Label, The Macallan No. 6, Glenfiddich. Nothing but the best for the blue-bloods of Arabia.

“Islam, my ass,” Corbett said.

One late afternoon, scouring the temporarily empty plains for signs of life, we stumbled across a wire snare in a tree alongside the river course, placed there no doubt to catch a leopard unawares. Leopards make sought-after trophies for grown men with small dic energy.

Corbett cursed.

Tanzania has strict laws banning snares within a certain distance of a watercourse. The snare was clearly illegally placed. He blamed the Emiratis.

He asked the local Maasai how much the Emiratis had taken on their most recent hunting party.

“They said ‘a lot,’ Corbett recalled ruefully. “That worries me. Because when the Maasai say ‘a lot,’ it means they went crazy.”

Corbett lived a life in full, survived by his young children, Luca and Ella.

Take only memories, leave only footprints.

In the end, Corbett may not have been that well known to the outside world but he left an indelible impression on the land and those he loved.

On word of his passing, many of the Maasai he had met and made friends with made the long walk from Ol Tukai conservancy at Manyara, some 70 miles in all, to Corbett’s home in Arusha to pay their respects.

I will always remember him as a man of letters, a raconteur, a born storyteller, birder, conservationist and mountain guide. A truth seeker.

And a friend.

©Alex Strachan/Strachan Photography

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Hippos: Reality Bites

Hollywood has a lot to answer for. The myth of hippos as Peter Potamus, for example, goofy lovable creatures who time travel in hot air balloons and wear tutus and pointe shoes to the ballet. The reality is quite different.

The know-it-all was determined to set the record straight. He had downed one too many sundowners — heavy on the gin! — and the heat and humidity of equatorial Africa weren’t helping.

“I will have you know,” he began, “that hippos kill more people in Africa than any other animal!”

“Well …” Musonda, our erstwhile guide with Zambia’s Dept. of National Parks and Wildlife (DNPW). replied calmly. “That isn’t entirely true.”

He returned the know-it-all’s angry, red-faced glare with the calm mien of someone who knows what he’s talking about.

After all, when a wild animal goes rogue and kills someone, as happened just days earlier in another park in a neighbouring country, Musonda would have been one of the frontline workers expected to go in and clean up a terrible mess.

“There’s the clever, too-smart-for the-room answer,” Musonda said. “Mosquitos.

“Which happens to be true … but that’s overthinking things, at least what we’re talking here. Easy on the gin there, fella.”

Perhaps, deep down, he was rethinking the whole idea of Zambia being one of the few countries in sub-Saharan Africa to allow — encourage, even — supervised walks in the miombo wilds. The key word here being supervised.

“Crocodiles,” he added, channeling his inner Graduate. “I have just one word. Are you listening? Crocodiles.”

Exactly how do you mean?

“For the simple reason they don’t leave a trace,” Musonda said matter-of-factly. “Folks just vanish. It’s hard to tell just how many sisters and brothers are taken by crocodiles. Crocodiles don’t leave any evidence behind. People simply just disappear.

“Of the large land mammals, it’s true that elephants kill more people —  but that’s around the world. Hippos are only here  in Africa.”

Pablo Escobazr notwithstanding.

Whatever you do, don’t run, goes the familiar refrain. As refrains go in the wild, it works. Most of the time.

With lions, for example.

Hippos? Not so much.

With hippos, the sage advice is to go for the nearest tree, and even that doesn’t guarantee a successful escape.

Hippos are faster than they appear, and their temper is legendary. Myuthical, even. If there was a competition for the most bad-tempered animal on the planet, hippos would be the one most likely to start an argument in an empty room.

Predators are all about food — you’re just protein to them — whereas hippos, being primarily vegetarians — the precise clinical, scientific term is “opportunistic omnivores” — are content to munch happily on tall grass, which they do mostly at night, on dry land, chowing down as much as 50 kg (110 lbs) in a single night.

Night being the operative word.

Hippos prefer to eat in the dark. They don’t graze during the day — that’s why you don’t see many images or videos of them on dry land — and, contrary to general assumption, they don’t care for lily pads and other aquatic vegetation. They’re almost entirely grazers, which they do at night.

Hippos are also notoriously insecure, and territorial to a T. That can be a bad combination.

Male hippos in the wild are often deeply scarred, usually from territorial disputes with other hippos. A hippo’s yawn is actually a territorial threat display, to better to show off their 50 cm tusks with. (Think 20 inches in American money.)

Hippos have a bone-crushing bite, too. A hippo’s bite force is 1,800 PSI, three times that of a lion’s, give or take.

Hippos feel safe and secure in water — it’s their happy place. If you get between a hippo and water, at night, alone, on foot, God help you — though, in the event, more likely not.

©Alex Strachan/Strachan Photography

You have a problem. A big problem. In this case, size matters.

This is not helped by the fact that hippos range over surprisingly long distances at night, searching for the most succulent grass.

