The wildebeest were cut off from the emergency water and riverine habitat that for eons they had counted upon in times of drought. Nothing they had ever learned, none of their instincts could help them deal with this obstacle.
Frustrated in their urge to continue north, with the river little more than a day or two away, the herds turned east along the fence. There was nothing else to do. Having walked for days with little nourishment and no water, they were already weakened, and now the long fence beside them added more than 100 miles to their trek.
As they plodded along the fence, they encountered many other herds, part of the same migration headed for the lakeshores and riverbanks. Each day they were joined by giraffe, gemsbok, and hartebeest, all needing water but trapped by the wire and posts.
Thousands upon thousands of antelope that had been spread out over vast areas of the savanna were now forced by the fences to take the same migratory route toward water. The grasses of the fragile rangeland were soon stomped and broken, ground into dust by the hooves of the first herds to pass. For those that followed, there was nothing to eat. Animals began to drop from hunger, thirst, and fatigue. A giraffe who could easily have stepped over the wire became tangled in it. He struggled to get free, but the coils of high-tensile steel sliced deep into his flesh until he pitched forward, breaking his foreleg at the knee. His hind legs still ensnared, he pawed at the ground for days, building small mounds of sand around him as he tried to rise again. He never did.
Eventually they came to a north-south fence called the Makalamabedi, which forms a corner with the east-west Kuki line before running south along a portion of the east boundary of the game reserve (see map 1, opposite). Here there was chaos among the wildebeest. To follow this second fence they had to turn south, directly contrary to the direction they needed to go for water. They stood in confusion, their heads hanging, until many began to sway and stumble and finally collapse. But they were tenacious and the end did not come easily. In contrast to the victims of the swift tooth and claw of a predator, the animals who fell prey to the fence died more slowly. Even as they lay, still pawing the dust, their eyes were often plucked out by crows and vultures while other scavengers chewed off their ears, tails, or testicles. A few thousand died along the fences, but the carnage had just begun.
Finally the wildebeest herds struck off south along the five-foot wall of wire. A day later they came to the end—the fence just stopped in the middle of the savanna, as though someone had forgotten to finish it. The herds swung around it. Now there was the sweet, unmistakable smell of moisture on the prevailing easterly wind. They followed the promising odor. But as soon as they had moved around the end of the fence at the border of the game reserve, they entered a safari hunting area. To reach the water they would have to risk being shot.
Two more days of walking, and the wildebeest who had survived the trek, the fence, and the hunters, shuffled out of the woodlands and onto a great plain black with thousands more of their own kind. The smell of water was stronger; it was only twenty-five miles away. They hurried forward.
Resident cattle, tended by natives from scattered kraals along the lakeshore, had stripped the once beautiful lake plain of every edible leaf and blade of grass. Now its surface was like concrete covered with several inches of grey powder, and the choking dust rose from the hooves of the wildebeest in the still morning air. Here and there a spindly bush stood rooted in the wasteland.
Wizened carcasses littered the plain. Dying animals lay on their sides, their legs moving rythmically, as if, in their delirium, they were still moving toward the water. Prime wildebeest bulls and cows, the breeding stock of the population, began leaving the long lines filing toward Lake Xau. Unable to take another step, their knees buckled, and their muzzles sank lower and lower, until their nostrils blew small potholes in the dust.
At dawn of the second day after leaving the game reserve, the surviving wildebeest had nearly reached the lake. But water was not all they needed. There were no shade trees for miles, and there was nothing to eat. Time was short; they would have to drink and then get back to the shade and graze of the woodlands twenty-five miles behind them before the sun sapped them of their remaining strength (see map 2, opposite).
Suddenly the long, orderly lines began to splinter and circle; thousands of antelope were running from three trucks filled with waving, jeering men. Wheeling in tightening circles around the wildebeest, the driver of the five-ton Bedford bludgeoned his way through the herd, before turning to come back again. Several wildebeest hit on the first pass tried to hobble away. The driver turned sharply and, with clouds of dust boiling from the truck’s wheels, he ran down the wounded one by one.
