The news was frustrating: the team had been feeding the elephants all week to encourage them into a more accessible area, but the night before they had migrated back into the thick bush in the mountains. They were totally inaccessible by road so we would be completely reliant on the skill of the helicopter pilots to locate them and then drive them out of the mountains to a more approachable area where we could bring in the crane and flatbed trailers to load them. The fear was that because the elephants had already been exposed to helicopters several times they might just ignore them, staying hidden and inaccessible. If that happened the whole operation would have to be abandoned and rearranged at vast extra expense with further coordination headaches. No wonder Michelle looked tense.
As if on cue, a gentle humming suddenly caught our ear, growing slowly louder as its source became visible. Both helicopters came into view flying in tandem, one in front of the other, first Gerry in his little R22, followed by Jacques in his bigger R44.
Produced by the Robinson Helicopter Company, these were the two models of choice in wildlife work, and I had seen them both in action. The R44, designed in 1992, was a four-seater helicopter, more stable and sturdy, but less manoeuvrable than its older brother, the two-seater R22, designed nearly twenty years earlier. The R22 was great for herding animals – it could come in very low, and keep up with the jinking, weaving and direction change of even the quickest antelope – but the R44 was the better craft for darting. The vet could sit behind the pilot and follow his line of sight as they came upon the animal, and the R44 would hold more steadily against the wind for the shot.
They circled several times looking for a safe landing spot, but with electricity cables running above us and trees surrounding the area there didn’t seem an obvious location. Jacques settled for somewhere on the other side of the farm buildings, but Gerry opted for a small clearing among a collection of macadamia trees, 20 metres from us. It was a tiny spot that in no way seemed large enough for a helicopter to fit through, but with pinpoint precision, propeller blades only a foot or two away from the branches, Gerry brought his R22 down. Johan and his capture team arrived shortly after the helicopters. They had parked the flatbed trailers and crane at the entrance to the farm.
With the whole team assembled, the plan was discussed. The GPS coordinates of the elephants’ current location were given to Gerry and Jacques, who discussed their plan of approach while Ben, Silke and I sorted through our equipment. Ben would be darting them from Jacques’s helicopter, Silke and I would then monitor them until Ben joined us, and once loaded onto their respective trailers we would each travel with an elephant, to monitor and maintain its anaesthetic for the three-hour journey. We would be using a drug called Etorphine as the main anaesthetic, a highly potent and extremely dangerous opioid and the most feared drug in veterinary medicine. A few drops injected into a human, in an open wound, in the eye or in the mouth, would be fatal without administering the reversal agent. Depending on the depth of anaesthesia and the size of the animal, a mere 0.2 or 0.3 ml injected into an ear vein every twenty minutes was all that was required to keep a 3-tonne elephant asleep.
I had worked with Etorphine before, but never quite like this; I would be riding on a flatbed trailer across bumpy, bouncy tracks trying to maintain my balance by wedging myself between the elephant’s tusks while attempting to draw up a dose of Etorphine that would easily kill me if I accidentally injected myself. The thought alone made me perspire nervously. It was going to require all my concentration and focus to keep the elephant asleep and not myself. It was probably best to lay off the coffee; I didn’t want to risk a case of the shakes.
With their equipment checked and a plan in place, Ben and Jacques headed to the R44, while Gerry returned to his R22. Moments later the two helicopters were airborne, mere specks in the sky as they ventured to the mountains in search of the three elephants. The rest of us loaded into our respective vehicles and made for the edge of the dense bush that surrounded the base of this mountain region. The plan was to bring the elephants down to this area to dart them, but even if it worked, we would still have to use a JCB to clear a path through the bush for the trailers. Once loaded, the trailers would be exiting across three fields to join the main track out of the farm. These were each about 100 acres, one of tobacco, one of potatoes and the third a recently ploughed fallow field. With each trailer laden with an elephant, getting stuck was a real possibility. Once out of the farm, the journey would take us onto the main road to Hoedspruit, 10 miles away, through the town, and then onto the arterial road (speed limit 70 mph) for 12 miles, before turning off to the game reserve where we would have another fifteen-minute journey to the airfield, where they would then be unloaded and woken up. There were going to be challenges every step of the way, and to list the whole host of things that could potentially go wrong would be paralysing.
Once we were all in place, it became another waiting game, only this time we could gauge some of what was going on by watching the helicopters in the distance scouring the forest below them. Despite the GPS coordinates that Michelle had given them, the elephants seemed elusive among the dense flora. Back and forth the two helicopters went, working together like a pair of collie dogs combing the Welsh hills for sheep, but after half an hour they still hadn’t located them. It dawned on me how difficult the task would have been without one of them being collared: a needle in a haystack, utterly impossible.
Gerry landed briefly to recheck Michelle’s map and confirm their current location and then was gone again, but this time they had more success. Reporting back, Gerry informed us that they were at the bottom of a ravine by a stream that ran down from the mountain. As we watched from a distance the R22 disappeared as Gerry took it down into the ravine in an attempt to get this small bachelor herd moving. From our vantage point a mile away it was impossible to know how dangerous the manoeuvre was, but Jacques said afterwards that there wasn’t enough room for the R44 to do it. Just another day in the office for a wildlife helicopter pilot.
The manoeuvre worked and word came back that the elephants were on the move following the stream down the mountain. Gerry said afterwards that the animals were clearly familiar with the route, and so he knew his best chance of keeping them moving was to let them travel this path at their own pace, only occasionally intervening with gentle encouragement. His technique worked well and with Jacques now flanking him on the right, the elephants maintained a steady pace down the mountain in our direction. Most of the fears for the job had centred on this first part of the operation: getting the elephants to an area where they could be darted and accessed relatively easily. It had gone incredibly well. Now it was time for the relocation.
‘The first one’s darted,’ Jacques’s voice crackled across the radio. ‘Stand by, we’re trying to keep the group together.’
Even without hearing that message, an onlooker would have known something had changed. A frenzy descended around the helicopters as their course changed. No longer travelling at a slow, steady directional pace, they were now nipping back and forth circling an area no bigger than a couple of hundred metres in diameter. Meanwhile Johan signalled to his team to get ready, as we jumped onto the back of the truck. I would take the first elephant.