Cat among the pigeons Read online

  Despite the name, waterbuck are not so obsessed with aquatic pursuits that they spend the entire day, or even much of it, splashing about. But they do need to drink every day, so when the time comes to settle down, first choice is a river or lake-front property. It’s also good to have somewhere safe to plunge into in case a lion with a peg on its nose happens to come galloping over the hill.

  Territories are not marked out in the way favoured by so many other animals, namely defecating and urinating on the boundary; not to belabour the point, but that’s hardly necessary, in the circumstances. Once established, a male waterbuck takes his property rights very seriously and a good part of every day is spent in facing off with the neighbours. The trick is to stand erect and sublime at such times, looking official and important. Point made, both neighbours then back off and go to lunch. Visiting bachelors are tolerated, providing they’re obsequious; only when a young buck pitches up with a determined look on his face, obviously intent on getting into the property market, come what may, is it necessary to resort to violence.

  Female waterbuck, in loose herds and accompanied by their young, range over a number of male territories, lingering here and there as the mood takes them, but coyly refusing to be pinned down on a permanent basis.

  When it’s time for an expectant mother to give birth she leaves the herd to find a secluded spot in thick vegetation. Soon after the birth she leaves her newborn calf to its own devices, wandering up to a kilometre away during the day and only returning to suckle two or three times between dusk and dawn. Each time, she thoroughly cleans her calf before leaving, endeavouring to remove as much scent as possible. Nevertheless, no doubt conscious of the fatal attraction of mom’s own overblown perfume, junior takes the precaution of changing hiding places after each visit. Sadly, these precautions don’t always work, and a high proportion of newborns fall prey to leopards and hyenas. The calf ’s largely solitary and very scary daytime existence ends after about four to five weeks, when it is finally able to join its mother and the dubious safety of a changeable herd.

  The Batswana name for the waterbuck is serwalabotloko which, loosely translated, means ‘the one who carries away pain’. The poetry derives from an ancient custom. When a tribal chief was ailing, and all other traditional treatments had failed, a male waterbuck was captured, trussed up and carried into the old man’s hut. Great care was taken to ensure that the animal was not hurt or injured in any way. The chief would be raised from his bed so that he could grasp the animal’s horns, and fervently pray to be cured. The buck was then carried back to where it had been found, and released. If it ran into the bush, the chief would die; if it chose to plunge into water, he would recover.

  Perhaps, in a strange way, being the butt of ribald jokes has helped ensure that the waterbuck continues the mystic mission ascribed to it in African tradition; laughter is, after all, one of Nature’s most powerful antidotes for pain.

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  FIREFLY

  If you’d been paying proper attention in chemistry class you’d know that adenosine triphosphate (ATP to its friends) is a critically important macro molecule that acts as a power broker for virtually every cell in your body. All living creatures depend on it to do the things they do.

  The forebears of fireflies worked out long ago that when you combine ATP with oxygen, calcium and the chemical luciferin in the presence of an enzyme called luciferase, light is produced. It’s tempting to speculate that if our own ancient ancestors had done their science homework properly, our noses would also light up when required and we wouldn’t need to burn billions of tons of fossil fuels to power our bedside reading lamps.

  Firefly is a colloquial name for over 2,000 species of bioluminescent insects that live in the world’s tropical and temperate zones. With the exception of a cave-dwelling fungus gnat that lives in New Zealand and Australia and generally minds its own business, none are flies and none can set the world on fire. Unlike even our most energy-efficient bulbs, the light they produce generates virtually no heat.

  True fireflies are nocturnal beetles, members of the Lampyridae family. They favour moist conditions and are hence usually found in or near marshes or where there’s plenty of damp leaf litter about, typically in forested or wooded areas by rivers, ponds and lakes. In their larval phase some are semi-aquatic.

  Already boffins in chemistry, fireflies of the Photuris genus have gone to the top of the class in physics too, refining and sculpting the edges of the translucent scales in their exoskeleton to optimise light output. This neat trick has been experimentally copied to make LED lights 50 per cent more efficient.

  Not only adult beetles light up. The larvae and even the eggs of many species also emit an eerie glow. The supposition is that the bugs first evolved their light show as a means of warning predators not to eat them. When alarmed, they exude a substance that tastes disgusting and is toxic to many undiscerning consumers. In the lethal trial-and-error process Nature favours, luminosity was a clever way of getting that message across.

  But having mastered the science, fireflies subsequently worked out that flashing off and on is also a nifty way to communicate with each other, particularly when it’s time to find a mate. Some reprobates have gone one step further. They imitate the amorous flashes of other related species to lure unsuspecting suitors to join them as lunch.

  Because there are so many different species, each adopting a slightly different approach to life’s chores and conundrums, it’s not surprising that we’re a bit confused about who’s who is the firefly zoo. About 30 species live in southern Africa, varying in size from 5 to 30 millimetres. Unsurprisingly, the name firefly is usually ascribed to those that fly, flitting about and flicking their little lamps on and off as the mood takes them. In some species only the male has wings and very large eyes but doesn’t light up at all; the female is flightless and emits a steady glow when ready to attract a mate. Females of this species look as though they never quite made it out of the larval stage and are hence often known as glow-worms. In the world at large, glow-worm is a name happily bandied about without any particular reference to entomological exactitude.

