ZIMBABWEPoaching

The ongoing war against ivory poachers is (along with the rhino-

horn trade) one of the world’s perennial wildlife problems

26 . Geographical February 2021 . 27

Poaching has been a fixture of the African bush since the first national parks and reserves were gazetted. Mark Eveleigh goes on patrol with a unique anti-poaching unit in Zimbabwe’s beautiful Bumi Hills, tackling the sometimes surprising fallout from Covid-19

ONGOING BATTLES

ZIMBABWEPoaching

28 . Geographical

They call this place Dinosaur Island.’ Mark Brightman’s voice barely reaches me over the blare of the outboard motor as he guns the little steel launch into a channel near Lake Kariba’s Zimbabwean shoreline. The name seems fitting since I’m aware that the dark waters around us are home to some of the world’s largest crocodiles. I’d heard that a nine-metre-long maneater nicknamed Bismarck was recently shot not so far from here.

Along the shoreline, other giants are adding their weight to the Jurassic Park imagery. Bumi Hills is famous for the large elephant herds that graze upon the floodplains. While the females and calves tend to stay on the mainland, the males – often big tuskers – are frequently driven by territorial pressures to nearby islands. From my suite at Bumi Hills Safari Lodge, I’d seen them, trunks snorkelling across the water, turning Kariba into a Zimbabwean Loch Ness.

Dinosaur Island is actually named not for crocs or ellies but for the 180-million-year-old fossilised remains of a Vulcanodon karibaensis, a primitive sauropod, found here in 1969. But it’s a far more recent skeleton that Brightman and his team of rangers have come here to investigate this morning. Bumi Hills Anti-Poaching Unit (BHAPU) are frontline forces in the battle against the ivory trade.

The ongoing war against ivory poachers is (along with the rhino-horn trade) one of the world’s perennial wildlife problems. I’ve joined anti-poaching patrols in various parts of Africa over the years – in Uganda, Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania and notably with elite SAS-trained Swazi rangers – but within a couple of hours on patrol with BHAPU, I’m already realising that there can be few anti-poaching teams in Africa whose field of operation is quite so dramatically diverse.

‘Since we patrol the lake, we’re also responsible for policing illegal fishing, but there are so many forms of poaching here that it’s very hard to anticipate what we’re going to have to deal with on a day-to-day basis,’ Brightman explains. ‘Crocodile bile fetches a high price in the traditional communities and pangolin scales are prized, especially for export to Asia. Lion heart, fat and bone, and leopard claws and teeth are also valuable in the local communities…’

As he continues to describe the bizarre list of animal parts that are sought after for muti (traditional medicine), Brightman’s lack of surprise could only be born out of 40 years of experience in the bush. In many parts of Africa, he says, lion bone is believed to make a man invincible and the skin – used as a sleeping mat – is said to transform him into a tireless lover. Lion fat is believed to be effective as a deterrent against elephant raids on crops. South Africa allows a legal quota of bones from 1,500 lions to be ‘harvested’ each year (ostensibly for export to Asia) and Brightman is adamant that disreputable ‘canned’ lion-hunting reserves are creating a market for lion carcasses, making them an ever more popular target.

Ti. Fuli fue public turnunc macierehemus hilne non-sulostus re im noner

February 2021 . 29

In many parts of Africa, lion bone is believed to make a man invincible, the skin to transform him into a tireless lover

There are concerns that ‘canned’ lion-hunting

reserves are creating a larger market for lion carcasses

It goes on. Baboon hands are used in curses and crocodile bile is widely believed to be a fatal poison. Owls are identified with witchcraft in much of the world (to whit Harry Potter), but in Africa, hyenas replace broomsticks as the vehicle of choice for witches. Both of these creatures are commonly targeted by poachers for use in black magic.

Occasionally, Brightman’s team comes across a poaching operation that mystifies even the experts. ‘Lately, a new one for us,’ he tells me. ‘We’ve been chasing a Zimbabwean gang who were targeting a colony of gulls over on Starvation Island.’ Such a poaching operation would seem to be an unrealistically labour-intensive and risky substitute for (larger) chicken eggs. The BHAPU team staked out the stash of more than 300 gulls’ eggs for two days but the poachers may have been tipped off because they never returned to provide an answer to the mystery. Brightman believes it was simply an opportunistic gang who were planning to sell the eggs for consumption.

