The 300-acre African Habitat is made up of three areas, all have beautiful valleys, creeks, hills and secret little gullies. All three also have lots of magnificent trees, both conifers and deciduous, and offer our African elephants at the Sanctuary the unique opportunity to freely exercise their natural, wild instincts to browse and create savannas.
Currently, Tange and Flora have access to two of these areas. One is a 10-acre section near the Barn, where at one time you could not even see into the Valley because of all the trees. Today, it looks like a bomb has exploded. (Their names were Zula, Tange and Flora!) It's a healthy site to see though, because that means the Girls have constantly been on the move and eating what they like to their heart's content. The second area is about 50 acres that includes the Plateau and Pipeline, places where they have knocked down so many trees it's hard to keep the roads clear. This area also includes a very lush Valley where they spend a lot of time, and you can often hear trees popping down in this Valley.
The third area is approximately 240 acres that has only been partly explored by Tange and Zula in years past, but because of Flora's more robust fencing requirements, she has not yet toured this area. We would like to change that, but first need to rebuild the fencing to Flora's standards. Plans are currently underway to apply for some grants in hopes we can get this project underwritten soon, allowing us to open up more areas of habitat to both Flora and Tange once new fence construction is complete.
On average, the Girls knock down and eat at least four trees a day (and who knows how many at night!). The African Girls are resourceful and will eat the entire tree, starting with the tender tips of the Pines, the roots of the Hickories as well as stripping and eating the bark off of all of them.
In most areas, the only trees that are left standing are the ones sitting on the side of a very steep hill or in a deep gully—we even have an area where the Girls have eaten off all the tops of the trees and left the rest, giving it a very manufactured look. Thanks to their tireless landscaping efforts, Africa is being transformed into a very nice, very flat Plain, full of all types of grasses, weeds, and of course, 100 to 300-gallon mud holes.
Ordinarily these new greenways sound ideal to sustain them, but Africans prefer to have trees in their diet. Basic math tells us that at the rate they are going, with the exception of the trees growing on steep slopes the elephants aren't able to easily navigate, they could eventually de-forest almost the entire 300 acres. When this new fencing project is complete, our goal is to be able to rotate them into different areas of the habitat at different times of the year, allowing new forest growth to preserve the mainstay of their diets, while giving them new areas to explore that are virtually untouched.
2010-06-30
