Drought — but does it matter?

Last year wasn’t really a drought year. We had more or less average annual rainfall but the rains came to a halt early. It’s normal that, as the dry season goes on, the food for the herbivores here in Hwange National Park deteriorates towards the point where the animals might just as well be eating shredded cardboard — it might fill them up but it doesn’t nourish them. In most years, they will lose condition but survive — but if the dry season is prolonged, as it was by the early end of the rains in 2023, animals die. Last October and November, we saw many distressing scenes of dead and dying wildlife, mostly elephants as they are our most common large mammal and the smaller things are quickly mopped up by scavengers so they’re not as visible.

This year really is a drought year. Here are graphs for Sinamatella Camp, in the north east of the Park, where we live.

You can see from those that this year’s rains not only stopped early but were also well below average. At this time of the year, the vegetation around the Camp should look something like this…….

Instead, it already looks like this………

So, we can expect to see the same sorts of things that we saw in 2023, but worse. Probably much worse. It will be the deaths of elephants that will make the news. We have so many elephants in Hwange that we think of them very differently from the way a lot of people elsewhere in the world do and we know that losing some is natural and not a disaster. Internationally though, the view is that elephants are so endangered that we can’t afford to lose any at all and, when we do lose some, it makes the news. Don’t misunderstand me, we work hard to preserve our elephants and we don’t want to be surrounded by the sight (and smell!) of dead ones but we know they are just the visible sign of many other awful things that are taking place and we don’t worry about them and forget everything else.

So, let’s look at some of that ‘everything else’, starting at the bottom of the food chain with the plants themselves. Late in the season when the elephants are hungry and thirsty, they spend a lot of time near whatever water is left and the plants suffer. This is damage to what was once dense Combretum scrub…….

Of course, the lack of rain itself may be a catastrophe for some species. Common weeds in the Camp are Bidens schimperi and Calostephane divaricata.

In a good year the sides of the path from our house down to the workshop are lined with them and their golden flowers but this year there have been none. None at all. There were only a few last year so will there be any viable seeds left if we get rain next season? I hope so, but maybe not.

I could make similar comments about a whole host of flowers –Tridax, Vernonia, Solanum, Tithonia, Tribulus, — they all failed, some totally, some partially. And, if the flowers failed, what about a step up in the food chain and the insects that feed on them?

Vernonia flowers are especially loved by insects. In this picture, from June 2019 there are two butterflies, a beetle, a fly and a bee……. all on one small head of flowers — and that isn’t unusual.

We don’t have solid data to show that insect numbers are down this year but the evidence of our own eyes is enough. We’ve visited some of the few Vernonia patches that managed to flower and there is hardly an insect to be seen. We spend a lot of time on the veranda of our house and as we eat our evening meal we usually see dozens of insects clinging to the wall where they have been attracted by the lights. They can be a nuisance, diving into food and drink — but not this year because there aren’t any. And without the insects, what about the creatures that eat them?

Well, the geckos that used to feed on the insects on the veranda wall have gone. They’re probably still alive and, being reptiles, they can survive with reduced food intake. The insect-eating birds are another matter. Unlike the geckos, they can’t just crawl into a hole in the wall and wait for the rains (and the insects) to come back, they have to find something to eat. We’ve seen the result with the pair of Red-billed hornbills that breeds in a nest box near our house. When hornbills breed, the female lays her eggs in a suitable hollow tree (or nest box) then the entrance hole is walled up with mud and droppings, leaving a small slot through which the male feeds her, and her chicks once they hatch. Records show that female Red billed hornbills are normally in the nest for a maximum of forty eight days but on average forty five days. This year though, with food hard to come by, the chicks have presumably grown more slowly than usual because our female was walled up for forty nine days — well into the high end of the recorded figures. She and her mate are now both feeding the chicks and, judging by the long intervals between feeding visits, finding it a difficult task.

I could continue up the food chain, with similar things to say at each step, until, of course, we reached the carnivores and scavengers — they like the drought, their food is so much easier to come by!

The point is surely already made though — we have a disaster on our hands

…….. But do we? There is another way of looking at it.

Yes, we have a drought, yes, wildlife will die, but surely this isn’t the first time there has been a drought in this part of the world. Surely, in the thousands of years that this particular ecosystem has been around, there have been many droughts — and no doubt some of them have been worse than the one we are living through now. Nevertheless, it’s all still there; disasters must have happened but the populations of plants, insects, birds, herbivores — all the Park’s wildlife — have recovered, and surely they will recover again this time. That’s a very seductive way of looking at things. It leaves us in the happy position of being able to shrug our shoulders and say ‘it’s all natural, it’s none of our business’……….And here again, and for the last time, I have to change tack and say ‘but is it?’ and my answer is, most emphatically, yes it is our business because we are responsible for a large part of the problem, and we also have the capacity to make it worse.

Leaving aside the whole question of man-made climate change, the big lie in the ‘don’t worry, it’s all natural’ narrative, is that it most certainly isn’t all natural. Hwange National Park is wonderful but it isn’t natural. The wildlife areas of North West Matabeleland, where the Park is situated, are surrounded by people. There is no unrestricted free movement for wildlife. Worse, the crops have failed in those poor farming communities around us so some of the people will look to poaching in the Park as a means of survival and that will add to the wildlife losses through starvation and thirst.

Also, much of the Park has no natural perennial water but Man has drilled boreholes, installed pumps and created artificial water sources that have allowed the animal populations to grow well beyond what is ‘natural’. That’s been part of my job for the past fifteen years so I’m ‘guilty’ there — and well aware of it!

So, finally, what do we do? As is so often the case, the answer lies between the extremes, so it may be sensible — but it isn’t all that exciting! On the one hand we should accept that any losses we see this year will probably be made up in future years so there’s no need to panic, but on the other hand we must also accept that we are partly responsible for the mess and we must continue to do the good things we do for the Park, like water supplies and avoid the bad ones such as unrestricted poaching. We’re still going to see plenty of this…….

But that doesn’t mean we haven’t tried, it just shows that when it comes right down to it, we’re not as all-powerful as some people think, and nature, in the form of the drought in this case, still rules.