When they had struck down six wildebeest, the drivers slid the trucks to a stop and laughing tribesmen leaped out. Two men held each animal by its horns, and a third sawed through its throat with a knife.
With the sun rising higher and hotter, the survivors crossed a shimmering white salt pan and climbed a last barren ridge. Below them, not half a mile away, lay the blue waters of Lake Xau, pelicans and flamingos bobbing like flower petals on the surface.
To the north, more than 360 miles of river front and lake shores had once been available to the wildebeest during drought, as had a similar stretch of the Limpopo River, in the south. Now, fence lines and settlements had funneled a major portion of the entire Central Kalahari population into a tiny area, denying all but two or three miles of the riparian habitat to the 80,000 antelope who had come for water. The wildebeest had to drink here or die.
Sensing danger from the native huts on either side, the thirsty animals took a few tentative steps forward. The water was there. They could see it and smell it! They broke into a canter, heading for the lake. When they were about 200 yards away from it, bands of native men and boys with packs of dogs broke from cover near the kraals. The dogs were set upon the wildebeest and chased them in circles for long minutes. The dogs worked efficiently, holding exhausted animals by the hind legs, hamstringing and disemboweling them as they sank to the ground, the poachers rushing in with clubs and knives to finish them off.
Thousands of other wildebeest were prevented from going to the water by the disturbance. Some managed to reach the lake, where they collapsed into its coolness. But many were too weak to rise or even to drink, and their muzzles sank slowly into the shallow water and the mud.
Above in EWG, we watched through binoculars as the slaughter continued along the shore. Trembling with rage, I pushed the control wheel forward and we plunged toward the lakeshore. The poachers were preoccupied with their butchery and did not see the aircraft until it was at ground level, roaring across the plain toward them at 160 miles an hour. We flashed by inches above a pack of dogs attacking a young male wildebeest; at the last second they let go of their prey and dodged away. The dogs scattered in confusion and the antelope began to run. We chased the dogs until they fled to cover. Three of the men threw their clubs at the plane an instant before they dove into the dust, scuttling on their bellies through the thornbushes.
During the migration, I continued to make periodic low-level flights over the huts and the herds in the early mornings and on moonlit nights. It seemed to deter the poachers, and from then on we saw less harassment of the herds.
Ironically, even if the wildebeest were able to drink, the lake was a nemesis for them. Once they had tasted its water, their migration was frozen in that one area. Because of the native settlements they would go no further north, and thus were barred from the river beyond. Every day they needed to get back from the lake to the shade and grass in the woodlands before the sun grew too hot, and then to recross the plains and salt pan at night. It was an incredible fifty-mile round trip.
Day by day this distance between water and food increased, as the masses of antelope denuded the rangeland of grass farther and farther from the lake. For a while the wildebeest survived like this, but inevitably the time came when all the water they could drink at the lake and all the g
raze they could get from the woodlands did not supply them with sufficient energy to make the long journey in between. At this point the antelope began the inexorable slide toward starvation and mass death.
September, and the start of the Kalahari hot-dry season, could not have come at a worse time for the antelope. Temperatures shot upward, and phalanxes of dust devils swirled across the parched plains. With the sun rising earlier and setting later, the wildebeest could not avoid making part of their trek in the heat of the day. It was the proverbial last straw. Mortality soared and carcasses littered the plains, salt pan, and lakeshore. Without rain to draw the suffering animals out of the Lake Xau trap and back into the Central Kalahari, most of them would die.
Extensive fencing began in Botswana in the fifties, when beef exports from cattle ranching became an important industry and the need arose to control periodic outbreaks of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) among domestic stock. During such epidemics European (EEC) countries refused to accept meat products from Botswana for fear of contamination. It is understandable that Botswana had to take action to protect this lucrative industry, and the Department of Animal Health was charged with the task of devising ways to control the disease. To date, that department has erected more than 800 miles of cordon fences through the country’s wilderness areas; and construction of another 700 miles is currently under way.
