Hunting for elusive “ghost elephants”
Deep in the Angolan highlands lies a new species of elephant. Ecologist and ornithologist Steve Boyes has been searching for this elusive flock for years and the story of his journey is the focus of Ghost Elephantsa haunting and evocative documentary directed by Werner Herzog. The film debuted at the Venice International Film Festival last summer and is now coming to National Geographic and Disney+.
It may seem unusual for an ornithologist to embark on a quest for distant pachyderms, but for Boyes the connection is entirely natural. He grew up in South Africa and wanted nothing more than to become an explorer, just like the people whose stories he read about every month in National geographic review. “I grew up waiting for the magazine to arrive; I wanted the cards,” Boyes told Ars. “These would become my garden, or the field beyond, or the river – wild places imagined and real.”
Boyes’ parents frequently took him and his brother into nature, including in Botswana and Tanzania. “We used to fit into baboon troops and march with impalas,” Boyes said. Although his brother was afraid of elephants, Boyes walked with them from a young age. Ghost Elephants contains beautiful underwater footage of elephant feet trudging through water and elephants swimming sideways, behavior that matches Boyes’ own experiences with animals. Under the right circumstances, if they don’t feel threatened, elephants “will come swimming around you and with you and interact with you,” he said. “So elephants have always fascinated me.”
As an adult, Boyes conducted his doctoral research on Meyer’s parrot in the Okavango Delta, home to the largest population of elephants in the world. They shared a sort of symbiotic relationship with the parrots. “Every tree the parrots fed on, the elephants fed on,” he said. “Elephants created nesting cavities for parrots by disturbing trees.”
