The Veteran Naturalist

The header image was taken in July ’02 about one kilometer south of the Chobe River in the Chobe National Park in Botswana.  The park is one of the largest in Africa and home to the highest density of elephants in the world.  Elephants are both CITES I and CITES II listed endangered species; however, in southern Africa their problem is not that they are on the verge of extinction, but rather that they are so wildly successful.  And the landscape you see is the result, a graphic example of the boom and bust of elephant populations all over southern Africa.  This is what the Chobe looks like for a swath at least ten kilometers wide below the river.  In classic fashion, elephant numbers are peaking just as the habitat is about to give out.  Since the elephants are fenced in, they have nowhere to go.  They face starvation by the thousand on one of the premier sites managed for their protection.  This landscape is a stark reflection of our inability to provide proper stewardship of the environment.