Tarangire Zebra?!

Tarangire Zebra?!

Our experience in Tarangire with elephants was nothing short of fantastic. But Tarangire is morphing: there’s much more, now, than just ele.

Our two days with the Cleveland Zoo safari in Tarangire probably encountered as many as 800 elephants. On our second day alone we counted upwards of 500, and it was extremely exciting. Ele in the northern end of the park are more accustomed to visitors, and so we were able to get quite close. But those we found in the center to the south, especially around the Silale swamp, have seen many fewer visitors, and they were very wild. Several times we left the track to give wide reign to these wild, southern ele in the road.

It used to be that Tarangire was just an “elephant park.” But as we would learn on the second day that the Cleveland Zoo spent in Tarangire from the eminent researcher, Charles Foley, the 6% elephant population growth over the last decade or so is transforming its landscape.

We saw thousands of zebra. The number of zebra rivaled some of the congregations I’ve seen during the Serengeti migration. And they, too, were healthy, enjoying the mostly dead but considerable grass that was found throughout the area.

And… yes, hundreds maybe a thousand, wildebeest. So Tarangire is morphing: from what I remember as a dense forest to a mixed ecosystem. And for us that means the excitement of the world’s best elephant sanctuary is being complemented by a growing diversity of plains game.

Zoo director, Steve Taylor, had arranged a visit during our time in Tarangire with the eminent elephant researcher, Charles Foley, at his research camp in the park. Foley explained that the forests are being leveled by an increasing elephant population, and that has opened up large areas of savannah grasslands for other animals like zebra and wildebeest.

I’ve heard Foley explain this before, and although he expresses a noninterventionist conservation policy, I’m not sure whether he thinks this is good or bad. But for us in tourism, and at least for now, it seems to be good.

True to our expectations, by the way, Tarangire was dry but not in a drought. In fact, as we left, there were raindrops on our windshield. The park was a quilt of some very dry areas with some green areas, and the swamp was much dryer than in year’s past, but the river was running well and the animals were mostly healthy. Only once or twice did we encounter elephant families that were physically stressed. And even the buffalo populations – which are often the first to show food deprivation – were grand and healthy.

Wild Intervention

Wild Intervention

The Cleveland Zoo supports an important elephant researcher in Tarangire, Charles Foley, and we visited him in his camp in Tarangire.

Foley is an independent researcher who has worked in Tarangire for 16 years. He is among a handful of north-of-southern-Africa researchers with an impressive knowledge of how elephants effect and interact with their ecosystem.

In southern Africa there are more, and more organized and interacting, animal researchers, but in our dear East Africa it’s still pretty much a free-for-all. There are a number of often competing big name research organizations like AWF and WWF that vie for funding. The advantage of more cooperation would probably result in a better efficiency of research funding.

But at the same time this independent spirit has – I believe – contributed to the noninterventionist philosophy that I personally embrace. There is a more homogenous attitude towards the wild in the south, and it often revolves around “carrying capacity” notions of managing the wild.

But here in the east, there is strong support for noninterventionism.

During our visit Foley once again expressed his own view of not intervening in the wild. He spoke about the current drought and past droughts as cycles that will ultimately correct themselves without any interference.

Much of this comes from his Ph.D research that identified elephant populations that were old enough to transmit how to survive in a drought to their offspring. And those that survived, of course, would prosper in the subsequent populations and be better able to survive the next drought as well.

While Foley and I seem to embrace the same general hands-off attitude to the wild, there is a contradiction that appears when he discusses one of his current projects.

Foley is working hard to organize the communities just east of Tarangire to allow for animal migrations to and fro from the park. He has determined that the grasslands east of the park are actually more nutritious for most animal populations, but that the reason they must gravitate to the park especially in the dry season is because of the Tarangire sand river and important minerals that aren’t found to the east.

His projects pay the Maasai communities for not developing the land east of the park, and for allowing the animals to seasonally roam on them (as they have done naturally for generations). As with many Community Based Tourism (CBT) projects throughout East Africa, he is arguing that the community’s wild land can be as profitable by not developing agriculture as by doing so. Instead of getting money for your potatoes at the market, you get money from the tourists who want to photograph wild animals.

Well and good. I have often written about CBT projects, and everything we can do to support this I believe is the right thing to do.

But it abuts the noninterventionist philosophy.

Take the current situation in Amboseli, for example, where a savage drought has seen as much as 90% of the resident elephant population leave. (This according to researchers in the Cynthia Moss camp, there, speaking to participants on my July safari. Click here for Moss’ own account. )

Moss is appealing for funds to set up more research camps and assist further with anti-poaching activities. Some would argue this is interventionism.

