The Hunt for the Golden Mole

by Richard Girling

  Bedfordshire, however, does not stay long in the mind when you’ve got wild Africa in your face. It seems almost absurd to have so much dished up at once – so over the top that it makes me laugh, like a child at a fairground. How can this be real? There are fences around the conservancy, but the area within them is huge, 350 square kilometres, and they are there to channel the movement of wildlife, not to obstruct it. Well-used corridors through the fencing allow animals to move freely in and out, while steering them away from villages and farms. This crucially prevents the ‘island effect’, a weakness of nature reserves isolated from their surroundings which leads to the local extinction of some species and over-population of others. As its chief executive, Richard Vigne, will explain, Ol Pejeta accommodates wildlife. It doesn’t farm it. What I am seeing therefore is recognisably the same place that Alfred Russel Wallace saw in the 1870s. In fact, I am very likely seeing even more then Russel Wallace did. Unlike him, I have an expert guide at the wheel of a Toyota Land Cruiser, an indefatigable, go-anywhere hyena on wheels in which Andrew can deliver me into close proximity with almost any animal of my choosing. But that ‘almost’, I now confess, means the sad exclusion of golden moles. Truthfully, deep down, I have always known I wouldn’t see one and so have delayed the question until after my arrival. In that rather cowardly way I have kept alive a slender thread of hope and justified a thirty-hour journey to the middle of Africa. But I block the thought. The mole, I guiltily acknowledge, was always an excuse – a detail, seductive but arbitrary, that would draw me into the bigger picture. And now here it is, a picture so enormous that I can’t take it all in. Calcochloris tytonis and its tribe can wait a bit longer. In any case, I feel it is here in spirit, represented in its absence by myriad tiny scurriers and burrowers that only civets, hawks and owls can see. At breakfast one morning a tiny striped mouse boldly darts out to feed on a handful of muesli – the smallest animal I see, and my mole by proxy. The economic principle of Fritz Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful may now be derided by the more macho kind of free-marketeer, but it holds good in nature. Small is not only beautiful but, as my pursuit of the mole will make abundantly clear, it is also essential.

  Andrew is a great talker. He explains the byzantine intricacies of African politics and tribalism – he is of the Luo tribe, though the people of the district are mostly Maasai and Kikuyu – and he has an insatiable appetite for news. Who did I think would win the Republican primaries currently being fought in the USA? Mitt Romney, I say, and he agrees, but he wants to know what a Republican victory would mean for American minorities. I wish I could tell him. Andrew’s passion for wildlife matches even that of my old friend (and genuine Africa hand) Brian Jackman, on whose advice I am carrying a new pair of 10x42 binoculars and a fleece to keep off the evening chill. Being on a plateau I get no sense of elevation, but we are actually 2,000 metres above sea level, slung between the northern slopes of Mount Kenya and the Aberdares. I do at least manage to astonish my guide by showing him what Europe looks like at this altitude. The photographs on my camera were taken from a ski station high in the Swiss Alps at Verbier, in mid summer but still hemmed in by snow-capped peaks.

  I learn soon to abandon my own swivel-eyed scouring of the plains and rely on Andrew’s seemingly supernatural ability to read nuances of light and shade. He has sharper senses than any other human I have ever met, including even Jackman and the angling writer Brian Clarke, who once pointed at a ripple on the River Test and predicted to within a few ounces the weight of the trout that was causing it. Andrew has wraparound eyes and ears. Distant pinpricks, invisible even to my 10x42s, turn into rare Jackson’s hartebeests. Faraway murmurs swell into waterbuck. Time and again, quietly and carefully, he plants me within a how-do-you-do of elephant, buffalo, rhino, giraffe, eland and their supporting casts of jackals and hyenas. On one memorable afternoon he ushers me into the presence of a hippopotamus. Cheetah and leopard require more luck than comes our way (though both are here in numbers); otherwise nothing escapes him. A jackal trots past with something in its jaws – the head of a baby hyena, Andrew says, ‘very unusual’. A dot of sky blue becomes the scrotum of a vervet monkey (the colour is what separates the men from the boys – adolescents display an immature shade of green). Young baboons lark and dart through a fever tree, playing a kind of Kenyan roulette with gravity while their elders hunch in the branches like giant rooks.

