Natural World (1983) s25e03 Episode Script

My name is Martyn Colbeck and I've devoted 15 years of my life to filming the most intimate moments in the lives of African elephants.
I've witnessed the most incredible scenes - terrifying battles for supremacy emotional births and even the callous kidnapping of a youngster.
Unexpectedly, these fascinating animals hijacked my life and capturing them on film became my passion.
In 1990, I arrived on the plains below Mount Kilimanjaro.
My intention was to record the intimate lives of one family of elephants over a long time - something that had never been done before.
I needed to get close, physically and emotionally.
One expert, Cynthia Moss, had already spent 20 years studying these elephants here in Kenya.
Fantastic.
I can still remember the first day that Cynthia Moss took me out and introduced me to a family of elephants.
Andit was extraordinary in two ways.
One, because we drove up and parked right in the middle of a family and they completely ignored us.
So, immediately, you felt a very intimate relationship with the animals.
The second was when she started telling me who they were.
She knew every single individual.
And there was a history to every single individual.
That was the pivotal moment.
It opened the door onto another world and I was immediately entranced.
Echo, a 45-year-old female whose tusks almost touch, led this family.
Their names all began with E.
And within a few weeks of arriving in Amboseli National Park, Echo had given birth to a male calf.
I soon realised something was wrong.
A newborn elephant can usually stand within half an hour.
My initial elation soon evaporated.
The baby was unable to straighten his front legs.
It was distressing to watch.
Both Echo and her daughter, Enid, tried to get him to his feet.
I was amazed how gentle they were.
The rest of the family set off towards food and water, leaving Echo and Enid alone with the calf.
Despite being over a kilometre away, I heard them communicating constantly in low-frequency rumbles.
Echo's daughter was clearly torn.
Should she stay to look after the new calf or quench her thirst in the heat? The family continued to call.
Raised feet betrayed their indecision.
The stranded calf was becoming sunburnt and dehydrated.
I felt helpless and unable to intervene.
It looked like Enid might leave.
I should have known better.
As Echo tried again to help the calf to his feet, he screamed in distress.
Enid spun round.
Her rapid return revealed how close the family members were.
I wasn't optimistic about the calf's chances.
The following morning, I didn't know what to expect.
Incredibly, the calf was shuffling along in a kneeling position.
Echo and her daughter paused frequently to let him catch up.
His knees could easily become cut and infected.
He risked a slow and painful death.
The following day there was a glimmer of hope.
The calf seemed to be trying to stand.
While the family rested, he never gave up.
Unknowingly, I had recorded the first time this condition had been seen.
The determined survivor was named Ely.
He had been so big, he couldn't stretch out in the womb.
Echo.
All right, Echo? I spent a lot of time with Echo during the first, traumatic days of Ely's life.
I felt I was starting to get to know her.
Now I faced two challenges.
I had to become totally accepted by all 14 in the family and I had to learn to think like them.
Slowly, I immersed myself in Echo's world.
I found the elephants so fascinating I couldn't stop photographing them.
Strangely, my black-and-white stills captured the elephants in a way the moving image couldn't.
I was now beginning to appreciate how wonderful Echo's family was.
They were a joy to be with and they seemed more playful than other families.
I was really getting to know them.
I hoped they would share more secrets.
One unpredictable event I had never filmed was a greeting ceremony.
Occasionally, even after elephant families have been only briefly separated, they greet each other like long-lost friends.
One day, the family split up.
Echo led a new calf onto the plain.
The others stayed in the swamp, feeding.
Calls went back and forth.
Echo sounded like a harassed mum trying to get the kids out of a swimming pool.
When at last they arrived, they made a huge display of emotion.
Don't tell me these elephants aren't happy to see each other.
This is sheer joy.
Sometimes I lost track of Echo and the family.
I'd have to scour the park, searching for her.
One day, quite by chance, I stumbled on another remarkable scene.
I've just come across this small group of elephants crossing this plain here.
I'm not entirely sure who it is.
Oh, hang on a minute, that's Grace.
That's Grace right at the back.
She's so distinctive because she's got this enormous, single, right tusk.
She's right there at the back, on the right-hand side.
I remember Grace from years ago, when she had just given birth.
The calf looked about four months premature and was tiny - half what it should have weighed.
With Grace was her adolescent daughter, Gwen.
The calf was deathly pale.
Grace needed to move it out of the sun before it was badly burnt.
I felt for her.