But there can be no question that what Kenya’s Wildlife Service is now doing is interventionism: KWS feels it must counter the effect of the drought. Click here for current details.

Without reaction of the sort KWS is now employing to a crisis situation, a drought could decimate animal populations, and possibly for a long time. Ergo, no tourists or tourist revenue for anything, much less a project to increase dispersal areas.

The cycle underpinning Foley’s CBT project in eastern Tarangire is that hoteliers in the park will pay Maasai outside the park to support the animal population in the park that draws tourists. But the absence of a dispersal area is no greater a threat to healthy animal populations than a drought.

One circumstance is wholly natural, the other less so. But making this distinction as to when interventionism is justified is a daunting task, and possible only if you believe that the weather is more capricious than development schemes for the Maasai.

Fabulous Tarangire

Fabulous Tarangire

While much of the rest of East Africa is suffering in the midst of a serious drought, Tarangire though dry is still fabulous.

We entered the national park in the late afternoon at the northern gate, and we’d traveled hardly three minutes before we encountered the Watermelon Club.

The watermelon club is composed of 20 or so magnificent and giant elephant bulls that in a truly wild situation would not be hanging out, together. Now mind you, I think Tarangire is one of the wildest parks in Africa, but inevitably the park ends and civilization begins.

Tarangire’s civilization is composed of a lot of watermelon farms. We know from the elephant dung that a lot of these watermelons are ending up in the bellies of 6-ton tuskers. During the day the hang around the northern edge of the park and don’t seem to mind the thousands of photographs that ensue. They sleep, meander a bit, knock down a few trees, and wait for sunset.

Then, they raid the area’s watermelon farms. It may seem comical to us visitors, but it’s anything but funny to the farmers. It’s become a serious regional issue. Researchers like Anna Estes are trying to document the incidents and figure out what to do.

Everyone loved the encounter and we headed a bit more quickly than we intended to down to the river. Like all the freshwater rivers I’ve seen in East Africa this year, it’s flowing well. This one is born in the Silale Swamp, which the next day we would find appearing dry. Yet it’s flowing well. Similar to Mzima Springs and later, the streams that run into a now nearly completely dry lake in Ngorongoro Crater. Is this late rain? Or more ominously, the slow desertification of East Africa?

We continued along the river and encountered huge numbers of zebra, beautiful light, many giraffe, more ele and buffalo. The park was fabulous for both our days, here. It was also, VERY COLD. People don’t think of Africa as cold, no matter what our preparatory literature might tell them, and the truth is that it isn’t snowing. It’s more like the upper 50s. But without the air-conditioning and heating that we’re all accustomed to at home, the upper 50s feels like it’s snowing!

Pulled into Sopa at 7 p.m. Gathered at just before 8 p.m. and had a wonderful debriefing and then a pretty simple if awful dinner. Afterwards, Conor wanted to talk, so I did, including learning about his proposed bike trip across Mauritania. Didn’t get to bed until 10:30p and slept like a log.

Our second morning we were out at 6 a.m. in the BITTER COLD. But what a reward we had at the Silale swamp. Before we returned around 1 p.m. we’d seen about 200 elephant and as many buffalo. I was with Carl, Tim, Marley and Conor, and the others really empowered Carl and I to bird, so we found chinspot batis, red-faced crombec, crowned hornbill and all sorts of other things.

For “team mammal” we saw honey badger, not an easy find.

In the afternoon we were going to take it casually and end up on Tarangire Hill for the sunset, but as I was riding along in Tumaini’s car, we got word that a leopard was on display at Silale – exactly where we’d been that afternoon. We raced over the Boundary Hill Ridge and sure enough, a beautiful big female leopard was on display in classic pose on a lower branch of an acacia. It was stupendous. Charles raced back then again to the lodge to retrieve Hayley, who had stayed behind, so that everyone finally got a view of this most elusive of the cats.

We then completed our plan, perhaps faster than we should have, but there was time for everyone to stick their head into the hollow trunk of the Poacher’s Baobab, and to click quite a few pictures of a beautiful landscape and sunset from Tarangire Hill. That should have been it, but it wasn’t.

The road off the hill is tangled in high now leafless bush. It’s a narrow road, and we found that dusk was a time that the elephants used the road to climb the hill for the night. We waited in my car a long time before coasting silently down the road, but it didn’t work. One large female trumpeted and charged, stopping just meters from our car.

Tarangire’s wooded landscapes are beautiful. Its elephants are unbelievable and exciting, and the terrain including Silale Swamp one of the most magnificent on the circuit.