  One morning we set out at six fifteen to look for lions. For the first couple of hours we have no luck – or, rather, our luck is of a different kind. Serendipitously in the dawn light we find a black rhinoceros and her calf standing rock-still in the bush. There are giraffes wallpapered against the lightening sky, buffaloes trudging head-down across the plain, a group of oryx. We meet elephants, warthogs, a hyena carrying the leg of a gazelle, eagles, ostriches and uncountable zebra. But no lions, and we are getting hungry. On a curve of the Uaso Nyiro River, away from the trees, Andrew sets up the table for breakfast. Red checked cloth, cereals, yogurt, sausages and bacon, vegetable pies, pickles and preserves, fruit, tea, coffee . . . This time we have no need of Andrew’s enhanced sensory perceptions. The sudden deep, guttural cough, Wugh!, is no distant murmur. It is nearby, urgent and loud. Twenty metres away a lioness pads out of the trees, glances at us without interest and lopes off along the river.

  We follow in the Land Cruiser for as far as we can, before she melts into the bush still calling for her lost companions. Encounters in Africa, I gather, are often like this. Plains game you can guarantee, any time of day or night. Zebra, Thomson’s and Grant’s gazelles, warthog, giraffe – you can’t avoid them. Lions, however, are different. You can improve your chances by knowing where to look, but you still need a bit of luck. A couple of days later Andrew stacks the odds in our favour. Using a radio tracking device, he locks on to a collared lioness lying somewhere deep in the bush. Even so, in thick undergrowth she is not easy to find, and I congratulate myself – the only time it happens – for spotting her before Andrew does. She is hidden in deep shade beneath a tree, together with another lioness and two well-grown cubs. Like the breakfast lioness they only cursorily note our arrival. Four heads pop up at the sound of the engine, then flop back down again to doze. Their bellies are full; their eyelids heavy, hunger forgotten. Barely a hundred metres away, an impala skips across a clearing, upwind and unaware of its luck.

  Uninvited guest – the lioness brought a sudden end to breakfast

  Another day, we rumble across the plain to the conservancy’s airstrip. It is heavily grazed and, at ground level, difficult to distinguish from the land around it. A small Cessna has touched down and is parked among a group of gazelles. Down from the cockpit steps Richard Lamprey, Fauna & Flora International’s technical specialist for Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, who has flown up from Nairobi to meet me. FFI’s fingerprints are all over Ol Pejeta. The land was once a 40,000-hectare ranch owned by the mining and farming conglomerate Lonrho, which was put up for sale in 2004. Conventional cattle ranching by then had become difficult. Controlling wild animals had been made all but impossible by a hunting ban, and by an influx of elephants from the drier country to the north which had destroyed most of the fencing. Decreasing productivity and rising costs were driving ranchers into insolvency.

  For wildlife, and for the conservationists who cared for it, it was a situation that presented both danger and opportunity. The danger was that the land would be sliced up into plots. As movement through the area was vital to the flow of animals across the plateau, this would have critically reduced its value for wildlife. The opportunity was to buy and save the land for wildlife, and at the same time to grow the local economy. This is the twin-track approach upon which the future of endangered species ultimately must depend. The late Christopher Hitchens pointed out an oddity of the English psyche – evidenced by involvements in places like Greece and Spain – which leads the queen’s subjects to show more enthusiasm for other people’s patriotism than they do for their own. For conservati
onists in particular, this has tended to extend not just to other peoples but to other species, whose ‘rights’ are promoted over man’s. But there is a fatal flaw in this. Animals are killed or displaced for a reason. Their persecutors expect to profit by it, and conservation is not popular where communities feel their interests are secondary to those of the wildlife. The substitution of the word ‘poaching’ for ‘hunting’ in the language of the law is a perfect example of conflicted priorities. I am reminded of the two prisoners in Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park who were punished for shooting a warthog. It is a simple fact. Conservation cannot succeed without popular support, and people as well as animals need to see the benefit.