  The bulk of a firefly’s modest lifespan is spent in the larval stage. They potter about in the underbrush and even underground, hunting and eating snails and worms. When they become adults most of them don’t eat at all, though some species find time in their busy schedule to take the occasional sip of nectar. Such brief visits to the juice bar aside, adult life for a firefly is firmly focused on finding a mate and, when conditions are favourable, their large numbers can produce an awe-inspiring light show.

  Inexplicable things that shine in the night tend to ignite the human imagination and fireflies predictably attract more than their fair share of superstition. A legend of the Ewe people, who live in Togo and Ghana, holds that vampires routinely take the form of fireflies. If you’re stupid enough to catch one and put it in a jar, it will promptly overcome that inconvenience by assuming its true form and then eat your liver. In stark contrast, Japanese poets have long evoked the firefly as a symbol of enduring love and hope. In other cultures they are believed to provide some sort of electrical utility for elves and fairies. If this is indeed the case, we can sympathise with these diminutive citizens of the netherworld as they no doubt register regular complaints about the erratic nature of this essential public service.

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  ELEPHANT

  African and Asian elephants have only once fought against each other in a formal battle. The result was a pushover for the Asians. The encounter occurred during the Battle of Gaza in 217 BC between the forces of the Egyptian pharaoh, Ptolemy IV, and Antiochus III of the Seleucid kingdom.

  To be fair, Antiochus had 102 Asian elephants in his army, whereas Ptolemy could muster only 73 reluctant Africans, rounded up on the savannas of Eritrea. They were smaller than their Asian counterparts, from a subspecies now extinct. They took one look at the trumpeting horde of Oriental pachyderms, ditched their keepers,
and promptly stampeded off the battlefield. Despite this disappointing performance, Ptolemy’s army still somehow managed to win the day.

  While it’s certainly nothing to brag about, trained elephants have been used in wars for over 3,000 years. Virtually all these combatants were from Asia, but the elephants that famously plodded over the snowy Alps with Hannibal to attack the Romans on their home turf were almost certainly African. They were probably sourced from the slopes of the Atlas Mountains in Morocco, and may, once again, have been of a slightly smaller subspecies now no longer with us.

  The big tuskers that roamed the forests and savannas south of the vast Sahara were inaccessible to the warmongers of the old world, so they couldn’t easily be recruited to join the ongoing carnage. By the time this changed, high explosives had been invented and their services on the battlefield were no longer required.

  An elephant’s main preoccupation in life is eating rather than fighting. To meet the nutritional requirements of their huge bodies they need to consume about 170 kilograms of vegetation every day, which can mean munching for up to 18 hours in every 24. Their digestive systems are also not wildly efficient, so a significant proportion of what goes in one end comes out the other, only partly the worse for wear. That’s good news for dung beetles, of course, and all the other creatures that make a living in the recycling business; but it does mean that any ‘all you can eat’ restaurants would quickly flip their sign and lock the doors if they saw a boisterous party of elephants coming down the street towards them.

  As you’d expect from big eaters, elephants tuck away a wide variety of plant matter, including grass, leaves, bark, twigs, seed pods and fruits. They routinely break branches or push over entire trees, some quite sizeable, to get at what they want. In the natural scheme of things their destructive feeding habits don’t matter much, and can even eventually be beneficial for other plant – and even other animal – species. But when large numbers of elephants are artificially confined to an inadequate area the result can be catastrophic for the entire ecosystem, including the elephants themselves.

  African elephants used to wander wherever they pleased, north to south and east to west, from the temperate shores of Table Bay to the tropical beaches of East Africa’s Great Lakes and beyond. Many of their old migration trails through coastal mountain passes and thick forests were used by Thomas Bain and other road and railway engineers as they opened up the hinterlands of Africa. Ironically, among the first to make use of these routes were professional hunters, the precursors of a great slaughter that soon decimated the elephant populations, as well as vast numbers of other African creatures on the plains of the great plateaus.

  Of course, professional hunters were mainly after elephant tusks, which, if it weren’t a commonly accepted fact, would surely be regarded as utterly bizarre. It is the only instance in the history of life on earth in which one species has preyed on another with the express purpose of extracting two of its teeth. An alien visitor might reasonably conclude that we were a species of mad dentists.

  Elephant tusks are modified incisors and very useful to the rightful owner in a variety of ways, including as levers, for digging, stripping bark from trees, as well as in defence and offence. They are purely ornamental for anyone else. With the advent of synthetic materials, ivory is no longer even used for billiard balls or piano keys, but nevertheless demand, principally from China, remains insatiable. Buyers, legal or otherwise, are prepared to pay huge sums.

  Big-game hunters took a heavy toll on elephants in Africa but they had become rather ridiculous anachronisms by the middle of the 20th century. Their place was taken by men with AK-47s who needed money, mainly to buy more AK-47s. By the 1960s the large-scale wars that the African elephant had once managed to avoid had finally arrived on their home ground, with truly devastating results for the species.