Bingo at Tarangire

Bingo at Tarangire

Yes, it’s dry, and that’s when Tarangire really performs. And boy, how it did on this safari!

We flew into the Kuro airstrip after several event less flights from Samburu, arriving in mid-afternoon with my Tanzanian crew waiting patiently. When we were flying in, I noticed a huge number of elephant at the Silale swamp, so about half of us went straight there.

No disappointment doing so. We saw about 250 elephant, and on the way back to Sopa Lodge there were a few charges, a couple hundred buffalo, untold numbers of impala, and in the fading light of the day, a mother lion with two cubs!

Tarangire is becoming a better and better park. Once thought to be extremely seasonal, good only when the dry season attracted the large number of elephant, it’s really matured into an all-year park.

Despite the guidebook remarks that it remains seasonal, I’ve seen hundreds of elephant here in the middle of the rainy season. But yes, in the dry season it’s unbelievable! We saw perhaps a total of a thousand elephant during our two days, here.

Ellery, Zancy and their mother, Joannie, and I were with my driver, Winston, for the next morning when we explored the northern half of the park. I can’t say a lot for the quality of Sopa Tarangire, but its location is the best of any lodge or tented camp in the park. It allows us to explore both the southern (Silalae) and northern halves in two days. It really isn’t possible to do so at any other lodge or tented camp.

We left at 630a with a box breakfast and headed along the eastern river road. Later, when the group visited the famous elephant researcher, Charles Foley, at his camp in the north, we’d learn that there is really a division between the elephants in the north and south, and that they rarely intermingle.

We had seen quite a few elephant before turning down the Lemiyon circuit onto the black cotton soil plains in the northeast sector. There we encountered large numbers of zebra and wildebeest, and then, 19 lion! Tarangire has only recently begun to support such large prides.

We then headed down a gully road and I saw a massive bull elephant coming down the road towards us at the top of the hill. We stopped under a tree, fully shaded. The wind was with us, off the ele. Ellery, Zancy and Joannie were terrific. There wasn’t a peep or a movement.

The ele came lumbering towards us unaware of our presence and stopped only about ten feet away. After a moment’s hesitation he drew nearer.

Zancy was standing up through the open top of the Landcruiser opposite the driver, Winston, and I was right behind him. The ele came up to the rover and put his trunk on the hood. I could no longer see the sky. All I could see was elephant.

Zancy didn’t move or utter a sound, but his eyes popped out of his head and his jaw dropped to his already very low Bermuda shorts. None of us moved. The ele scraped around the right side of the car and snorted. Ellery’s massive curls got a moment’s unexpected spa-like blow dry. Then, he went away.

Old bull elephants are always easier to encounter like this than younger ones, or females, or any in a group. But it’s not something you do casually, and it’s not something to be done without the utter discipline that my wonderful clients exuded on this terrific morning with the ele!

Tarangire Elephants

Tarangire Elephants

Tarangire’s elephant game viewing is excellent year-round. It simply can no longer be considered a seasonal destination.

It was drier than when I visited the park only 12 days ago. Then there were many pools of standing water and a lush green veneer covered everything. For our visit this time it was still green, but much less water and dust followed every vehicle.

We left Tarangire Treetops before dawn with our picnic lunch. The drive to the gate is about an hour and was pretty uneventful, although the morning sunrise was spectacular. After we entered the park, Blair Devermont spotted a leopard.

She was gesturing to us wildly as we approached from behind, but the leopard slid away into the tall grass before we got a chance to see it. Leopard are skittish everywhere, but especially in Tarangire. This was a hunting reserve less than 20 years ago, and it takes multiple generations of leopard to become accustomed to game viewing vehicles.

We continued around the Silale Swamp road and enjoyed our picnic lunch at one of the finest picnic sites in all of Tanzania’s parks. New bathrooms, a beautiful area on a hillside overlooking the great swamp, and all shaded by magnificent trees. It’s the perfect spot for my lecture on Stanley and Livingstone, since all the great explorers coming from Zanzibar had to cross swamps like this.

We then proceeded up the track on the east side of the Tarangire sand river. It wasn’t long before we saw elephants. Similar to most game viewing, successful elephant viewing requires absolute quiet. I’m convinced of all these magnificent animals’ special senses, hearing is the most acute. They tolerate the whole gamut of car noises, but the variety of human voices is infinitely greater and disturbs them.

This doesn’t always mean angers them, although it can. But more often, it means that the game viewing experience will just not be as good. The matriarch will simply lead her family away from you.

