To Pump or Not to Pump?

Recent events around Hwange's parched waterholes have brought to the surface questions that even I as a safari guide, or as a friend recently put it, "a run-of-the-mill jeep jockey!" was asking eight years ago.

Reports vary from source to source, with accusations of self-service and secret agendas flying between oposing sides,but the common factor is that animals are dying of both starvation and thirst in Zimbabwe's crown jewel, Hwange national park.

For about 80 years now, water has been pumped into pans around Hwange to provide the wildlife with dry-season water and no doubt to attract animals to areas suitable for tourists and their attendant guides to get the best views. With all the best intentions in the world we have created a monster!

Elephant are without a doubt the keystone species in the park and one only has to drive around Kennedy 1 and Kennedy 2 pans to see the affect they have had on their habitats. Vast areas of stunted trees turned into scrub by constant elephant pressure around these waterholes. When I was guiding in Hwange ('96 -'98), the most up to date estimate of elephant numbers in the park were about 30 000 and today I hear suggestions of up to 70 000! The ecologists have always said that the ecosystem can only support 15 000 and so therein lies the problem…too many elephants…or, and this flies in the face of all that I was ever taught…too little space!

I wrote a recent assignment on Hwange's elephant for a college project and during my research I found some interesting papers. One paper was written by the well-respected wildlife vet, Chris Foggin (of the Wildlife veterinary unit) in which he stated that the pumping of water in Hwange had increased the elephants usage of the park (by the distribution of the pans) from 35% to 75% and that the population had grown by at least 5% per annum since. Without natural predators and with the parks scouts keeping poaching to a minimum, the elephants numbers multiplied in the newfound, rose-tinted "easy-life" that the perennial water provided. Seasonally they would normally have had to search for water elsewhere and it was then that nature would take her tax!

The very young and the very old would succumb to the harsh conditions on the long walk to the Zambezi River or the Okavango delta in Botswana, but for nearly a century there has been no need to leave because everything they needed was catered for. There was sufficient vegetation to support the small numbers of elephant and especially because of the increased area now available to them, their pressure on the habitat was spread thinly over the 14 000km2.

But as their numbers increased, so did their pressure on the vegetation. Animals that had little or nothing else to eat targeted trees and plants that would naturally have had a period of rest in the dry-season, when the elephants were away. Grass, when it is full of protein, makes up the majority of an elephants wet-season diet and that diet changes as and when that resource runs out. The Accacia erioloba or Camel-Thorn produces its pods in the dry-season and these pods are an elephant's favorite.

I remember once waking up to the sound of these pods raining down on my tent as an elephant bull had entered the Ngweshla campsite and was standing 4 meters from my tent shaking the hell out of a large acacia for the last of the seasons pods. Once gone though, the animals were forced to uproot trees, dig up roots and raid campsites to find enough food to support themselves and that was 8 years ago!!.

Some say we now have 40 000 elephants more than we did then!

It is a difficult issue especially in a country that relies so heavily on tourist revenue, but we as Zimbabwean's need to come up with a plan. We have given the animals everything that they have needed and provided tourists with arguably some of the best elephant viewing in Africa …BUT AT WHAT COST?

Can we morally continue to pump water year-round and in so doing provide a false reality that only delays the inevitable…a mass die off of both elephants and a myriad of other species?

I don't for a second think that we can just switch off the pumps and walk away but if we continue along this line the system will collapse. Culling used to be a short-term fix but even that seems to be out of the question. I read it would take about a decade of continuous culling (at the rates culled in the1980's) to reach Zimbabwe's sustainable elephant population of 60 000 and then an annual cull of 2500 animals from then on…indefinitely! We all know that the foreign donors that hold our purse strings would not stand for that and so we need to find alternatives. I think that we would need to study the affects that the switching off of our pumps would have on our neighbor's ecosystems (Botswana has its own elephant problems) before we do anything but now is the time to start getting our heads together and coming up with a Zimbabwean solution.

We invite opinions from both sides of this debate…so lets get it started!

By Brent Stapelkamp (December 2005)

ZimConservation Synthesis Report No. 4