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We have been walking for nearly a month, moving camp every day, documenting the distribution of forest elephants, giants hidden behind the trees, within a 150-mile swath of Ndoki Forest. We’ve seen so much on this trek in northern Republic of Congo: huge trails left by the giants’ soft feet on the banks of fast-flowing, tannin-brown rivers; massive trees, some nearly 10 feet in diameter, bursting through the canopy 150 feet overhead; secret forest clearings carved out by the elephants’ search for minerals in the soil; and occasionally, a large, gray, shadowy form moving silently, screened by the vegetation. We have seen the forest change from a dark, tangled mess of vines and knee-deep mud, to a diverse terra firma dominated by impressive fruit trees with dense canopies that plunge the forest floor into shadow, to an open canopy with a thick understory of herbs.

Now we are walking in yet another type of forest, one with bright red, iron-rich soil. This landscape began as soon as we crossed the crest that divides the Sangha and Ubangi watersheds, two huge tributaries of the Congo River. Majestic trees—Tryplochiton schleroxylon, Terminalia superba, and Cieba pentandra—are interspersed with those the giants love to eat. Beautiful, weeping Duboscia macrocarpa are so common their fluted trunks seem to hold up the entire canopy like the pillars of a medieval cathedral. Anonidium mannii, slightly smaller than the rest, with soft velvety bark, has shed pineapple-like fruits that litter the forest floor. Neat piles of their seeds, sucked dry of pulp, lie everywhere. Around each pile is the imprint of a “bottom,” like a halo—evidence that gorillas and chimpanzees were sitting among the fruits and feasting.

The sun dapples through the leaves, the rich smell of fresh elephant dung fills our nostrils, and the forest seethes with life. We are in the giants’ undisturbed heartland, and the closest thing to paradise on Earth I have ever experienced. Still, the giants have not shown themselves.

Finally, we reach a place that takes us to another level of wonder . . . a giant of a different kind, a tree beyond words. The Pygmies call it “Banga,” and scientists identify it as Autranella congolensis. This specimen is maybe 40 feet in circumference and 215 feet high. At the top of its trunk spread massive limbs that support an enormous crown. The ground beneath is bare, denuded of vegetation by the combined activity of just about every species of ground herbivore in the forest. From elephants to ants, they come to feed on the tons of fleshy fruit the tree produces each year. Half a dozen elephant trails converge at the tree. The Pygmies’ stunned murmurs and headshaking reveal that even they are moved.

“We’ve GOT to camp under this tree,” I exclaim. In an instant, backpacks drop in agreement. “Campament Banga” is born.
 
That night, after the obligatory smoked fish and manioc supper, lying in my tent under the tree’s strong branches, I reflect that this giant tree was planted by another forest giant. Perhaps 1,000 years ago, a forest elephant stopped here and dropped a pile of dung that contained a small, hard seed. That seed sprouted a tiny pair of green cotyledons and a white root that took hold in the same ground on which I lie. The insignificant little plant struggled for light and nutrients, deep in the second largest tropical forest on Earth. It waited patiently for a shaft of sunlight, and when it arrived, the little tree grew. Like some weird form of time travel, this tree signified that the long-dead medieval elephant gardener is still with us, alive in the gnarled and scarred Banga towering over our heads.

When the seed that became “our” Banga was sown, several million elephants lived in Africa: savanna elephants in the open habitats, and forest elephants in the tropical jungles of West and Central Africa. When our Banga was a sapling, forest elephants ranged freely and were probably not hunted in significant numbers by local peoples. In the north, however, waves of ivory-hungry traders and hunters from Egypt, Greece, and Rome had already pushed savanna elephants from the Mediterranean coast.

When our Banga was perhaps 400 years old, European explorers were scouting south along the coast of West Africa and beginning to plunder the continent. As they colonized ancient African nations, roads advanced into the interior, followed by settlement, agriculture, and trade. Ivory, gold, and slaves defined global trade routes and the economic destinies of nations. Tusks from West Africa’s elephants supplied the great demand in Europe and America for piano keys, combs, doorknobs, and bagpipes. Fortunes were made.

Following the European “discovery” of the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, when our Banga was nearly 500 years old, elephants were retreating from southern Africa in the face of an unstoppable hunting wave that was pushing ever northward. Ivory merchants from Arabia and Asia Minor to the Orient traded ivory from bases on Africa’s eastern coast. On all fronts, elephants were being exterminated by relentless human greed.

