How do you know when an elephant’s had a good time?
Tree branches strewn around, smashed up prickly pears, a broken fence and a LOT of poo…
When Kariega’s bull elephant Kambaku realised that the reserve’s electric fence wasn’t working, he simply stepped on it, walked right over it and on to the R343 road connecting Kenton-on-Sea and Salem in the Eastern Cape Province.
Kariega Reserve Manager Jason Loest reckons Kambaku must have been there a good few hours and had a really good time - “because there were lots and lots of droppings along that section of road.”
He thinks the elephant got out in the early hours of Monday 24 January.
“There was a power failure on the fence and when he realised it, he just walked right over it,” said Loest.
He got a message about the escapee at around 5am.
“By 5.20am he was back inside.”
How did they do it?
“We just kind of herded him up the road – you know, walked and clapped our hands a bit.”
That was fine until he reached where they’d parked their vehicles across the road.
“Then he got upset and I think he thought “enough of this” and just turned and walked back over the fence into the reserve.
“He’s really an extremely well behaved chap and he didn’t go far from where he left the reserve. I think at first he thought ‘freedom!’ and then there was this delicious tree just right there, so that was it.”
Makhanda farmer Peter Wylie witnessed the operation from a little way down the road.
“I was returning back from Kenton and suddenly there was this big bull elephant on the road ,” Wylie said. “He’d wrecked the fence here and left big elephant droppings all over the place and branches and things on the road.”
“He went back into the reserve, but I should think that an elephant does not forget. He was having a good elephant time and he will be out again sometime soon,” said Wylie.
Of the rangers who persuaded the elephant to return home, Wylie said, “They were very competent In the way they handled the situation.”
Michelle and Kevin Rafferty on the way to Makhanda
By the time Victoria Primary School principal Michelle Rafferty and her husband Kevin reached the spot on the way to work, there was no sign of the elephant. But they slowed down when they saw a large, dark shape in the road ahead of them.
“It was so big that I thought some animal had been killed,” Michelle said. “When we got up close, we both exclaimed that it had to be elephant poo!
“Thereafter for about twenty metres there was a large pile on either side of the road at short intervals.”
The Raffertys were very concerned “mainly because there were plenty of joggers and cyclists not far behind us and whom we had just passed”.
Now on full alert, they fully expected to see a large elephant on the next bend.
“But we only saw the reserve’s white bakkie (pick-up truck) and figured that they must have gotten it back to the ‘right’ side of the fence.
“From reports, it sounds like we missed it by a few minutes,” said Michelle. “How sad or fortunate (depends how you look at it) that we left five minutes later than usual this morning. It was a quite an adventure between dodging potholes - and now huge piles of dung too.
“We have seen a few elephants at the dam - before but elephant dung on the road was a first!”
It took Loest a little while to establish that some of the younger staff on the reserve had named the elephant who took a stroll down the road as Kambaku.
“That is a fairly recent development to those of us who have known him for some time,” said Loest. “To us, he is simply ‘the big bull’.”
Kambaku is the reserve’s breeding bull, among several bulls relocated from Addo Elephant National Park to reserves in the region. Well into his 40s, he’s the oldest elephant at Kariega,” said Loest.
In June 2005, sanparks.org.za reported that 12 elephant bulls from Addo were to be translocated to private game reserves that week, in a bid to improve elephant management in the park by reducing the number of dominant bulls in the 13 500 hectare main game area of the park.
Fabulous story. I mean, I've heard of herding cats, but herding an elephant - never!