  Elephants are intelligent and emotional animals, and they must surely wonder where it will all end. Those unfortunates charged with the horrible task of culling elephants in overpopulated areas know that it is more humane to kill all the animals in a given family, such is the overwhelming misery and inconsolable distress of any survivors.

  Elephants endeavour to support and lift an ailing matriarch or family member, and to hover around a corpse for hours, seemingly undecided about what to do. Even the bleached bones of long-dead elephants garner intense interest; in a strange communion they gently touch the remains, particularly the tusks and the jaws, with the tip of their trunk.

  For the time being the behemoths can only soldier on, making the best of the parcels of wild land presently left to them by humanity’s burgeoning numbers and relentless warring. But for the largest land animal on earth, there are inevitable stresses and strains in being confined.

  When they reach the age of 12 or so, young male elephants are shown the door by the family matriarch and in the normal course of events join up with mature bulls which, like it or not, are responsible for their higher education. In recent years, young bull elephants in Hluhluwe-Imfolozi in KwaZulu-Natal lacked such role models and somewhat unfairly focused their teenage frustrations on rhinos, bowling them about like beach balls. They killed several and the mayhem only subsided with the intervention of two huge mature elephant bulls trucked in from the Kruger National Park.

  It is a sad indictment of our own species that we seem incapable of finding such mountains of wisdom and placid authority to bring an end to our own bloody and perpetual squabbles.

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  BAT-EARED FOX

  The bat-eared fox only made it into the exclusive Canidae club by a whisker. It mainly eats termites and that’s a bit like being a vegetarian at a Blou Bulle braai. To add to the confusion, it often sports a black bandit mask, a bit like a racoon. Nevertheless, a fox it is indeed, even if it has been partly named after an aerial rodent.

  Nicknaming someone after an anatomical anomaly is frowned upon in polite society, but there’s simply no escaping the fact that those whopping ears are the fox’s most distinctive feature. The reason they’ve evolved to look like satellite dishes is that they have a similar function. They don’t pick up DSTV, which given current content is probably just as well, but they do enable the fox to eavesdrop on subterranean chatter. If you had a pair of ears like that you’d probably be astonished at the kind of racket termites, grubs and larvae make as they go about their daily chores. A dung beetle grub breaking out of its subterranean egg and eagerly looking forward to a lifetime of rolling elephant poop is likely to have a truncated career if a bat-eared fox happens to be in the immediate vicinity.

  Another peculiarity that distinguishes bat-eared foxes from other canids is their teeth; proportionally they’re a lot smaller but these foxes have more of them – an extra set of molars in both their upper and lower jaws. Coupled with a muscular adaptation in the lower jaw, this enables them to chomp insects at a ferocious rate, easily eclipsing the dental dexterity of a greedy kid who doesn’t want to share his packet of jellybeans.

  Eschewing such selfish behaviour, bat-eared foxes are social and can often be found in groups, amicably sharing popular foraging sites. Such groups usually consist of a mating pair and their offspring but the neighbours occasionally invite themselves over and gatherings of a dozen or more of various ages are not uncommon. In areas where human beings and other diurnal predators are regularly out and about the foxes are mainly nocturnal, particularly during the summer months. But in some parts of South Africa, notably the Great Karoo, they often forage during the day in winter, preferring to snuggle up at night when an icy wind blows, just like the rest of us.

  Unlike warthogs and other squatters of the African veld, bat-eared foxes usually dig their own dens but they will make use of disused aardvark burrows when they’re available. Either way they keep their options open and usually have two or more dens within their home range, each with several metres of tunnels and a couple of relatively capacious chambers.

  The diminutive beasts – generally no longer than
50– 60 centimetres excluding the bushy tail, and tipping the scales at a modest 4–5 kilograms – choose to live in arid grasslands, by and large, where the grasses are kept relatively short by ungulates. It is, of course, no coincidence that such habitats are also favoured by the termites that form up to 80 per cent of their diet. To relieve the monotony, the foxes also prey on a variety of other bugs, including grasshoppers and beetles, as well as lizards and mice and a little bit of carrion, when it’s available. Their diet supplies most of their water needs, which is just as well, given that perennial ponds and streams are invariably rare in the places where they choose to live.

  Although exceptions have been noted, bat-eared foxes are usually monogamous. The pair produces a litter of up to six pups, which are then wholly dependent on their mother’s milk for 3–4 months. Unusually, the male is a stay-at-home dad during this period, guarding, grooming and playing with the cubs and, where necessary, moving them between dens. The female needs to be out and about, gobbling up enough termites and bugs to ensure a regular milk supply. She never returns with titbits, nor offers up the kind of regurgitated yuck other youngsters sometimes have to put up with – it’s milk or starve. The cubs get to sample their first juicy termite only once they’ve been weaned. During the interludes when she is home, the male seizes the opportunity to dash off to the local termitarium to quickly stuff his face, and woe betide him if he stops off for a pint at the The Wiley Fox on the way home.