Because cape buffalo and some species of wild antelope can carry the FMD virus, their populations were suspected of being a reservoir of the infection that periodically contaminated domestic animals.1 The fences were erected to segregate the country’s stock population from wild herds, to separate infected cattle from others, and to divide the range into sectors that could be quickly sealed off during outbreaks. By preventing the movement of infected animals from one area to another, the fences would, in theory, make the disease easier to control. But foot-and-mouth disease continues to develop and spread across fence lines in Botswana.
The use of fencing to control FMD has become a very controversial issue, and research veterinarians disagree on the effectiveness of this means of disease control. In spite of extensive experiments it has never been demonstrated that wild animals transmit the FMD virus to domestic stock.2 The epidemiology of the disease is poorly understood, and no one really knows how it is spread.
The fences had been devastating Botswana’s wildlife long before our study was under way. In 1961, and again in 1964, as many as 80,000 wildebeest died in the area of the Kuki-Makalamabedi fence corner and between there and Lake Xau. George Silberbauer, government officer of the Ghanzi District in 1964, estimated that a tenth of the population in the Central Kalahari Reserve was dying every five days while trapped behind the Kuki fence during drought.3 It is not known how many survived the 1964 mortality. Dr. Graham Child, an ecologist with the Botswana Department of Wildlife, wrote that the 1970 die-off was, “the severest mortality in living memory.”4
Bergie Berghoffer had tried in vain to save thousands of dying wildebeest. For weeks he had hauled water from the Boteti River to troughs he had made from dozens of steel drums and placed near the fence corner. “It was a bloody disgrace,” he said. “You could walk up to the poor blighters, put your hand on them, and they would just fall over.”
Zebra, which once used Deception Valley as part of their wet season range,5 have been eliminated altogether. We didn’t see one in seven years. Great mixed herds of gemsbok, eland, and hartebeest, which George Silberbauer described as covering an area three by five miles near the Piper Pans, have been reduced to a small fraction of their former wet-season concentrations.
After the reduction of the Central Kalahari antelope by drought and disease control fences, the survivors have become even more important to the predator community. If the large antelope all die off, lions, leopards, cheetahs, wild dogs, and scavengers, like brown hyenas, will suffer a similar fate. Though we cannot know how many carnivores there were before the fences decimated their food supply, their numbers must have dwindled considerably.
Since the Botswana Department of Animal Health began fencing the Kalahari, the Kalahari Bushmen have found it increasingly difficult to hunt and kill antelope for meat, one of the few sources of protein for them and other rural native Africans. Coincidental with fencing for disease control, the amount of protein in their diet has fallen precipitously, according to Dr. Bob Hitchock, a former rural sociologist for the government.
The wildebeest crisis must now be considered in a broader context than simply antelope versus the fence. It is part of a larger picture, the competition between man and wildlife for such limited resources as grassland and water. Alternatives for controlling FMD, such as a sophisticated vaccination program, need to be considered more seriously. (For more details, see Appendix A.)
In many ways, Botswana has had a positive attitude toward wildlife; indeed, about one fifth of the country is either national park or game reserve. Government officials had always been courteous to us and had granted us permission to conduct research in the Central Kalahari Reserve. But we were continually frustrated in our attempts to stimulate interest and action from the government in order to help the wildebeest.
We wrote letters and reports to the Wildlife ¡Department describing the migration and mortality. We made recommendations, including the establishment of a game scout camp at the Lake Xau area to control poaching and harassment of wildebeest, and the maintenance of a corridor from the reserve to the lake so that the antelope could drink. But there was little response to our requests.
The drought persisted into October, and the wildebeest were dying at an ever-increasing rate.6 We felt frustrated and alone in our efforts to save them. In all our years in the Kalahari, we had never seen such suffering among animals, such degradation of habitat. It all seemed so pointless. Had the antelope been allowed to distribute themselves throughout the miles of riverine habitat, as they had done for thousands of years in times of drought, many fewer would have died.
