Thursday, July 10, 2014
Just a mile or so from the Serengeti we get stopped at a police checkpoint, the only one we've encountered on the trip. Lawrence seems edgy as we wait our turn on the side of the road. He takes a stack of papers from the glove box and flips through it a few times, apparently checking that he has everything the police might ask for. I’ve heard a lot about the bribe economy in East Africa, and I wonder if that’s got him nervous.
When our turn comes, one officer inspects Lawrence’s papers with a stern frown while another one, equally taciturn, slowly circles the vehicle, looking it – and us – up and down. The process is doubly unnerving because pretty much every government agent in Tanzania – from police officer to park ranger – wears a military-style uniform and carries military-grade weapons. If Lawrence isn’t intimidated, I am.
The first officer returns Lawrence’s papers and curtly instructs him to accompany him to the back of the truck where hushed words are exchanged in Swahili. They seem to be negotiating, but if any money changes hands, I don’t see it. Lawrence returns to the driver’s seat and, without explanation, pulls the Land Cruiser even farther off the road. “Everyone needs to get out, please,” he finally explains. “Flat tire.” The rest of us look at each other, skeptical that we could have been riding on a flat without knowing it. We jump out, half expecting to discover it’s a practical joke, but the right rear tire is indeed so flat that the truck’s weight is resting on the rim.
We take turns trying to help Lawrence replace the tire, but it soon becomes clear that we’re just in his way. Against our instincts, we stand off to the side and watch. It takes him less than 20 minutes to get us back on the road, during which time it occurs to me how lucky we were. Had it not been for this checkpoint – the only one I’ve seen in nearly two weeks – we wouldn’t have discovered that tire until we were smack in the middle of Lionville. And that, my friends, is a rough neighborhood.
At the rim we pull on sweaters for a bathroom break and to take some pictures at a scenic overlook. The crater is so big that perspective is impossible to obtain without zoom lenses or binoculars for support. What appear as tiny specks to the naked eye turn out to be trees, safari vehicles, and sometimes even elephants. What looks from here to be a snowy puddle is actually Lake Magadi, a sprawling salt lake with a surface area of nearly 40 square miles. You could put Dulles, BWI, and Washington National Airport down there and still have covered only about half the lake.
The crater is what’s left of a massive volcano that erupted here, then went dormant, and finally collapsed in on itself nearly 3 million years ago. In its prime it was likely to have been nearly as tall as Kilimanjaro is today. But it’s much, much older. This volcano came and went long before Shira, the first of K-man’s three volcanic cones, erupted. The word ancient doesn’t even come close.
Ngorongoro Crater is the largest intact, unfilled volcanic caldera in the world. Its name, however, is a mystery. Pronounced ung-GO-ROH, ung-GO-roh (with hard Gs), the word means “big hole” in one of the local dialects. But that, of course, doesn’t tell us which came first. The most popular explanation is that ngorongoro is how the Maasai pronounce the sound that cowbells make as their cattle lumber into the crater each morning. We’ll never know the truth, so I’ve elected to embrace the uncertainty.
Due to its steep walls, the crater’s interior is nearly a closed ecosystem. It’s a bit like a fly trap. Animals easily tumble in but they rarely expend the energy to climb back out. Countless generations of creatures have passed their entire lives in this confined space with no reason to doubt that it is the entire world. Our own creeping descent into the crater is so steep that my ears pop repeatedly despite the slow, gear-grinding speed. It’s no wonder so many animals end up staying at the bottom after stumbling into the bowl. No wonder, too, that so few of their offspring venture high enough to even see their escape.
The basin floor is so lousy with loitering zebras, wildebeests, and gazelles that if the crater walls weren’t visible on every horizon I’d assume we were out on the Serengeti Plains. These particular ungulates, however, don’t participate in, and have no knowledge of, the Great Migration. They’ve never tasted Serengeti grass, never met their cousins on the outside, never dodged a crocodile in the Mara River. Cut off from the Great Migration, these grazers follow a rhythm of their own, slowly pursuing the tender green grasses as they flourish in different parts of the basin each season.
Though it appears at first glance that the whole Serengeti menagerie is represented here, the crater is actually home to only a subset of animals found on the surrounding plains. No crocs live here. No topis. No impala. No giraffes. What we see is mostly zebras and wildebeests, a smattering of Cape buffalo, and a handful of elephants. There are also many eccentrically exotic birds, such as the punked-out crowned crane, the pretentious secretary bird, and the regrettably-named Kori bustard. (Watch your spelling with that one.) What the bustard lacks in flair it compensates for with notoriety. It is the heaviest bird in Africa – perhaps even the world – that can still fly. Take that ostriches!
