Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chicago, including the two elephants in the center of the museum, one with a missing tusk.
They were collected during the hunting expedition that President Teddy Roosevelt took part in
with his son Kermit (see Africa Trails). Indeed, one of the elephants Roosevelt shot was
supposed to be in the exhibit in New York but was not included by Carl Akeley in his Africa
exhibit because it was too small. Akeley, after collecting mountain gorillas for the exhibit,
went on to lobby the Belgian government to create a game reserve for the gorillas, which
happened (King Albert later renamed Virunga), and it was there among the gorillas he died
from probable malaria, ironically a disease that likely jumped species from gorillas to humans.
He was also instrumental in helping Martin and Osa Johnston in their early photography and
filming careers of wildlife. His second wife Delia went on to spend time among the Pygmies in
the Ituri forest supported by the Bronx Zoo which had originally had a Pygmy man, Ota Benga,
brought there by WMJ Hornaday. Although the Angola/Etosha elephants are large, their ivory
formation is not as good—likely due to a shortage of minerals.
When I was in the military our commanding officer for the Rundu sector wanted to go on a
“Jolie Patrollie” (Happy Jolly Patrol) to look for desert elephants in the Kaokoveld, Skeleton
Coast, and northern parts of the now Namib Naukluft Game reserve - this was between
various battles that were going on in Angola! We set off to hunt (to see) the elephants with a
convoy of five Land Rovers, several Unimogs, and some large Samel 6 wheel drive military
trucks loaded with supplies and “troopies” for protection. Our trip through the Etosha Game
Reserve was sublime. Recent unusual rains brought the desert to blossom with wild flowers as
far as the eye could see, new grass, and the plains were covered with animals in every
direction, particularly zebras, attracted to the desert blooming. We then carried on to
Sesfontein in the middle of the desert looking for the elephants. It was here that I had to call in
a Puma helicopter to evacuate one the lawyers on the trip who had too much to drink and
developed an acute rigid abdomen. It was either acute pancreatitis, a perforated ulcer or
severe gastritis to go with the symptoms and signs, but I could not keep him with us under the
circumstances. It later turned out to be the latter.
In the old Sesfontein fort I came across the remaining horns from a kudu that had been
dragged there by a hyena. Sesfontein was an abandoned after the German occupation and
attempts to eliminate the local population in German South West Africa for farming. The
Herero, Namaqua, and San Bushmen fled but many were killed (80% of the Herero 80,000
population, 50% of the Namaqua) and some were captured and sent to Shark Island, a
notorious concentration camp on the coast where most died or were experimented on. The
roots of human experimentation and racial research started here in German South West Africa.
Francis Galton, Darwin's first cousin, who was obsessed with measurement and statistics as
related by Bernstein, spent time in Namibia during the mid-1850s examining the Herero and
Nama and wrote about “eugenics,” a notorious concept of racial research and breeding that
drew Eugen Fischer's interest in German South West Africa. His star pupil was Josef
Mengele.
We found desert elephant spoor in a dried out water reservoir with deep dug pits, but never
spotted them. At the time in the early 1980s there were only about 80 left. [During the drought
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