More spectacular bird species are often targeted by sangomas (shamans) for use in their cures and curses. In particular, vulture body parts are popular charms for gamblers, fish eagle and kingfisher droppings are considered powerful remedies for various ailments and a burnt dove’s nest is said to be a cure for vertigo. Hammerkops, the strange hammer-headed waders that are often called the ‘king of birds’, decorate their gigantic nests (which can weigh more than 20kg) with

Lake Kariba has been shrinking in recent years, revealing a Bumi Hills shoreline that is an ideal habitat for vast herds of impala

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ZIMBABWEPoaching

30 . Geographical

random items and sangomas prize almost any object found in a hammerkop nest.

‘Poachers and other criminals have a hammerkop belief of their own,’ Bumi Hills head guide Nick Gaunje tells me. ‘They wait until the adult birds have left the nest and then climb up to tie a piece of string loosely around the hatchling’s foot. When the mother returns, she will untie her baby. The criminals believe that if they can retrieve that piece of string, it will be invested with phenomenal magical powers that can confuse juries and get them out of jail.’

While on paper, Zimbabwe inexplicably avoided a large share of 2020’s Covid-19 cases, its economy nosedived and the Bumi area saw an exponential increase in game-meat snaring as a result. It’s impossible to estimate how many animals died, but in 2020, BHAPU patrols collected more than 200 snares from the bush around Bumi Hills (double the figure for 2018).

‘Snaring comes in a variety of forms,’ Brightman explains. ‘Sometimes it’s just one man trying to get meat for his family and it’s hard to be too harsh in such a scenario.’

Despite the good work of the African Bush Camps Foundation (set up by the owners of Bumi Hills Safari Lodge), life can be hard in the villages and first-time offenders are usually given a warning.

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‘However, sometimes bushmeat snaring is a sickeningly wasteful process, along with being utterly agonising for its victims,’ says Brightman. ‘Occasionally, we might find up to a dozen snared impala rotting away, totally wasted because nobody came to check their traps.’

The team has freed countless antelope, buffalo and even lions from certain death in snares. Some animals have freed themselves but have had to be tracked down and tranquilised to deal with septic wounds caused by the wire that bit into their flesh. Even elephants are not spared the threat of snaring. I saw a club-footed individual close to the lodge that was only alive thanks to BHAPU.

Things are often not what they seem in Africa and BHAPU’s field operatives are sometimes called upon to double as forensics experts and detectives. The previous day, two Zambian men had been arrested on Starvation Island. At first glance, they appeared to be impoverished fishermen, desperate enough to have paddled their dugout more than 30km from their home on the northern shore. Under such circumstances Brightman’s sense of empathy would normally see them let off with just a stern warning. However, there could be more to this than met the eye. Why had the men paddled so far, across equally rich fishing grounds,

Bumi Hills guide and tracker Nick Gaunje checks out an elephant

skull and is relieved to see that it wasn’t a victim of poaching

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ZIMBABWEPoaching

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BHAPU’s field-operatives are sometimes called upon to double as forensics experts and detectives

BHAPU rangers turn their heads from the camera to hide their identities

Mark Brightman points to a pile of elephant bones

A bushbuck doe makes herself at home on the lawn

at Bumi Hills Safari Lodge

to run the risk of fishing in a protected area? More importantly, why wasn’t there any fishing tackle or nets in their boat? The impoverished-fishermen disguise would be a very effective cover for poaching scouts. It was something that had to be investigated and so the men were handed over to the authorities.

This afternoon’s patrol on Dinosaur Island is expected to be a routine forensics investigation. Brightman eases the boat onto the bank and within minutes I begin to see elephant spoor in the form of dinosaur-sized footprints, almost as big as dustbin lids.

‘I’d have bet anything that 2020 would have seen a serious spike in the number of elephants taken by ivory poachers,’ Brightman whispers as we walk in single-file into the dense bush. ‘Unexpectedly, however, ivory poaching dropped off substantially.’

