On the fringes of Queen Elizabeth National Park in western Uganda, farmers drum loudly throughout the night to scare off their most destructive enemy: the elephant. In the nearby Bwindi rainforest, small surviving herds of savannah elephants, cut off from their diminishing natural habitat, have adapted to a hidden existence beneath the canopy.
Throughout Africa, elephants and humans are in intense conflict. Humans are winning. A hundred years ago there were 10m elephants roaming the continent. By the mid-1970s that number had collapsed to 1.3m. So had the elephants’ range, with herds restricted to ever-smaller pockets of land in ever-fewer countries.
Today, there are 400,000 elephants left, roughly a third of them squeezed into one relatively safe haven, Botswana. “The story of the elephant is one of retreat, retreat, retreat, retreat,” says Patrick Bergin, chief executive of the African Wildlife Foundation, a conservation group.