Lions in the crater are in real trouble. Cut off from other prides roaming on the plains above, they have no one to breed with but relatives. This basin contains one of the densest lion populations in the world, and they’re all restricted to a space the size of Fresno. It’s tough to avoid inbreeding when the entire dating pool shows up at family reunions. Common side effects of inbreeding include birth defects, reduced fertility, and a whole host of immune deficiencies. Hence, Crater lions are especially vulnerable to disease, the main scourge currently being canine distemper virus.
There’s enough food in the crater to support at least 120 lions, but in the last decade the total number has rarely been more than half that. The isolation created by the crater mimics what human development is doing to lions all across the continent; it's fragmenting them into smaller and smaller prides and social groups, limiting reproductive opportunities and thus intensifying genetic abnormalities. A vicious circle if there ever was one.
Our attention gets drawn away from the lions by a truly enormous elephant adorned with gleaming white tusks nearly as long as his trunk. He looks robust and healthy enough to be a poster child for the World Wildlife Federation. He could well be the biggest animal we’ve seen so far, and I’m glad he’s on the other side of a dense herd of wildebeests.
Lawrence informs us that large white tusks are common among crater elephants because of high amounts of calcium in their diet. I’m about to ask him why that is when he suddenly drops me into my seat by throwing the Land Cruiser into gear, lurching us forward.
Lawrence knows we’re very satisfied with what we’ve seen so far, but he hasn’t forgotten his mission. While we’ve been ogling all the lions, warthogs, and bustards he has kindly located for us, Lawrence has been assiduously eyeing the basin for rhinos.
Even here, with limited territory to explore and unobstructed vistas all around, our chances aren’t good. For one thing, rhinos don’t mill about in herds. Except for mothers with babies, they live very solitary lives. For another, only about two dozen rhinos live in the crater these days. That’s up from just 15 individuals as recently as two decades ago, but, despite their slightly rising numbers, rhinos are still at greater risk of extinction than even lions or elephants. Not just in the crater, but worldwide. The black rhino is the only member of the Big Five currently on the Critically Endangered Species list, which is a special category at the top of the "regular" Endangered Species list for creatures that need to get their affairs in order because they're looking down the barrel of imminent annihilation. Along with mountain gorillas, black rhinos are higher on the list than Bengal tigers, snow leopards, and giant pandas. That’s some elite company right there.
In addition to the usual suspects of habitat loss and fragmentation, superstition is one of the rhinos' biggest threats. They’re frequently poached because many people, particularly in China and Vietnam, believe that rhino horn can do everything from revive coma patients to exorcise demons. Despite the fact that rhino horn is made of nothing more valuable or medicinal than keratin – the same protein that makes hair and fingernails – many Asian “folk healers” and other snake-oil charlatans have convinced gullible dupes that it can improve sexual performance in men, increase fertility in women, reduce fever, detoxify poisons, and cure any malady you happen to complain about to your local apothecary. The fact that it’s exotic, expensive, and hard to acquire just adds to its appeal (and cost), making it pretty much everything you’d want in a good quack remedy. Consequently, the street value of rhino horn is a little higher than gold, a little lower than pure cocaine.
That’s not as specious as it might sound. Old rhinos are assholes. They’re Hulk-strong, weigh up to 3,000 pounds, and can sprint 35 mph. They have terrible eyesight and are so mindlessly aggressive they’ve been known to charge tree trunks. Not even Don Quixote was that belligerent. Old rhinos, in fact, are generally more dangerous to their own kind than to humans and safari vehicles (which they also charge), often competing against young males for females with whom they are too old to mate successfully in the first place. Accordingly, Namibia’s government sees it as a win-win to sell a handful of rhino permits each year. Hunters remove a few otherwise obstructive individuals from the herd, and the money goes toward further conservation and restoration efforts.
But not everyone sees it that way. With fewer than 5,000 black rhinos left in the wild, many environmentalists went ballistic at news of last year’s auction, and it's not hard to see why. To give you some idea of how rapidly the black rhino population has been decimated, consider this: There were about 70,000 of them in the 1960s. That’s still way down from their numbers before European colonization, but let’s just use it as a reference point. If you were to eliminate the same percentage of U.S. citizens today as rhinos were lost in the past 50 years, you would have to erase more than 20 million Americans. At the very least, you’d need to nuke New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, and Phoenix. Maybe even San Antonio. How’s that for a dramatic analogy?
