By Ashley Massey, '04
Funding: Dickey Center, Mellon Grant, DOC
Last summer I lived in an elevated wooden hut in the scientific research camp of Tembe Elephant Park in northern KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. I conducted interviews in the tribal wards surrounding the park as part of my Environmental Studies senior honors thesis on communities and conservation. Living in a small fenced-in island inside the park was amazing. The kitchen hut boasted a resident tree frog (Trog) and monkeys would throw monkey oranges at me from the hut roofs. Tembe is also home to the largest elephants in the world (judged by shoulder height). They are notoriously bad tempered as many survived encounters with poachers during the Mozambican civil war. A large bull elephant died of natural causes shortly before I arrived; they extracted eleven bullets from the carcass. At night the elephants would walk around the camp and eat trees by the fence; many nights it sounded like they were eating my hut. Sometimes, my camp neighbors and I would walk out with flashlights and catch a huge gleaming tusk in the beam. We would stare in awe- upon remembering the sheer power of the elephant on the other side of the fence, and we would retreat back to our huts. Driving back to the research camp from the tourism compound one night I experienced a real-life Jurassic Park moment. I was locking up the fence of the tourist camp and heard a crash in the nearby bush. A huge bull elephant with a crooked tusk, infamous for his aggression inside the park, stared at us and flapped his ears in anger. We jumped in the moving truck bed and tore home through the sand. I learned how to drive stick shift in the sandy ruts of the park, on an old, yellow, 4x4 Suzuki jeep, fearful that I might surprise an elephant and stall out. Many of my days off were spent driving the jeep through the park looking for game, or camping out in a hide for an afternoon overlooking a waterhole where wildlife would come to drink. I also went out with the lion monitoring team to track the newly introduced lions using radio collars and telemetry equipment. It was a rare opportunity- working with local communities during the day and spending my time off amongst the wildlife in the park. Not only did this off term further my thesis work, but it was also an amazing, horizon-expanding, personal experience.
