Purple starlings flit overhead. Verdant tumbles of vegetation whisper in the mid-afternoon breeze. As our rifle-toting convoy snakes along a game trail through Yankari National Park in North-eastern Nigeria, it’s a picture of tranquillity. Until we’re flanked by a stampeding herd of cattle.
In an instant, we’re embroiled in a full-frontal assault on our senses. The thunder of thousands of hooves, flash of scimitar-length horns and pong of cowpats electrifies the landscape. As the park rangers shake their guns and shriek warnings, the bisected herd reforms within goring distance around us, like white-water rapids around a rock. We’re cocooned in a surging mass of charging beasts.
When at last the cows pass and my heart rate normalizes, my fear is swallowed by disappointment. If the elephants were anywhere nearby, surely now they’ve scarpered.
Since dawn, we’ve traipsed in the destructive wake of Nigeria’s largest remaining herd of savannah elephants, chasing a rare encounter. We set off by pickup truck along a bush-fringed dirt track, following the GPS-transmitted location of a radio-collared matriarch. For the past five kilometres, we’ve abandoned the road’s switchbacks to instead rove on foot through the compact bush.
In the dry season, fire will transform this ecosystem into an open patchwork of elephant-revealing golden hues. But for now, the wet season’s downpours have nourished a viridescent explosion of elephant-concealing shrubbery.
Not that there are that many elephants to conceal in the first place.
Poaching and habitat loss have hammered Nigeria’s savannah giants to the very brink. Only about one hundred are left in Yankari, despite the 2,244-square-kilometer park harbouring the country’s major remaining population. This lingering few persist only thanks to the steadfast endeavours of the dedicated handful of highly-trained rangers accompanying us.
Yet whilst limited in number, this pride-of-a-nation herd still know how to leave a storm trail. As we approach the westernmost park limit, freshly uprooted trees lie snapped like matchsticks all around us, their bark raked loose by ivory stabs. Termite mounds and hulking logs alike have been trampled and strewn aside with equivalent ease.
As our GPS point signals that we are within 200 metres of the matriarch’s last-known position, we descend the embankment of a muddy canyon using knee-deep steps pummelled by elephant feet.
That’s when the cows charge.
When the hoof stamps have subsided, we stop and stare at the hodgepodge of fava bean and yam fields in the distance. Rangers later tell me that the land conflicts among pastoralists and herders in these encircling communities outside the park have leaked into its borders. Herders seeking new pastures are fattening their livestock by corralling them into the lush fodder-lands of the protected area. Alongside defending some of Nigeria’s last elephants, rangers now also spend their afternoons shepherding cows out of Yankari.
That’s when my disappointment at a missed encounter vanishes. Majestic views of elephants are easy enough in the National parks of East and Southern Africa. What we’d wanted was to witness conservation in action—and this is what’s happening in Yankari.
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