Officials find rare elephant in South Africa's Knysna forest
Copyright 2000 Deutsche Presse-Agentur
October 3, 2000
Officials of South Africa's Forestry Department have photographed a rare elephant in the Gouna Forest near the southern Cape town of Knysna, the department said Tuesday.
The discovery is viewed as extremely important as forestry officials believed the only remaining Knysa elephant was an elderly cow of about 54 years and with a single tusk. She was photographed six years ago during a survey of the forest spanning almost 50,000 hectares, while the new photographs show an elephant with a left tusk.
The Kruger National Park's scientific services section for large herbivores confirmed that the elephant in the latest photographs was not the elephant photographed in 1994, Sapa news agency reported.
Scientist Ian Whyte of the Kruger National Park said studies on tusk growth ruled out the possibility that the old cow could have re- grown a left tusk. He said the head an body shapes of the elephant recently photographed were "somewhat characteristic of a young bull".
Area forest manager Michael Peter said routine monitoring of the Knysna elephants would continue to assess the condition of the known elephants and to establish whether there more elephants in the dense forest.
He said the ecological implications on the forests were minimal as the low number of elephants had a limited effect on the foreign and fynbos (shrubbery) ecosystems.
The Knysna elephants are the last of the most southern elephants on the African continent, representing a remnant of large populations which occupied the Cape in the 17th Century.
In 1876 it was estimated that 400 giants roamed the Knysna forests but in 1983 only four were recorded and in 1994 only one. This led to the introduction of young elephants from the Kruger National Park but the attempt was unsuccessful because the elephants found the surrounding farms more habitable than the forest, causing extensive damage.
The were later removed to a nearby game reserve.