By the First World War, when our Banga was more than 900 years old, living, breathing elephants were “economically extinct” in West Africa. Today, only a few thousand survive in little islands of habitat dotting the region. In Ivory Coast, a country named for its “limitless” elephants, probably fewer than 500 remain in scattered populations.

One place was spared by these early onslaughts, at least to some extent: the vast, mysterious forests of the Congo Basin. Traders in eastern Africa had circulated rumors of massive stocks of ivory in the forest interior. And in the mid-1600s, hunters were killing elephants for their ivory several hundred miles up the Congo River. But no major trade routes had yet been established with the interior. There, forest elephants held their secrets and their territory. Then, in the mid-1880s, Henry Morton Stanley made his epic voyage of discovery, during which he uncovered the potential wealth of the Congo Basin. Seeing the misery wrought by the ivory trade in East Africa, Stanley wrote:

“Every tusk, piece and scrap of ivory in the possession of an Arab trader has been steeped in human blood. Every pound weight has cost the life of a man, woman, and child; for every five pounds a hut has been burned; for every 2 tusks, a whole village has been destroyed. Every twenty tusks have been obtained at the price of a district with all its people, villages, and plantations. It is simply incredible that, because ivory is required for ornaments or billiard games, the rich heart of Africa should be laid waste.”

Ironically perhaps, and sadly for Stanley, his voyage unlocked the gateway to the last great elephant population in Africa. Spreading like wildfire up and down the arteries of the Congo River, traders set up their comptoirs, or trading posts, to exploit rubber, ivory, timber, and whatever else could be exported for profit. The lure of ivory was a force provoking frenzied greed. As Marlow, Joseph Conrad’s alter ego in his 1902 novel Heart of Darkness, traveled up the Congo River to meet his destiny with Kurtz, he felt it throbbing through the trees:

“The word ivory rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it. A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like the whiff of some corpse.”

Did our Banga feel it, too? Did it hear the shots, smell the fear, and take up the bloody nutrients of elephant flesh into its roots? Maybe, but maybe not. The forest is difficult to traverse on foot, and our Banga is a long way from a navigable river. It is just imaginable that the white gold rush never touched this pocket of forest in the thousand years since that little seed germinated. No one knows how much ivory was plundered from central Africa’s forests during colonial times or what impact the slaughter had on elephant populations. We do know that forest elephants all but vanished from vast tracts around roads, towns, rivers, and trading posts.

What was the planter of our Banga seed like? And what of its descendents? What makes forest elephants different from other elephants? Well, most conspicuously, forest elephants are smaller, in some cases astonishingly small. The dumpy little elephants of Lopé in Gabon look like bush pigs with trunks when compared to the massive beasts of Kruger, Ruaha, or Samburu. Like some diminutive forest-dwelling people, the elephants’ size is an adaptation to life amid trees and vines.

Unlike the huge, curved scimitar tusks of savanna elephants, the tusks of forest elephants usually stick straight out and point down, helping the animals move through dense vegetation. Forest elephants live in small social groups—usually a mother and her offspring. Mothers and their young occasionally come together in larger family herds of sisters and their youngsters, but they seldom number more than ten. There are few predators in the forest—except humans, of course—so forest elephants don’t need the added security that a large group size affords savanna elephants in the face of lions and hyenas.

Forest elephants are the very definition of what ecologists would call large generalist herbivores. They eat at least 350, and more like 500, species of plants—a dietary diversity unheard of in the savanna. Bark, leaves, roots, fruits, and wood are consumed. The elephants strongly prefer some foods and vehemently avoid others, but they seem to sample a bit of just about everything in a manner that can be surprisingly delicate. They can strip small quantities of leaves off the ends of branches without causing excessive damage, or chip little pieces of bark from favored trees with their trunks. They also push over trees up to ten inches in diameter to get at the foliage, and occasionally they ring the bark of large trees. Sometimes, with well-timed head butts or shoulder barges they make a tree sway like the mast of a tall ship in a gale. If they’re lucky, the whiplash sends the top of the tree crashing to the ground as fodder. They devour more than 100 fruit species and rapidly “vacuum” up hundreds of fruits from under a single tree. Almost every pile of forest elephant dung contains some viable seeds, usually from four to seven plant species, though piles have been found with more than 1,000 large seeds from 16 species of fruit trees. Forest elephants defecate about 17 times per day, disseminating a lot of seeds, which helps maintain forest diversity. Some trees “decided” that elephant gardening is a good evolutionary bet and have evolved very large seeds that only elephants can swallow or rock-hard fruits that only elephants can break.