Despite their bulk and seemingly short stumpy legs, they can move. When they work themselves into a rage, which is early and often, they can top 30 km/h (18 mph). Unless you’re Usain Bolt, or Noah Lyles for that matter, you haven’t much of a chance — and not even Bolt is likely to register his top time in tall grass in the pitch dark of night.

As with any large, potentially dangerous large animal in the wild, as  Musonda took pains to point out, a little common sense and an abundance of caution go a long way. Respect for the natural world and an appreciation of the ways of the wild help too.

Hippos kill around 500 people a year, according to most estimates. (Crocodiles are estimated to kill 1000 or more people each year, but as has been established, they don’t leave much evidence behind). Scientists and wildlife researchers calculate human fatalities from hippos using hospital records, park ranger reports, and area community surveys. Most if not all fatal attacks — hippos and crocodiles alike — occur in remote areas, so researchers use population-density scaling to project regional numbers to draw broader continent-wide conclusions.

Given the facts on the ground, then, it’s only fair to ask why hippos have earned a reputation for being friendly, cuddly critters who like to laugh, dance, and have a good time.

The culprit, as is so often the case, is Hollywood.

First — or if not first exactly, the first I can remember anyway — was Hyacinth Hippo in the Disney feature-length ‘toon classic Fantasia, circa 1940.

Hyacinth, a prima ballerina, famously wore a tut and sported a gold coloured tutu and matching golden ballet slippers in the classic ‘toon’s ‘Dance of the Hours’ segment.

Then there was Peter Potamus, a 1960s cartoon character known for his time-travelling hot air ballon and his signature “hippo hurricane holler.”

Followed in short order by George and Martha, titular stars of the children’s book series, and Tootsie, the “Hungry Hungry Hippos” character from the popular board game.

More recently, we’ve had Gloria, the sassy, level-headed hippo at the centre of the Central Park Zoo crew in the original animated film Madagascar, and Moto Moto, the smooth-talkin’ larger-than-life hippo who loves to ”name things twice” in the Madagascar follow-up e Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa.

The experts — yes, there are experts in this kind of thing — say hippos are often depicted as cute, cuddly, friendly critters in popular culture because their chubby, rotund shapes trigger a human psychological response called "baby schema,” or neoteny.

Now you know.

As we’ve now shown, the reality is quite different. Hippos have earned a deserved reputation as one of nature’s more dangerous large land mammals, but as the PBS science and natural history program Nature has gone to great lengths to point out, their aggression is more a result of anxiety and the primal need to defend their turf than outright belligerence and contrariness.

Doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be taken seriously, though.

As the scholar Md. Ziaul Haque once said, “A crocodile and a hippopotamus can never be friends.”

©Alex Strachan/Strachan Photography

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Mayhem in the Mara

Overcrowding in the Maasai Mara … of tourist vehicles, not animals. Might fewer tourists at higher prices be a fix?

Whatever you do, don't get out of the boat.

Or its African equivalent, an old saw of experienced wildlife tracker-guides throughout the African miombo:

Whatever you do, don’t run.

You would think some things would come naturally to visitors to Africa’s wilderness areas by now. Scolds like,

Don't feed the animals.

A fed baboon is a dead baboon.

To a crocodile, you're protein.

But wait, there’s more. To an elephant, you’re basically an irritant, an annoying pipsqueak who needs to be taught his place on occasion.

To a mosquito — or worse, a tsetse fly — you’re basically a blood meal. And to a snake, if you step on one, It’s going to get you back.

The controversy had been building for a while, years even.

Ever since the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2021, in fact.

But it took one especially egregious incident, a year ago almost to the day, to bring things to a head.

Reckless visitor behaviour in Kenya’s Maasai Mara National Reserve, and “over-tourism” — a new word for an old and growing problem from Venice to Shanghai — have led to severe disruptions of Africa’s annual wildebeest migration. Dozens of tourist vehicles converge on herds of wildebeest waiting to cross crocodile-infested rivers, in some cases blocking them altogether, all to get that perfect picture and have a good story to tell back home.

There have been reported incidents of safari drivers harassing diurnal predators like cheetahs — critically endangered — interfering with their hunts to the extent that the mortality rate among cheetah cubs, already high, is becoming untenable.

Videos of tourists jumping out of their vehicles and harassing animals have become a staple on YouTube, TikTok and other social media platforms.

Though I find this hard to believe, if all too easy to imagine, drivers have been witnessed herding wildebeest into harm’s way, at the beck and call of impatient tourists who want to see something more exciting than a lion or wildebeest simply standing there.

In the incident in question, last August, video emerged on Instagram and YouTube, of just that. It was alleged — though not proven, insofar as I’m aware — that a park attendant allowed it … provided he was handed a USD  $20 backhander to look the other way.

If true, and it’s a big if, add ranger complicity to the lexicon of the day.