  As Richard Lamprey explains, FFI is not in the business of owning land. It is in the business of encouraging purchases where land is of value to wildlife. At Ol Pejeta it managed to secure funding from the Arcus Foundation, a private charity set up by an American philanthropist, John Lloyd Stryker. Stryker had a particular passion for great apes – importantly for him, Ol Pejeta already had a refuge for chimpanzees – but he shared FFI’s broader vision and wanted to help. So it was that by late 2004 Ol Pejeta belonged to FFI, though its ownership would be short-lived. By the end of 2005 the land had been transferred to a locally based non-profit company, the Ol Pejeta Conservancy, staffed and run largely by Kenyans, though FFI would remain an active partner. Richard Lamprey is a frequent and welcome visitor.

  At the conservancy’s somewhat ramshackle headquarters, known as ‘Control’, he introduces me to the research officers Samuel Mutisya and Nathan Gichohi, whose presentation is a statistical tour de force – breakdowns of animal populations by species, sex and age, breeding rates, causes of death, movements in and out of the conservancy. It builds into a minutely detailed portrait of a landscape exploding with life, and helps me remember why I am there. Forgetting golden moles, and setting aside the excitement of Andrew’s game drives, what brought me here was the rhinoceros. No animal is more charismatic, none has a higher bounty on its head or is in more desperate need of protection. Ol Pejeta in the last year or so has lost three of them to poachers, including a rare southern white found with seventeen bullets in its body. Rangers had already de-horned it as a precaution, but the poachers still hacked off its face to get the small amount that remained. There has been a human cost too. Six months before my visit, a poacher was shot dead and two others wounded in a firefight near the conservancy boundary. Now another rhino has been wounded by poachers and badly needs help. Rangers and vets will search for it next day, and Richard Lamprey and I will go with them.

  The area of search is defined by the orbit of a spotter aircraft – a Piper Super Cub kept for just this kind of eventuality – which guides the team on the ground. Sensibly I’m kept away until a tranquilliser dart has done its stuff and the wounded monster has sunk belly-down with its legs folded beneath it. A green towel has been draped over its eyes and it snorts like a drunk in its sleep. Any living thing this big would be impressive, but the rhinoceros with all its primitive power is awesome, like a piece of living geology. It is not, however, immune to the high-velocity bullet. This one, by great good luck, was a misdirected shot that passed through the left foreleg, missing the bone but leaving the animal badly lamed. I wonder what Roualeyn Gordon-Cumming would have thought of such a scene. What would he have made of an age in which animals were so fiercely defended and men like him, whose preferred view of nature was across a gunsight, were vilified as criminals?

  I can’t deny that I enjoyed Gordon-Cumming’s yarns. Had I discovered him earlier, he might even have been a boyhood hero. But his are not the eyes through which modern Africa can be viewed. The challenge for conservationists is to bring down the market, to make it literally true that a charismatic wild animal is worth more alive than dead. Standing there, surveying the fallen giant, I have a fantasy. If I could bring alive just one historical figure and share with him what I can see, it would be Albrecht Dürer, whose famous woodcut of a rhinoceros, made in 1515, is still the most beautiful ‘likeness’ of the animal ever made. ‘Likeness’ needs quotation marks because Dürer himself never saw a rhino, but made his drawing from a written description and a sketch by someone else. The image is recognisably of a one-horned Indian rhinoceros, but one that seems to be wearing something like medieval horse-armour, complete with rivets and tooled bodywork. Inaccurate it may be, but it brilliantly captures the monstrous strangeness and physical enormity of an animal that ancient bestiaries conflated with the unicorn. Five centuries of increasing familiarity have done nothing to reduce its impact, on the imagination or on the eye. The details may be awry, and the species may be wrong, but Dürer’s image distils to its essence the spirit of the collapsed behemoth that now lies before me. I am, I realise, the only one just standing and taking photographs. Everyone else is lending a hand, bracing themselves to heave the animal over so that the vets can reach the wounded leg.

  Afterwards when they have cleaned the wound, administered slow-release antibiotics and the antidote to the tranquilliser, we watch from a distance as the patient lurches to its feet, remembers where it is and limps off into the acacias. Like every other rhino in the conservancy, it has a fortune on its face and will have to take its chances. At least in Gordon-Cumming’s day rhino horn was valued only as an exhibit. Now it is a commodity. Most of the specimens in European museums were collected in the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries, and for each institution one was usually enough. For the traditional medicine trades of China and south-east Asia, one is never enough. I am loath to correct Julian Huxley, but there is one thing that he seems to have got wrong in his influential pieces for the Observer in 1960 – a mistake since repeated by many others. It is not as an aphrodisiac that rhinoceros horn is prized. In fact, this seems to be the one benefit not to have occurred to the ancient herbalists whose word in these matters gives quackery its kernel of faith. In most horned animals, the horn has a bony core within a sheath of keratin (the same stuff from which hair, hooves and fingernails are made). Rhinos are different. There is no bony core, so the horn is solid keratin. Powdered and dissolved in water, it has magical properties sufficient to replace the entire stock of a western pharmacy (though if this is true, of course, it would make as much sense to chew your fingernails or eat your haircut).

