It is late on a January afternoon in the middle of South Sudan\u2019s dry season, and the landscape, pricked with stubby acacias, is hazy with smoke from people burning the grasslands to encourage new growth. Even from the perspective of a single-engine ultralight aircraft, we are warned it will be hard to spot the last elephant in Badingilo national park, a protected area covering nearly 9,000 sq km (3,475 sq miles).<\/p>\n
Technology helps \u2013 the 20-year-old bull elephant wears a GPS collar that pings coordinates every hour. The animal\u2019s behaviour patterns also help; Badingilo\u2019s last elephant is so lonely that it moves with a herd of giraffes.<\/p>\n
Fifty years ago, life for elephants in this part of Africa<\/a> was very different. In the early 1970s, an English ecologist called Dr Murray Watson crisscrossed the skies of Sudan in a bush plane to measure wildlife populations. While Watson\u2019s methodology wasn\u2019t as reliable as modern counts, he estimated there were about 133,500 elephants in what is now South Sudan.<\/p>\n Today, the country\u2019s known population of elephants is down to about 5% of what it was 50 years ago, says Mike Fay, a US conservationist who has spent 45 years documenting and securing wildlife populations in the Sahel and central Africa.<\/p>\n The last remaining elephant in Badingilo national park, South Sudan<\/p>\n Meanwhile, in southern Africa, the opposite problem exists. In parts of the Kavango Zambezi transfrontier conservation area, or Kaza \u2013 a contiguous protected landscape encompassing swathes of Botswana, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe<\/a> (and part of Angola) \u2013 law enforcement and conservation work has been so successful that local people struggle with too many elephants, leading to an increase in human-wildlife conflict.<\/p>\n The problem is especially pressing on Kaza\u2019s eastern edge, where people and pachyderms are being squeezed into tighter land parcels without the ecological resources to sustain them. Governments, communities and conservationists debate whether the elephants should be culled for food, hunted to generate community income, fenced or translocated.<\/p>\n To document the challenge in different parts of Africa, I teamed up with photographer Tom Parker to follow this story in the north \u2013 in South Sudan, Garamba national park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Gambella national park in Ethiopia \u2013 and in the south: Zimbabwe, Botswana and Zambia.<\/p>\n A herd of elephants in Zakouma national park, Chad. Zakouma is one of Africa\u2019s most significant success stories: no elephants have been poached since 2016, making this herd one of Central Africa\u2019s largestToo few elephants: South Sudan<\/p>\n In the African Parks office in Juba, the capital of South Sudan, Fay looks over a map of the protected area made up of Badingilo national park, Boma national park and the Jonglei landscape. \u201cIt\u2019s mind boggling how big it is,\u201d he says. Fay is African Parks\u2019 landscape coordinator for the Great Nile migration landscape. The NGO has a 10-year agreement with the government to manage 150,000 sq km of land \u2013 a region about the size of Nepal.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is the greatest conservation opportunity on Earth, but also one of the greatest challenges that any conservation organisation has ever taken on,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n The Great Nile Migration involves four species of antelope which move seasonally across the vast grasslands between South Sudan and into south-western Ethiopia<\/p>\n Optimism about that potential has been boosted by the discovery in 2023 that this ecosystem hosts the largest land mammal migration<\/a> left on the planet, dominated by white-eared kob. The migration has endured despite Africa\u2019s longest-running civil war<\/a>. But other fauna have not fared so well \u2013 including the region\u2019s elephants.<\/p>\n Wildlife expert Mike Fay in the African Parks office in Juba<\/p>\n A hunter in Boma\u2019s Maruwa village says he last saw an elephant four years ago. The last one he killed was two years before that. \u201cI was hungry,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n The hunter made some money from the ivory \u2013 $50 (\u00a337) for each tusk, divided between five men. Our conversation draws in bystanders: occasional goldminers, ex-soldiers, a teacher who has not been paid for a year. \u201cWe don\u2019t think [the elephants] are dead,\u201d says one of the men, \u201cbut they\u2019re going to faraway places.\u201d<\/p>\n The hunter says that if he encountered an elephant again, he\u2019d kill it: \u201cFor food. We\u2019re really poor. We have nothing. No one standing here has a job. All we can do is survive.\u201d<\/p>\n Cattle herders belonging to the pastoralist Murle people in Boma, South Sudan, a region where elephants are now rarely sighted<\/p>\n In another village in Badingilo, African Parks\u2019 community officer, David Liwaya \u2013 a refugee from the civil war who returned to South Sudan from Kenya to work in conservation \u2013 puts the debate into stark perspective: \u201cIt\u2019s really difficult. Who cares about an elephant when you\u2019re losing your brothers?\u201d But giving up on the future isn\u2019t an option, he says.<\/p>\n At the end of 2025, 11 months after our visit, news comes from the African Parks team: Badingilo\u2019s last elephant has been killed by suspected poachers along with one of its giraffe companions.