In my own experience, incidents of 4x4s actively chasing after cheetah kills or stirring sleeping lions from their slumber — lions sleep up to 18 hours a day after all — are not unheard of, though, thankfully, not common.

Yet.

In recent years, overseas visitors have flocked to the Mara River every July and August to witness the stirring sight of half a million wildebeest on their annual Great Migration, as popularized — and promoted — in countless wildlife programs, on TV, at wildlife film festivals like the annual Jackson Wild festival in Jackson, Wyoming and the International Wildlife Film Festival (IWFF ) in Missoula, Montana, and on streamers like Disney+ and National Geographic. It’s one of the most stirring, spectacular wildlife sights remaining on the planet.

Pent-up energy after the COVID lockdowns and a growing sense that there’s less and less of the wild world to see with each passing hour has prompted a virtual stampede of overseas visitors.

And therein lies the problem.

Enter the advocacy group Serengeti Watch, a project of the Earth Island Institute, a credible, well-known 501(sc)(3) environmental organization based in Berkeley, Calif.

Kenya’s Maasai Mara National Reserve and Tanzania’s (much) larger Serengeti National Park are part of the same ecosystem, and share a common border, the Mara to the north and Serengeti to the south. The wildebeest cross the border en masse at will twice a year.

They graze July-October each year on their annual migration, before following the rains — and the sweeter grass — to their breeding grounds on the short-grass plains in Tanzania’s Ngorongoro Conservation Area.

The wildebeest herds settle around the Lake Ndutu region in December and January, and from there venture into Serengeti proper, where they stay from January until June.

©Alex Strachan/Strachan Photography

In one of nature’s great mysteries — and one of the reasons wildebeest are studied so intensively by field biologists — wildebeest give birth to their calves over a 15-day period, usually in February, and at no other time of the year. No one knows why, but biologists and behavioural scientists have speculated that it’s nature’s way of ensuring survival of the species. When so many wildebeest give birth at the same time it’s virtually impossible for predators — lions, hyenas, leopards, cheetahs, even jackals — to keep up.

Serengeti Watch shared a fascinating — and somewhat hopeful — report earlier this month to readers who follow the group’s work through its regular postings.

Numbers don’t lie, and these numbers tell a particularly revealing story.

Serengeti Watch:

“Wildlife numbers in the Mara have fallen dramatically, with declines of 60–80 % in many non-migratory large mammal populations since the late 1970s. For instance, impala declined by about 80%, giraffes by 75%. A wildebeest migration of half a million animals used to enter the Mara from Tanzania each year. That has dropped by 73%, and the Mara’s resident wildebeest population has plummeted by 81%.

“Part of the reason for these declines has been human population growth accompanied by an increase in livestock. In some areas, it resulted in fencing that fragmented the ecosystem and prevented wildlife from moving freely. In other cases, dispersal areas outside the Reserve have been turned into agriculture.

“But another reason is over-tourism. Too many lodges and camps taking up space, and too many tourists causing disruption of wildlife hunting behaviour and reproductive success.”

And now for the good news.

Or, if not good exactly, certainly better.

“We're seeing a dramatic shift — a 50% decline in tourism in the Mara, from about 420,000 in 2023 to 213,000 in 2025. 

“Those in the safari business attribute this to higher fees for travellers, making it less competitive with other areas within and outside Kenya.

“Marley Saitoti, assistant director of Tourism and Wildlife in Narok County, says it represents a deliberate shift towards a low-volume, high-value tourism model to reduce pressure on the ecosystem. ‘The Maasai Mara is a relatively small and fragile ecosystem compared to the larger Serengeti-Ngorongoro ecosystem,’ he explains. ‘It cannot sustainably operate as a mass tourism destination.’”

The change in thinking marks a dramatic shift in emphasis.

Low-impact = high-value tourism.

Fewer visitors, paying more for a low-impact, high-value experience is the way of the future, the thinking goes.

It’s a practice that was originally established in Botswana and has served Botswana conservation efforts well — — if we leave out the part about Botswana’s recent allowing of trophy hunting.

Botswana is an expensive safari destination, and has been since its inception. Not for them the overland trucks which tear up roads and can carry between 16 and 24 passengers between them, all of them looking to snap that perfect picture, on a budget.

South Africa, a (much) larger country with a (much) larger population and with more natural resources, has struck a healthy balance between the two models, as embodied by South Africa’s Kruger National Park. The Greater Kruger ecosystem spans some 2 million hectares (5 million acres) across South Africa's Limpopo and Mpumalanga provinces, and lies at the heart of an extensive network of unfenced private and community-owned game reserves that allow wildlife to roam freely. The idea is by keeping animal movements open, routes that inthe past were blocked by fences and colonial borders, nature’s bal;ance is restored.

It can be done, in other words.

All it takes is the will and determination to do it

©Alex Strachan/Strachan Photography

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