On the hunt for elusive “ghost elephants”

Deep in the highlands of Angola a new species of elephant is rumored to be hiding. Conservationist and ornithologist Steve Boyes has been searching for this elusive pod for years and the story of his journey is the focus of ghost elephantsa disturbing 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 to find remote pachyderms, but for Boyes the connection is perfectly natural. He grew up in South Africa and wanted nothing more than to be an explorer, like the people he read about every month in national geography magazine. “I grew up waiting for the magazine to arrive; I wanted the maps,” Boyes told Ars. “Those would become my garden, or the field beyond, or the river: wild places imagined and real.”

Boyes’ parents frequently took him and his brother out into the wild, including visits to Botswana and Tanzania. “We used to join baboon troops and walk with impalas,” Boyes said, and although his brother feared elephants, Boyes walked with them from a young age. ghost elephants It contains gorgeous underwater footage of elephant legs lumbering through the 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 and swim around you and around you and interact with you,” he said. “That’s why elephants have always fascinated me.”

As an adult, Boyes conducted his doctoral research on the meyer’s parrot in the Okavango Delta, which has the largest population of elephants in the world. They shared a kind of symbiotic relationship with parrots. “In every tree that the parrots fed on, the elephants also fed,” he said. “Elephants were creating nest cavities for parrots by disturbing the trees.”