In 1961, the largest elephant in history was unveiled on exhibit in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC; the Fenykovi elephant, affectionately known as Henry by the museum staff. In the mid-1950s, when this grand elephant was shot by Josef Fenykovi, Angola was known as the “living room of Africa”, legendary for its giant sable antelope, enormous elephants, and vast herds of wildlife.
That same year, Angola’s war of independence broke out, ushering in four decades of armed conflict in the wider region. Almost all the elephants, perhaps as many as 100,000, were either killed or driven out to become refugees in northern Botswana and Namibia, or western Zambia and Zimbabwe.
In 2016, the National Geographic Okavango Wilderness Project discovered signs of a small, remnant population of large elephants in the remote eastern Angolan Highlands. National Geographic deployed hundreds of motion-sensing camera traps in remote valleys, vast forest refugia cut off from the world, identified by local bushmeat hunters and traditional leaders who had been quietly protecting these gentle giants.
It took us seven years to get our first photographs of the Ghost Elephants of Lisima. This year, we took three master trackers from the Ju/’hoansi San tribe, the last hunter-gatherers who could identify elephants individually by their tracks. Where camera traps, acoustic sensors, and aerial surveys failed, the master trackers and local Luchazi and Nkangala hunters were successful.
Two weeks ago, on October 24, we encountered a ghost elephant for the first time: a massive bull, veiled in myth and legend. The master trackers who followed him after he ran away discovered a traumatised elephant who had lived through the atrocities of conflict – in his case, the Bush War, a consequence of the Angolan Civil War, that followed the war for independence.
This elephant had learnt to only move around at night. The master trackers had tracked hundreds of elephants in their lifetimes and Longfoot, as they called him, was the most elusive, aware, and traumatized elephant they had ever followed.
I have seen elephants celebrate birth and mourn death. When they experience traumatic events, they exhibit chronic signs of stress, aggression and depression
Elephants are sentient beings that live as long as we do. I have witnessed them celebrate birth and mourn death. There is a meandering, rocking, radiating, empathetic, mindful unity to them; a grandness beyond our conception. When elephants experience traumatic events, they exhibit signs of chronic stress, aggression, depression and repetitive behaviours akin to addiction in humans. Studying them, and their trauma, can help uncover not just how they tick, but how we do.
Over six weeks of tracking, we collected 42 faecal and DNA samples and will be analysing them in the coming months to better understand whether these elephants are descended from Henry. We are also checking whether the elephants we find today in northern Botswana and Namibia are related to one another. Are they refugees of war? And how does their trauma manifest?
These are creatures who have lived side by side with us in the past. They can hear us coming kilometres away, and smell us over even greater distances under the right conditions. They are remarkably sensitive to our presence; in places where poaching and human-elephant conflict are prevalent, they are wary and sometimes aggressive.
Environmental stressors can modify epigenetic markers, which regulate gene expression, allowing elephants to adapt their behaviour to changes around them. But how does this affect their strength and resilience over generations; their role in shaping ecosystems as they have done for millennia; and their long-term coexistence with human beings? As we ponder the fate of the ghost elephants, we must ask ourselves if the future of all wildlife is to follow these ghosts into obscurity.