Her other off spring were upset, too.
It's unbelievable.
She picked the baby up between her tusk - her single right tusk - and her trunk and lifted it high in the air and then carried it.
It was quite an extraordinary scene.
And we have seen nothing like it, before or since.
The baby died that night.
Grace stood over the body for four days.
Her grief made me more determined to share my experience with others.
It's very special being out there with a family of elephants on a daily basis and over a long period of time.
And that is what I wanted to convey to the public.
I wanted to convey how special elephants are.
It's a very difficult thing to do because you can't take that situation and package it and put it on television.
It's so much about the heat and the dust and the sound and the context.
And to put that into two dimensions is difficult.
So I suppose the big challenge, as a film maker and a photographer, was to try and give a sense of what elephants are like to spend time with - the essence of elephants, how complicated they are.
How powerful they are, how aggressive they can be if they're a male.
How tender they can be when they've got young.
Then how funny.
They make you laugh, they make you cry.
They're extraordinary to be with.
And to try and convey that was probably the greatest challenge.
After 18 months, I knew I'd been accepted by Echo and her family.
And I had recorded some unique and intimate moments in their lives.
But Amboseli had other surprises in store.
One grey June morning, I ran into two huge bulls lining up to fight.
They were Beach Ball and the one-tusked Lexi.
Serious fights between elephants are extremely rare.
As the bulls squared up to each other my heart was pounding.
It was terrifying to be so close.
I had to have a ringside seat but I could easily become involved by mistake.
Each elephant tried to twist the other off his feet.
Then he could stab his toppled opponent with his tusk.
The ten-hour bout ended without either Beach Ball or Lexi being badly injured.
All too soon, it was time to leave Amboseli.
I wondered if Echo and the family would remember me on my return.
In the meantime, I wanted to film elephants in more hostile surroundings.
I travelled up the wild Skeleton Coast to the remote northwest corner of Namibia.
I had long heard travellers' tales about elephants sliding down sand dunes.
The images were so incongruous, they set my imagination alight.
Now, at last, I had a chance to film the almost mythical desert elephants.
The landscape in which they eke out a living is one of the most austere on earth.
I fell in love with it immediately.
The desert is a photographer's dream.
Colours shimmer.
Everything is transformed by the heat haze.
Everywhere I looked, exciting images stared back at me.
I wondered how any animals could live here, let alone elephants.
And why would they risk setting out across the desert? I had to find out.
Just locating these elephants in these conditions was the first hurdle.
Weeks went by as my guide Paul Brehem and I searched.
Finally, I got my first, unbelievable glimpse.
What I saw was a complete contrast to the way I'd previously seen elephants, against the lush green of the savannah.
Food and water are scarce and far apart.
The secret of the elephants' survival is the hidden presence of dry river beds.
These rivers only flood briefly but they bring just enough water to allow some vegetation to grow.
I really wanted to film the elephants crossing the vast sand dunes.
But just occasionally, they go between the river systems.
So the river system we're on now is 70km north of the next one down.
And incredibly, these elephants cross these dunes behind me.
Just unbelievable.
I faced many more weeks, waiting for them to attempt their journey.
For me, the image I remember out of that whole period - and I was here ten months - was when the elephants crossed in front of these dunes.
They were yellow dunes and they were crested by this incredible, sort of red, crumbled garnet.
I could scarcely believe it.
This was the image I had dreamed about.
The scene got even better.
The last female elephant suddenly notices the oryx walking the other way.
She looks a little outraged to me.
And this is what they were heading for - an isolated water hole.
Elephants need 70 to 90 litres of water a day.
They hadn't drunk for five days.
They must have an amazing mental map of this area.
It is so vast.
And in order to eke out a living, they must know where the water is, they must know where the food is.
So that requires quite a lot of brain power.
We did witness a tragedy while we were making the film.
There was this tiny, little calf that, erm.
.
for me, just showed what it's like, the challenges of being a desert elephant.
It was a very young calf, probably about two-and-a-half years old.
And it was painfully thin.
It clearly wasn't getting enough food.
And yet, still, it would do this long march following its mother miles and miles to water holes.
And it just got further and further behind, but it just kept on going.
I don't know why the female was on her own.
I was struck by a very poignant moment, when the two met other elephants going in the opposite direction.
They were not members of the same family, but they obviously knew each other.
I wish I knew what was going through their minds.
The family continue on their way.
