Bull elephant, Zakouma National Park, Chad
Zakouma is an unusual park when compared to the better-known national parks of East or Southern Africa, because on normal game drives through the park, you simply don’t see elephants, except for the handful of bulls, that hang around the airstrip and the park HQ in the area of the park that is actually called Zakouma, elsewhere you just don’t see them, not unless you are actively looking for them and know in advance where they are. You won’t drive around a corner and find a small herd feeding beside the road as you might in a park like say Ruaha in Tanzania, to understand why this is the case, you need to know the tragic history of Zakouma’s elephants.
For roughly 6 months of the year between June and November Zakouma National Park is almost entirely inundated with floodwaters, at this time elephants would often disperse into the surrounding area of what is now the Salamat Faunal Reserve. During this time Arab horsemen from the Darfur region of neighbouring Sudan would come to hunt the elephants, as they had done for perhaps several hundred years. Traditionally a group of up to 20 horsemen armed with lances would charge a herd aiming to separate out one of the elephants, picking one with good tusks. A single horseman would then ride in front of this elephant to draw its attention and get it to pursue him, allowing the other men to ride in and spear it from behind with their lances. They would aim for the elephant’s hamstrings in its hind legs, these if severed would bring the animal down and ensure it could not get up again. Huge numbers of elephants were killed this way and in response the surviving herds in the region, have learned that at the first sign of horsemen, their best defence is to bunch up into tight groups, to ensure that no individual can be separated out.
Today this is no defence, the horsemen are Janjaweed militiamen and members of the Sudanese armed forces and they come not with the lances used by their ancestors, but with AK47s, belt-fed machine guns and rocket propelled grenades. This habit of bunching up into a single large herd, has meant that the poachers can easily kill 50-60 elephants in a single attack by simply machine gunning the terrified animals as they try to escape. In 2005 an aerial count found 3,885 elephants in Zakouma and the surrounding area, in under a decade the population was reduced to just 430 and had stopped breeding due to the constant stress. Since African Parks took over Zakouma the poaching has been almost entirely stopped and the elephants are breeding again, they have not lost an elephant to poaching in 6 years at the last count in 2021 the population had reached 636.
Zakouma had become famous for what was often described as the largest elephant herd in Africa, simply because the majority of the park’s elephants were congregating together in a huge unnatural mega-herd, that would include bulls that would normally have been pushed out. Besides sticking together for protection, the elephants also like to remain in the thick bush and woodlands, avoiding open areas of the park, this is why you just don’t see them when driving around. Just in the last couple of years the elephant herd has started to split into several big herds instead of just one, but they still stay deep in the bush, doing their best to avoid people entirely.
The best chance of seeing them is at the Bahr Salamat, where they have to come every day to drink, if you can anticipate which part of the river they will come to, and position yourself so that they won’t be aware of your presence, you can have an amazing elephant experience. When we tried to find them, despite receiving tracking information from the park HQ, (some of the elephants are wearing tracking collars) and having a ranger to assist us, we were not lucky, instead of seeing the whole herd come to drink where we had chosen to wait, we just saw two single bulls. The herd did come to drink but at a different stretch of the Salamat, not too far away, unfortunately we missed them.
Bull elephant, Zakouma National Park, Chad
Zakouma is an unusual park when compared to the better-known national parks of East or Southern Africa, because on normal game drives through the park, you simply don’t see elephants, except for the handful of bulls, that hang around the airstrip and the park HQ in the area of the park that is actually called Zakouma, elsewhere you just don’t see them, not unless you are actively looking for them and know in advance where they are. You won’t drive around a corner and find a small herd feeding beside the road as you might in a park like say Ruaha in Tanzania, to understand why this is the case, you need to know the tragic history of Zakouma’s elephants.
For roughly 6 months of the year between June and November Zakouma National Park is almost entirely inundated with floodwaters, at this time elephants would often disperse into the surrounding area of what is now the Salamat Faunal Reserve. During this time Arab horsemen from the Darfur region of neighbouring Sudan would come to hunt the elephants, as they had done for perhaps several hundred years. Traditionally a group of up to 20 horsemen armed with lances would charge a herd aiming to separate out one of the elephants, picking one with good tusks. A single horseman would then ride in front of this elephant to draw its attention and get it to pursue him, allowing the other men to ride in and spear it from behind with their lances. They would aim for the elephant’s hamstrings in its hind legs, these if severed would bring the animal down and ensure it could not get up again. Huge numbers of elephants were killed this way and in response the surviving herds in the region, have learned that at the first sign of horsemen, their best defence is to bunch up into tight groups, to ensure that no individual can be separated out.
Today this is no defence, the horsemen are Janjaweed militiamen and members of the Sudanese armed forces and they come not with the lances used by their ancestors, but with AK47s, belt-fed machine guns and rocket propelled grenades. This habit of bunching up into a single large herd, has meant that the poachers can easily kill 50-60 elephants in a single attack by simply machine gunning the terrified animals as they try to escape. In 2005 an aerial count found 3,885 elephants in Zakouma and the surrounding area, in under a decade the population was reduced to just 430 and had stopped breeding due to the constant stress. Since African Parks took over Zakouma the poaching has been almost entirely stopped and the elephants are breeding again, they have not lost an elephant to poaching in 6 years at the last count in 2021 the population had reached 636.
Zakouma had become famous for what was often described as the largest elephant herd in Africa, simply because the majority of the park’s elephants were congregating together in a huge unnatural mega-herd, that would include bulls that would normally have been pushed out. Besides sticking together for protection, the elephants also like to remain in the thick bush and woodlands, avoiding open areas of the park, this is why you just don’t see them when driving around. Just in the last couple of years the elephant herd has started to split into several big herds instead of just one, but they still stay deep in the bush, doing their best to avoid people entirely.
The best chance of seeing them is at the Bahr Salamat, where they have to come every day to drink, if you can anticipate which part of the river they will come to, and position yourself so that they won’t be aware of your presence, you can have an amazing elephant experience. When we tried to find them, despite receiving tracking information from the park HQ, (some of the elephants are wearing tracking collars) and having a ranger to assist us, we were not lucky, instead of seeing the whole herd come to drink where we had chosen to wait, we just saw two single bulls. The herd did come to drink but at a different stretch of the Salamat, not too far away, unfortunately we missed them.