For the record, Namibia has been selling three black rhino permits per year since 2004. This is just the first time one has been sold outside the country, and that seems to be what set off the row. It’s also worth pointing out, I think, that black rhinos have been staging a very slow but steady comeback in Namibia since the country began issuing those permits ten years ago. Namibia doesn't have the money to adequately protect its rhino habitat, but many Great White Hunters do.
At the time of this writing, I don’t know if the Dallas Safari Club's hunt has actually taken place. In November of 2014, the auction's winner, professional hunting guide Corey Knowlton, hadn’t yet received permission from U.S. authorities to bring the trophy head back into the United States after the kill. If that permission is ultimately denied, the Club says it will call off the hunt and refund Knowlton’s money, in which case a geriatric rhino that would otherwise have been shot quickly will die slowly of natural causes – or be shot anyway by park rangers trying to defend other wildlife. Ironically, Knowlton might not end up being all that disappointed if the hunt gets cancelled. For the past year he has been compelled to hire full-time security for himself and his children, all of whom have been receiving death threats from people who wouldn't dream of killing a rhino.
(* Update below.)
Lawrence stops the Land Cruiser without explanation and fixes his gaze on something in the distance. After a theatrical pause, he slowly raises his arm out the window and points. Two dark dots break up the wide panorama, the amber sea of grass. The dot on the left is clearly an ostrich, betrayed by its ludicrous lollipop silhouette. The dot on the right is vexingly difficult to identify. It looks like a very large animal that's laying down. Might be a wildebeest, but it seems too big. “Probably a buffalo,” I say aloud. We’ve seen plenty of them today in exactly this position. Others in the vehicle mutter agreement, but Lawrence will have none of our doubts. “Black rhino,” he assures us confidently. “But can’t get closer.”
Rules about off-roading are much better respected here in the crater than out on the Serengeti. I have yet to see a driver take his vehicle into the grass here, not even George. Lawrence is unambiguous: This is as close as we're going to get. We’re not going off-road, and the jeep track we're on is about to veer away from the rhino – or whatever that thing is. We’re just going to have to take his word that it’s a rhino and get the best pictures we can from here. It’s disappointing. We watch for about 15 minutes, but the great beast doesn’t move except to occasionally raise and lower what seems to be its head.
Well, not today. I feel the dull ache of loss and deflation when Lawrence decides we've had enough and starts rolling the truck forward.
Roosevelt did more than his share of big game hunting. After declining to run for a second term in 1908, Teddy dusted off his pith helmet and came straight to the African plains. Ever dynamic, ever useful, ever in the service of his country, he and his brother Kermit spent a full year here, hunting and collecting specimens for the Smithsonian Institution to display in its soon-to-be-opened Natural History Museum.
While president, TR may have done more than any other American for the cause of conservation. He established the U.S. Forest Service, created the National Wildlife Refuge System, designated the first National Bird Preserve, and placed more than 230 million acres under some kind of federal protection. To his credit are 51 Federal Bird Reservations, 4 National Game Preserves, 150 National Forests, 5 National Parks, 18 National Monuments, and a partridge in a pear tree. TR famously camped for a few days in the Yosemite Wilderness with John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, and promptly thereafter granted the whole region national park status. "Bully!"
It surprises a lot of people then, to learn how much Teddy enjoyed killing wildlife. The man who rightfully called the extermination of the American buffalo a “veritable tragedy” also, with the help of his brother, shot 512 animals in a single year in Africa, including 20 rhinos, 17 lions, 11 elephants, 9 hyenas, 7 cheetahs, 3 leopards, and – you guessed it – 10 buffaloes.
I used to believe that hunters and environmentalists were political opponents. The so-called “hook and bullet” crowd, after all, pretty reliably votes Republican these days, whereas self-proclaimed environmentalists can generally be depended upon to vote Democrat. I’ve come to learn, however, that it’s not a straightforward left-right spectrum. Simply put, there are environmentalists who hunt and environmentalists who don’t. Hunters like TR, perhaps more than non-hunters, recognize the need for regulating human consumption of what Mother Nature has provided.
"We have become great because of the lavish use of our resources. But the time has come to inquire seriously what will happen when our forests are gone, when the coal, the iron, the oil, and the gas are exhausted, when the soils have still further impoverished and washed into the streams, polluting the rivers, denuding the fields and obstructing navigation."
- Theodore Roosevelt, 1908
The big game hunter who killed hundreds of animals in Africa also did more for wildlife conservation and wilderness preservation during a single term as president than most of us will ever do in a lifetime. One could make a strong argument that TR was the most environmentally-conscious individual ever to occupy the Oval Office. And yet…
All my photos from July 10, 2014 are available online.