I’d already seen the figures back at BHAPU headquarters and they were, indeed, very surprising: in the previous decade, 217 elephants were shot in the surrounding area, yet in 2020 there were only six confirmed deaths from poaching. Brightman and his team are justifiably proud of the fact that it has been three years since an elephant was killed within the 50 square kilometres of Bumi Wildlife Area. Ivory poaching has been on the rise throughout the continent in recent years, so experts were surprised when a ZimParks spokesperson claimed that only 20 elephants were poached in Zimbabwe during 2020.

Brightman believes that the disruption of transport routes has been part of the reason for the drop in elephant poaching. But more important still are the police roadblocks that were set up to enforce social-distancing in vehicles, which impeded the transportation of illegal weapons.

Back in the early 1990s, Zimbabwean police released several hundred Lee-Enfield Second World War-era rifles – ostensibly to farmers for crop protection – and it’s these weapons that now form the bulk of the arsenal for poaching teams. Poisoning has been an additional threat to the elephants and BHAPU routinely tests carcasses for traces of cyanide, although this is far from an exact science – in seasons when young shoots are emerging in large numbers, small quantities of cyanide are present in a healthy elephant’s daily diet.

Brightman has left one man to guard the boat and the three rangers spearheading our patrol are armed, not only as a matter of course when walking in big-game country, but also for defence. The first sign they come across is a snowy patch of bone slivers and cartilage strewn around the undergrowth like pieces of shale. I might have walked right over it without noticing but Brightman spots the significance instantly. The poachers would have carried the tusks up to this vantage point and waited to see if anyone responded to the sound of gunfire before they shaved the bone chips from their precious ivory.

We fan out to look for clues but the poachers are increasingly wary and it’s doubtful they would have left anything that might offer a clue to their origins. Brightman is already forming a theory, however: ‘Having made the kill, they would instinctively head for their boat and if they carried the tusks in this direction, they were almost certainly heading

back to Zambia.’ He points north before hooking his thumb back over his shoulder towards the Zimbabwean shore. ‘There’s a village just back there, on the mainland. Somebody must have heard the shots.’ He shakes his head in frustration. ‘We try to pay informers, but we can’t compete with what the poachers offer.’

Brightman’s sources have told him that, even in the villages, a single kilo of ivory can fetch as much as US$800. With a really big tusker carrying around 50kg of ivory, this represents a fortune that few subsistence farmers can resist.

Not far down the hill we come across a huge femur. A scavenger, even a particularly big hyena, could never have hauled it so far and I realise that it must have been carried here by other elephants, fondling the remains as part of their unique mourning process.

A hundred metres beyond, we find the rest of the skeleton. The skull rises above the grass like a sun-bleached boulder. I can see where the front of the face has been hacked off hurriedly with a hand axe known as a demo, perhaps before the animal was even fully dead. Bringing down a big elephant such as this in dense bush must have been a risky operation and

BHAPU patrols have come across human remains in the past, displaying what Brightman describes as ‘signs of trauma consistent with elephant trampling’.

While the team investigates the crime scene, I move around the carcass shooting photos, concentrating on finding angles that don’t reveal the rangers’ faces. All across Africa, anti-poaching units operate almost as elite military forces do in other countries and I’m aware that it could be detrimental to their effectiveness (and possibly even fatal) if they were recognised.

While one of his men logs the coordinates, Brightman sets up his metal detector in the hope of finding bullets among the bones that can then be matched, with the help of the Zimbabwean CID in Harare, with a database of weapons. The breeze blowing across the lake is relatively predictable and the rangers take account of the prevailing wind direction to establish how the poachers would have approached the animals. Their explanations, based on decades of experience and bush-tracker logic, paint a vivid picture in my mind of just how the grotesque killing must have played out.

In December, the UN World Food Programme predicted dire food shortages for up to four million Zimbabweans in a country already devastated by drought, hyperinflation and the economic trauma caused by the coronavirus. With many parts of Africa facing similar problems, it seems certain that there are many busy and uncertain days ahead for the rangers on the frontline of the war against poaching. l

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MARK EVELEIGH