  The rhino shot by poachers at Ol Pejeta. Vets and rangers have to turn it over so they can treat the bullet wound in its leg

  Victims of this historic scam swallow it to relieve themselves of fever, rheumatism, gout, typhoid, carbuncles, snakebite, headaches, nausea, hallucinations and daemonic possession. In Vietnam, where demand is rising fast, the list extends also to hangovers and cancer. Apart from a flagging libido, the only things it seems unable to cure are the credulity of its purchasers and the cupidity of those who keep them supplied. Huxley was right that rhino horn fetched more than ‘the best ivory’, but that was fifty years ago. Now it has exceeded even gold. On the day I checked (20 February 2012), the price of 24-carat on the London market was £35,165.70 per kilo. In China and Hong Kong, rhino horn was fetching £40,000, and there were reports of prices as high as £60,000. Look no further for the reason rhinos in Africa are an endangered species. Look no further for the reason African officialdom is so vulnerable to the outstretched palm. Who wouldn’t be tempted by such sums?

  Like all successful industries, crime is in a perpetual state of development, forever alert to new opportunities. Coincidentally, at lunchtime on the very same day that I made my Hong Kong price-check, four thieves walked into the Castle Museum in Norwich, just 30 miles from my home, and tried to snatch the stuffed head of a black rhinoceros, complete with horns, that had been in a glass case there since 1911. In fact, a whole new crime wave was breaking out not just in Britain but right across Europe. In June 2011 the EU’s criminal intelligence agency, Europol, warned that an Irish crime group was diversifying from its already extensive criminal portfolio into the theft of rhino horns from museums. The gang-members
were infamous hard nuts involved in fraud, robbery, money-laundering and drug-trafficking in North and South America, South Africa, China and Australia as well as Europe. And they’d had a brainwave.

  Horn from African wild rhinos was one of the most valuable commodities on the international market – so valuable that men were prepared to risk their lives to get it. But why face all the dangers of a shooting war when museums throughout Europe were packed with stuffed specimens, including horns, in fragile and usually unguarded cabinets? In criminal terms it was a no-brainer. A fortune was there for the taking.

  And take it they did. From Sweden in the north to Spain in the south, Portugal in the west to Hungary in the east, natural history museums were targeted like banks in the Wild West. By the time Europol issued its warning, there had already been two raids in the UK. In February of that year a stuffed rhino head had been burgled from an auctioneers at Stansted Mountfitchet in Essex. It was later found, minus its horn, in a ditch. Next to be hit, in May, was the Haslemere Educational Museum in Surrey, where thieves broke in at two o’clock on a Friday morning. The museum holds 240,000 specimens, one of the largest natural history collections in Britain, but only a single item was taken – the mounted head of a black rhino, with both horns intact, which had been brought to England from Kenya (then British East Africa) in 1913 and had been on display since 1929. A few days after the Europol warning, the thieves turned their attention to Ipswich in Suffolk. Their target was Rosie, a one-horned Indian rhino that last drew breath probably some time in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. She might have been shot in the wild, or died in a circus or zoo. No one knows. What’s certain is that in 1907 the Natural History Museum in London sent her to the Ipswich Museum in return for a stuffed pig and £16. She made the journey on a horse-drawn wagon from which it took ten men two hours to unload her. Over the years she became a local celebrity. The name Rosie was conferred after a competition in a newspaper, and a drawing of her by the artist Maggie Hambling became the museum’s definitive icon. For 104 years Rosie stood there, admired but unmolested. Then, in the middle of a July night, thieves broke in through the back door, wrenched off her horn, snatched an African two-horned black rhino’s skull from the top of a showcase and made off with them. Bearing all the hallmarks of well-rehearsed professionals, they were inside the building for just three minutes.