Our group behaved magnificently! The first group of two families of 17 included a number of very young babies that performed as if in a school play! And we then saw a group of 50 coming from a mud bath towards the river. We positioned the vehicles carefully, maintained absolutely silence, and had one of the finest encounters I’ve ever experienced!

We returned to Treetops via the Boundary Hill track, one of the most beautiful little cuts through park woodlands in Tanzania. On the way back outside the park we stopped for pictures of everyone’s head through a hole in a baobab. The baobabs are magnificent in Tarangire, like the sunsets and sunrises, natural dynamic sculptures incapable of being plated on a photograph or painting.

My nephew, Tim Heck, smiles a lot, but I began to worry that he had some physical disease. He is a Blue Man in Chicago, capable at the end of each performance of standing in front of throngs of taunting people expressionless as directed. But he simply can’t do that here. Every time I see him, he’s smiling!

That evening we had sundowners overlooking Tarangire from a bluff near the lodge. To our north was the great Rift Valley escarpment with shimmering Lake Manyara at its base. To the east were the formidable hills of Monduli, and to our south, the beginning of the extensive Maasai steppe. The sun settled through the clouds like a curtain being drawn over the evening mist. This is a raucous and boisterous crowd, but I think I remember a moment or two of complete silence as the three-quarters moon appeared.

Yr-Round Tarangire

Yr-Round Tarangire

Don’t consider Tarangire only a seasonal park any longer.

For several years, now, I’ve been writing how wonderful Tarangire National Park is at any time of the year. So many guide books claim otherwise. They’re wrong.

Until the early 1980s, Tarangire was a hunting preserve. The 2200 sq. miles is the best elephant habitat in all of northern Tanzania and Kenya. It’s even better than Amboseli, which is famous for elephants.

One of my clients, Hans Wede, a successful “numbers” businessman from Denmark, estimated that we saw 500 elephants during our three game drives in the park. We saw fights, got charged, saw a half dozen newborns, watched a family for 40 minutes taking a mud bath and generally had one of the finest elephant viewing experiences I’ve myself had in 37 years!

And this is supposed to be the time you don’t go to Tarangire, because the elephants aren’t here.

In many regards, Tarangire is more like a southern than East African wilderness. It is heavily wooded and defined by its great Tarangire sand river and a number of other smaller sand rivers that flow into the Tarangire.

We spent the last two days in Tarangire avoiding elephants. We saw a lot more than just elephants, by the way, including a magnificent male lion (and several more females), lots of bat-eared fox and jackal, giraffe, lots of impala, zebra, buffalo, klipspringer and Tarangire’s outstanding birdlife. At the campfire during sundowners, my clients watched a leopard walk by. But elephants were the feature.

This is the wet season. Now admittedly there are some disadvantages to coming now: very hot, very humid, wet with great thunderstorms, and all this means more and more tse-tse fly. But it also means it’s a beautiful time. The veld is lush and green, the sand river is flowing and drawing all the migrant shore birds, and the forests are abloom with the earliest orchids.

And, contrary to virtually all the popular guide books, there are lots and lots of elephants!

Like so much in East African tourism, the notion that Tarangire is a seasonal park is based in early fact that was never revised as conditions changed. A half century ago when safari tourism began we were confronted with the catastrophic slaughter of elephants. Ninety-five percent of Kenya’s elephants were wiped out; probably 60% of Tanzania’s.

Those that remained were understandably skittish. Their behavior kept them away from people as much as possible. Sand rivers, like Tarangire, were their only source for water in the dry season, so they had to come to the sand rivers, then, even if tourists were waiting to watch them. Water flows nearly continuously under the sand, even in the driest times, and elephants then dig for it.

(My safari group this time even noticed that the elephants preferred to dig for water, even when it was flowing not far from their holes! We were at Samburu earlier, and that area is very dry right now in contrast to Tarangire. There were areas of streaming water in the Ewaso Nyiro sand river, but on one game drive we noticed that the elephants actually preferred to dig holes further down stream where no surface water was streaming. The filtered water through the sand is cleaner and sweeter than surface water.)

When the wet season came and water was everywhere, the elephants abandoned the sand rivers for locations with fewer people.

That’s no longer necessary. The elephant population has rebounded and elephant poaching is well under control. And Tarangire’s ecosystem beyond its sand river is great for elephant. So while there may, indeed, be even a more spectacular elephant experience in the dry season (July – November), you’d find that difficult to explain to my client, Joyce Hassell, who had a 5-ton bull’s ears practically wrapped around her Landrover. Or to my other client, Jodi Eckenhoff, who figures she took about as many pictures of elephant as we decided we’d seen: 500!