I’ve had a backlog of blogs because we’ve had even less electricity than usual in Zimbabwe. ‘Usual’ mostly means we only get electricity some time during the hours we are asleep, which at least cools the fridge a little and charges the inverter batteries so we can use a computer during the day.
But for the last 3 nights and 2 days, we’ve had none at all. All the carefully prepared food in our fridge rotted, and I had to throw away so many hard-to-procure meals that it was heartbreaking.
It was the elephants that did it. They come here to the ranch every night, and they are always beautiful, and always very dangerous. Last night they were so close to the house I wondered if they were going to rip the holey mosquito screens off once and for all.
Here’s a picture I took the other day of some of them, near our house—
A couple of days ago, some of these elephants pushed over or pulled down the power lines. I’m not sure what their reasoning was, surely living trees are more interesting to eat, but there you are, and as one guy here said, ‘I don’t speak elephant.’
They are damaging the trees between the buildings here. Typical elephant feeding signs look like this—
Of course, I feel privileged to share this spot of the earth with wild elephants. The conservancy is one of relatively few remaining places in Africa where elephants have enough habitat and space to roam freely, and as far as I’m concerned, they’re welcome to all the trees they want to eat. A bit of this sort of damage around the houses is par for the course, then, but beyond a certain level it does become a problem to the people living here—
Last night they broke through the electric fence around the house of the landowner in two places and destroyed all her banana trees and badly damaged a big mango tree. They also broke the pipe supplying all the water to the house. If they keep it up at this rate, I don’t think anyone is quite sure what to do.
If you’re reading this, it’s proof that someone has repaired the power lines…and that the elephants have not yet pushed them down again!
Roy
Donations made here are
Mar 15th Cathy A USD 80.00
2 Comments
Roy — I suppose to be a conservationist in the field, one must possess a huge amount of patience in addition to compassion. Kudos to you for taking all of the elepahnt antics in stride.
Is there anyway to protect your property and the power lines…what about low-voltage electric fencing?
Hi Christine,
About the elephants breaking things:
I’m not sure what can be done about the power lines, but yes, it’s definitely possible to use electric fencing to deter elephants. In fact, the bigger houses here all have some kind of electric fencing, but with daily power outages, there’s a limited amount of time left for batteries to charge. If the power goes out for long, the batteries for the fences simply don’t have enough charge left to be effective any more. It was during one of those times that the elephants were causing the most damage and breaking through fences. Now that the rains have started, however, the elephants seem to have moved away from the ranch HQ and are apparently now finding lots of succulent green leaves elsewhere–thankfully. I did hear them trumpeting nearby yesterday, though. But no footprints around the HQ for a good week now!