The mother and calf hesitate, as if they're trying to decide what to do.
I often wonder what would have happened if they had followed the family instead of continuing on their own.
Eventually, the long treks between water holes were too much and the calf died.
It's aboutsurvival here.
You know, they don't have the time, the resources or the energy to play.
And that's kind of sad, you know.
I know what elephants are capable of doing, I know how complex their relationships can be, I know how much fun they can have in certain circumstances.
You don't see it here, with these elephants.
I couldn't wait to get back to Amboseli.
I wanted to continue to experiment with black-and-white photographs.
The permanence of the unmoving image captivates me.
Films seem to have a limited life.
But stills have a time less quality.
By chance, I witnessed a very rare event - a daytime birth of an elephant.
Almost all elephant births occur at night.
This made me even more determined to film Echo giving birth.
Echo had been mated 21 months ago.
I knew she would give birth within a month.
However, the rainy season was approaching.
Shadowing them in the wet and dark would be fraught with problems.
Nonetheless, I started following the family at night.
At first, they seemed surprised.
But gradually, they accepted me.
Some of the most magical times I shared with the family took place then.
One moonless night, in total darkness, Echo came up within inches.
She greeted me like one of her family.
It was a wonderful moment.
It wasn't long before the others were totally relaxed.
They lay down all around my vehicle.
Echo always went down last.
Being surrounded by 15 sleeping elephants was amazing.
There was only one thing I hadn't expected - their chorus of snores.
Hours later, the elephants would stir.
The spell broke as they started to get up.
A healthy yawn greeted the new day.
They kept to their usual routine.
I looked for signs that Echo might give birth but she didn't seem to look any different.
I just didn't know if she had conceived or not.
One evening, when I went out to find her, she looked huge.
So she was pregnant, after all.
I had to be ready at any moment.
After twenty-one and a half months of pregnancy, Echo finally went into labour.
I was just in time to see the whole family gather close around her.
Luckily, a gap opened in the forest of legs.
They were streaming from the glands on the sides of their heads, which is a sign of emotion.
I had never seen anything like it.
It would have been so easy for Echo to hide somewhere I couldn't follow.
In fact, she had chosen to give birth out in the open, with nothing to obscure my view.
Echo showed a great deal of trust in allowing me to share this powerful moment.
It was a celebration of elephant society and it was amazing to be part of.
Echo's new calf, Ebony, turned out to be a real character.
She was very cute and a joy to film.
She even regarded me as one of the family.
Every day, she would greet me like a relative.
She was always getting into scrapes.
But once, it was life-threatening.
I couldn't believe what was happening.
Ebony was stolen by another family.
Echo was driven off by the other family's matriarch, leaving Ebony captive behind the strangers' legs.
The kidnapping took me completely by surprise.
The perpetrators were making a point about their place in the elephant hierarchy.
What happened next was remarkable.
Echo gathered all the other big females in her family.
Together, they ploughed into the kidnappers to recover Ebony.
It showed forethought and teamwork.
Echo led Ebony away, flanked by members of her family.
After another four years, it was once again time to say goodbye.
Ebony's birth and kidnap had shown me a new side of elephants.
They demonstrated tenderness and co-operation as well as aggression.
These animals were turning out to be far more complicated than I had ever imagined.
I had to leave them for a while.
I had a rare opportunity to observe elephants facing challenges of a totally different kind.
I intended to film forest elephants in the Congo.
But just to catch a glimpse of these beasts would be extremely difficult.
Tropical rainforest is very demanding for a cameraman.
It's hot and humid.
Your lenses fog.
The damp rots your kit.
And you never stop sweating.
On the forest floor, you're in the dark.
It's difficult to see anything at all.
Creeping through this strange world, looking for the most dangerous animal in the forest, is nerve-racking.
Thankfully, hidden clearings called 'bais' have recently been discovered.
I was surprised to learn elephants create the bais themselves.
I was equally surprised how much smaller forest elephants were - only two-thirds the size of their savannah cousins.
Their tusks pointed straight down to avoid catching the dense vegetation.
The families were small, too - only three or four individuals in each.
The mud they wallowed in turned them into pale ghosts.
Up to 100 elephants can congregate in this bai, and there's a party atmosphere.
They've created the clearings in their search for something missing from their diet - salt and other minerals.
There's competition for the salt licks.
This female was only being allowed to use the best hole because she was sexually receptive.
I was amused to see the beautiful male guarding her go into reverse gear to keep others away.