Almost everyone we knew told us to forget it. “Cattle is too big an industry; you’ll never get them to take down the fences.” One or two friends warned us we might get expelled from the country for raising the issue. But Botswana is a democratic republic and we did not believe that the government would expel us on account of a wildlife issue. We felt compelled to do something before it was too late. We knew that the reports written by Dr. Silberbauer and Dr. Child describing previous die-offs had simply been filed away. We were determined to ensure that a solution be found before the next drought. Since no one within the country would listen to our recommendations, we decided to try to publicize the issue worldwide, to enlist the support of prominent people outside the country who perhaps could encourage the Botswana government to review the problem.
One day, over our radio, we received an invitation to give a slide presentation for Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, who would soon be touring some of Botswana’s wildlife areas. Shortly after that, Dr. Richard Faust of the Frankfurt Zoological Society and a group from The Friends of Animals—our major sponsors—were due to arrive in Maun. It was unbelievable luck. Two major figures in global conservation would be practically on our doorstep—at least within a couple of hundred miles of us—in a matter of weeks. We quickly wrote both Dr. Faust and Prince Bernhard, describing the wildebeest crisis and inviting them to camp, but we had almost no hope that the prince would accept our invitation to visit us in the desert.
Even so, we began to wonder how we would deal with it if he did accept. Where would he and his attendants sleep? We couldn’t imagine his sharing our one sleeping tent, with its packing-crate bed and piece of foam rubber, with his staff. I also doubted that royalty would consent to fly in Echo Whisky Golf, and our airstrip was certainly too short for a much larger plane. What could we give him to eat and drink—biltong and hot, smoky water? We worried most about the toilet. The “thunderdrum,” a bright red gasoline drum with a seat cut in the top, stood in the middle of the riverbed.
Given these u
ncertainties, we decided that we had better do whatever we could to prepare for the prince ahead of time, so that we would be ready if he decided to come back with us after our meeting at Khwaii. Delia washed the tent floors (sparing the spiders in their comers as always), emptied old birds’ nests from some of the kitchen pots, screened the ants from the sugar bowl, and baked bread in the bucket oven. I waxed the plane, hung burlap on some tent poles around the thunderdrum, and buried a bottle of wine, saved for a special occasion, beneath the ziziphus tree.
On the day the prince was to arrive in Botswana, we flew to Khwaii River Lodge, a posh resort on the east edge of the Okavango River delta. We buzzed the lodge and landed on the long sod airstrip. A Land Rover met us and the driver chauffeured us to a group of whitewashed rondavels set in a neatly manicured lawn. The dining house was of dark timbers; beyond it lay the Khwaii River flood plain, with scattered herds of lechwe antelope, and hippos lying like grey submarines in the blue waters.
When we arrived at the lodge, we were relieved to learn that the prince and his party were taking a game drive somewhere in the bush. We were somewhat uncertain about the proper way to greet him and hoped that we could find someone to ask. Should Delia curtsy, should I bow? Should we address him as Your Majesty or Your Highness? Odd considerations in the middle of the wilderness, but we didn’t want to appear gauche.
That evening as we entered the thatched dining house and self-consciously made our way through the room full of people, we glanced from face to face, hoping to somehow spot the prince. We were passing the center table when a hand gripped my arm and a voice said, “My name is Bernhard—not Barnard, like the famous South African heart surgeon. You must be Mr. and Mrs. Owens.” Suddenly we were facing the prince of the Netherlands, who had just let me know that I had misspelled his name in my letter about the wildebeest. A thin smile grew from the comers of his eyes and spread across his tanned and freckled face. His thinning hair was slicked straight back, and rather severe wire-rimmed spectacles were comfortable on his nose. I was reminded of a picture I had once seen of him as commander of the Dutch forces during the Nazi invasion.
Cry of the Kalahari Page 37