In their search for salt and other minerals, forest elephants excavate large cavities in the soil near rivers and streams. Like bulldozers, they dig under the roots of trees, topple them, and gradually expand the digging sites. Sometimes these large clearings attract more than 100 elephants at a time, as well as forest buffalo, bongo, sitatunga, pigs, gorillas, and even parrots to drink the water and eat the soil. The Pygmies call these clearings bais. They are little ecosystem islands with a wealth of plant and animal species that otherwise would not occur in the forest.

The wanderings of forest elephants create wide trails that wind through the forest, unbroken for miles, connecting dependable resources, such as fruit trees and bais. Permanent trails may aid and reinforce cultural memory: An inexperienced or lost forest elephant knows that if it sticks to the trail it will eventually come upon a fruit tree or a bai.

Using GPS collars on elephants across Central Africa, our elephant researchers have found that forest elephants move about on a smaller but comparable scale to savanna elephants, with home ranges well over 800 square miles. They usually travel a few miles a day, but when stressed, may cover 50 miles in three days. Maybe, before the comptoirs, unconstrained by people and fear, they ranged even farther.

Today, forest elephants are confined to smaller and smaller areas in the depths of the forest for the same reasons that wiped elephants out of much of South, West, and East Africa—human expansion and the lust for ivory.

In 1989, the great elephant biologist Richard Barnes (Dr. Dung to some colleagues—a tribute to his pioneering dung counts to survey elephant populations) showed that humans determine the distribution of forest elephants, even in the remotest areas of the Congo Basin in northern Gabon. Our research shows that this trend continues, especially as logging and road-building have advanced phenomenally in the past 20 years.

The national park network in the Congo Basin has also expanded dramatically. The creation of reserves in Congo, Central African Republic, Cameroon, and Gabon matches the network that already existed in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Funding has increased dramatically, too, and conservation is on the agenda in Central Africa as never before. However, more than half the national parks are smaller than the home range of a single elephant. Even the largest are not big enough to accommodate the natural ranging behavior of an elephant population. And few national parks provide enough security for their wildlife.

The unrelenting forces of human need and greed are accelerating outside, and even inside, the network of protected areas. Elephants and their forest homes are losing ground in all but a few well-managed national parks and their buffer zones. A massive expansion of the logging industry over the past 20 years has selectively cut most of the forest outside protected areas and laced the region with roads that are frequently used by elephant poachers. The national parks are threatened by oil exploitation, electricity generation, and mining. War, particularly in eastern DRC, facilitated a freefor-all for natural resources. In some areas, forest elephant meat and ivory fueled the activities of government troops and rebel militias alike. Hunger for iron and other minerals will see these industries dramatically change the geography of the last great forest wildernesses of Africa.

Lust for ivory in wealthy Asian nations and negligence in Europe and the United States are driving a lucrative illegal ivory trade. Thanks to better elephant protection in eastern and southern Africa, most of the world’s illegal ivory comes from Central Africa. In China, the largest importer of illegal ivory, prices for raw ivory on the black market have risen threefold in two years to about $750 per kilogram. As far as forest elephants are concerned, the comptoirs are back on an unprecedented scale.

This is a defining moment in the history of the Congo Basin. There is still time to “do it right”—to realize the region’s economic potential without causing its ecological destruction. During the twenty-first century, hundreds of billions of dollars will be made from the basin’s natural resources. There may be enough for everyone, but not without sensible rules in place and enforced to govern commerce and natural resource exploitation. These include protecting ecosystems in national parks, avoiding excessive fragmentation by roads, enforcing existing laws, valuing basic human rights, insisting on high standards of socially ethical practices within private industry and government, and honest oversight of economic development by African governments and the international community. Some private logging, oil, and mining companies are stepping up to the plate. But often they compete at a disadvantage with less scrupulous enterprises that are backed by the most powerful lobby of all—the growing number of consumers demanding cheap goods.

Six years after we made camp under our Banga and dreamed of long-dead elephants tending the forest, a logging concession built a road alongside the ancient elephant trails we had walked. Snares were set, elephant guns exploded, and one day, in an hour of work by a chainsaw operator, our Banga was felled. Now, it probably spans a river as part of a bridge, because this species is prized by road builders for its strength, not by carpenters for its beauty. No more monkeys, hornbills, gorillas, duikers, or pigs come to feed in its crown or on the earth where it once stood.

And if we are not very, very careful, there will be no more forest elephants to plant a new one.