And this looked like taking their frustration out on the poor forest buffaloes.
A game all the family can play.
Reluctantly, it seemed to me, the elephants melted away into the trees.
I felt disappointed I would never know them as I knew Echo and her family.
My return to Amboseli was a chance to catch up with my old friends.
In particular, I wanted to see if black-and-white stills could convey the brutal majesty of lone males fighting.
My favourite, Dionysus, had been crossing the plains for more than half a century.
He towered over 11 feet high.
His broken right tusk was a relic of the fights that had made him a top male.
The females were always excited to see him.
But a confrontation can come out of nowhere.
Suddenly, another bull, Masaku, approached rapidly.
At six tons, and at the most aggressive stage of rutting, Masaku stood very tall.
I could see he was going to challenge Dionysus.
This was only the second serious fight I saw in 15 years.
I had to be very careful not to get in the way.
Masaku was trying to twist the older and heavier Dionysus off his feet.
Then he could tusk him in his side.
The whole struggle was over quickly.
Masaku very nearly won.
I was the third participant, struggling for the best position.
Now in his 60s, Dionysus was past his prime, but still impressive.
His lone existence was a contrast to the close group that is the female-run family.
Like all males, he would have known that closeness and safety for his childhood years.
Then, at around the age of 12, Dionysus would have been banished by the adult females, forced out to live on his own.
It is a steep learning curve for adolescents.
As he got older, he would have learned where to find food, water and potential mates.
When a big male like Dionysus dies, all that solitary wisdom is lost forever.
I'd watched Echo mature over the last 15 years.
Her family had grown from 14 to 30.
She now ranked high among Amboseli's females.
But she was about to be tested to the limit.
There was something seriously wrong with Erin, Echo's 34-year-old daughter.
Erin was clearly in pain and unable to move very far.
Had she come into conflict with the local Maasai? She appeared to have a badly infected leg.
It was very sad to see Erin suffering.
What made it worse was that her young calf, Echo's grandson, depended on her for milk.
I learnt more about the caring nature of elephant society from what happened next than any other incident.
While Erin was sick, Echo never went more than a couple of miles away.
She and Erin were communicating the whole time.
Erin's infection was obviously extremely painful.
E-Mail, her 19-month-old calf, continually wanted to suckle.
She stopped him even though, without milk, he might die.
The family led the young calf away from his mother.
They seemed to know she wouldn't make it.
Erin died later that day.
I was equally worried about E-Mail.
He was very young to be orphaned.
It was touching to see his older sister never left his side.
I wondered whether he remembered his mum, as I did.
There have definitely been sad moments.
Like following any family soap opera, there's joy and there's sadness.
If you're involved with them, if you've been involved with a family for 15 years, if something happens to one of them, if one of them dies, it's sad.
You can't If you're involved, you can't help but respond to that.
Shortly after Erin's death, Echo took the family across the border into Tanzania.
I knew they'd be back.
I waited for them where Erin had died.
The first to come forward wasn't Echo.
It was Erin's daughter, Echeri.
Elephants are unique in their reaction to the remains of their own kind.
It was clear Echeri knew these were her mother's bones.
But what was she thinking? Did she grieve? The family were tense.
They touched and smelled the bones for a long time.
They all knew it was Erin.
It was as if they were trying to understand what had happened.
On my 15-year journey, I have caught a glimpse of the elusive forest elephants.
I've traced the rare migrations of their desert cousins.
And just when I think I know elephants, they surprise me again.
It wasn't the powerful bulls that captured my heart, but a gentle female called Echo.
I think of her now like any friend, with thoughts and desires, capable of complex emotions.
Hi, Echo.
Are you gonna come and say hello? Hi, Echo.
I now know that Echo recognises my voice and smell and will come that little bit closer than she needs to.
Sometimes I put down my cameras and just enjoy her company.
She is almost 60.
Despite her age, she has just had her eighth calf, Esprit.
Echo and the other females will teach her the subtleties of elephant society.
Perhaps one day Esprit will be a matriarch, too.
As well as filming the most intimate details of Echo's life, I had had time to develop a style of photography that I hope captures the essence of elephants - a fusion of still and moving pictures.
I like to think that, like the photographs, these elephants will be around for a long time.
They are like my second family.
I've come to realise just how intelligent, sensitive and tender elephants are.
And now I can appreciate why the Maasai believe that these are the only animals to have souls.