<\/p>\n Too many elephants?: ZimbabweAn artificially-filled watering hole in Hwange national park, where vultures gather around an elephant carcass while others come to drink<\/p>\n About 3,200 km (2,000 miles) away, outside Victoria Falls international airport in Zimbabwe, a road sign warns of elephants on the move. The road passes through a township called Mkhosana. Among the tightly packed homes, stories of human-wildlife conflict are ubiquitous \u2013 a situation aggravated by climate breakdown as elephants search for food and water in a worsening drought.<\/p>\n Fransica Sibanda, whose husband was killed by an elephant<\/p>\n Fransica Sibanda was recently widowed by an elephant, which trampled her husband yards from their home. \u201cI now live in fear,\u201d she says; \u201cthe park needs to put in a fence, or chase the elephants out.\u201d A neighbour, Ireene Nyathi, describes watching a man being picked up by an elephant and crushed against her wall: \u201cI think the elephant should be found and shot,\u201d says Nyathi.<\/p>\n \u201cTourists don\u2019t see this,\u201d says Miriam Esther, a local water development coordinator: \u201cThey just go to the hotels, see Vic Falls, photograph the animals.\u201d<\/p>\n Farther south, near Zimbabwe\u2019s Hwange national park, a herd of 12 elephants has come into drink in front of the swimming pool of the lodge where we\u2019re staying. To the right, another herd is heading towards the setting sun \u2013 a perfect marketing image for safari tourism. But this is a romantic version of reality. On an evening game drive, we encounter a juvenile elephant\u2019s corpse, its grey skin lying in the dust like a castoff winter coat. Then the bodies of two more adult elephants, their bellies pulsing with maggots.<\/p>\n A park ranger tries to retrieve ivory from a dead elephant. This is to ensure the tusks are not harvested from dead elephants for illegal salesSafari guide Robert Dube, in Zimbabwe\u2019s Hwange national park. The landscape behind shows the damage that elephants inflict searching for food<\/p>\n Hwange\u2019s dense elephant population is the result of decades of conservation successes, but also an ecosystem out of balance. About 60,000 of Zimbabwe\u2019s 100,000 elephants come through Hwange in the dry season, which is about twice the broader region\u2019s capacity, says Zimbabwe-based safari guide and conservationist Rob Janisch.<\/p>\n When Hwange was first created as a game reserve in 1928, colonial officials put in artificially pumped water holes in a naturally arid area \u2013 but because of this intervention, as well as expanding human settlements, the herds aren\u2019t migrating enough for the ecosystem to replenish. \u201cWhile this was seen as a conservation necessity at the time, hindsight would prove otherwise,\u201d says Janisch.<\/p>\n In late 2024, Zimbabwe and Namibian authorities<\/a> announced significant new elephant culls \u2013 often involving big-game hunters who bring much-needed revenue. Botswana floated reintroducing this strategy too, to global outcry. Many local people who don\u2019t derive their incomes from the wildlife economy say outsiders don\u2019t understand the pressures. Godwill Ruona, a taxidermist in Victoria Falls, calls elephants \u201cthe heartbeat of the bush\u201d, but says there are too many of them. \u201cYou can\u2019t sit in Paris and tell us what is happening in Zimbabwe.\u201d<\/p>\n This elephant protection fence pictured at night at a farm in Botswana, is a combination of solar-powered electric fencing and \u2018disco\u2019 lights to deter elephants from crop-raiding<\/p>\n Some solutions are having an effect. Deterrents include whips that sound like gunfire, bonfires, \u201cchilli fences\u201d<\/a> (the pungent chemicals irritate elephants\u2019 sense of smell). Communities such as Ngamo are investing in high-voltage rhino fencing to separate the park and villagers.<\/p>\n While this helps on a local level, it doesn\u2019t get around the fact elephants still need space to move. In some cases, relocation is possible \u2013 in 2016, African Parks moved 500 elephants<\/a> hundreds of miles between two parks in Malawi, the biggest in-country elephant translocation ever undertaken \u2013 but with conservation NGO budgets being cut across the continent, doing so at scale is challenging.<\/p>\n None of this is to diminish the pockets of well-managed landscapes that have had remarkable successes, or the work of heroic grassroots conservationists chipping away to facilitate human-wildlife coexistence.<\/p>\n Each of these victories matter. And while there is no single solution for Africa\u2019s elephants, the vast differences between Kaza and South Sudan also share common ground \u2013 that in an age of mass extinction, failure isn\u2019t an option.<\/p>\n Travel for this reporting was supported by Michael Lorentz, Rob Janisch and the Safarious Fund<\/a><\/p>\n Find more age of extinction coverage here<\/a>, and follow the biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston<\/a> and Patrick Greenfield<\/a> in the Guardian app for more nature coverage<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It is late on a January afternoon in the middle of South Sudan\u2019s dry season, and the landscape,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":247096,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[61,60,82,263],"class_list":{"0":"post-247095","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-ie","9":"tag-ireland","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247095","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=247095"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247095\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/247096"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=247095"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=247095"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=247095"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}