The secret elephants: The rediscovery of the world's most southerly elephants

Title: The secret elephants
Subtitle: The rediscovery of the world's most southerly elephants
Author: Gareth Patterson
Publisher: The Penguin Group (SA)
2nd edition. Cape Town, South Africa 2011
ISBN 9780143528012 / ISBN 978-0-14-352801-2
Softcover, 13 x 19 cm, 293 pages, black & white illustrations, some maps

Description:

The elephants of the Knysna forest have long been the subject of mystery and conjecture. Over the years they have taken on an almost mythical quality, with many doubting whether they existed at all. In 1994 the local forestry department maintained that there was only one surviving Knysna elephant, the seldom seen female known as The Matriarch. The Knysna elephant was thus described as 'functionally extinct'. This was the official stance until September 2000 when forest guard Wilfred Oraai encountered and photographed a young bull from a distance of some thirty metres.The question arose: who was its mother? And, indeed, who was its father? In 2001 Gareth Patterson began an independent study of the Knysna elephant. For the next seven years he covered thousands of kilometres on foot, following ancient elephant paths through the dense Afromontane forest and the surrounding mountain fynbos.

He found abundant signs to suggest that, far from dying out, the Knysna elephants are, quietly and secretly, holding their own. Patterson's fieldwork, and his DNA research in collaboration with conservation geneticist Lori Eggert, established that at least five young females exist, lending support to Patterson's growing evidence that the Knysna forest and its surroundings are home to a small herd of young elephants. His book 'The secret elephants: The rediscovery of the world's most southerly elephants' is the story of these remarkable animals that fought their way back from the brink of extinction without any help from humankind. Well known for his work on the African lion, Gareth Patterson is an environmentalist, independent wildlife researcher and author who has worked tirelessly for more than twenty-five years for the greater protection of African wildlife.

Content: The secret elephants: The rediscovery of the world's most southerly elephants

Foreword
1992 Global 500 Laureate
Author's Note
PART 1
If Silence Could Speak
Burial Rituals
The Forest of Secret Voices
Capture of the Orphans
The Elephantine Miracle
Beginnings
Into the Forest
Signs of the Elephants
PART 2
Brother Elephant
Mingled Destinies
The Ivory Hunters
Tsitsikamma, a Last Stronghold
Death in the Shadow of a Mountain
'Jungle Man', a Life of Death
PART 3
An Elephant Called Strangefoot
Encounters with the Elephants
Elephants of Forest and Fynbos
Food for Thought
The Secret Place of the Elephants
Meeting the Elephants
PART 4
The Mystery, and the Baby
Elephants, Mushrooms, and Self-medication
The Nature of Health
Encounters with a Musth Bull
The Old Man and the Matriarch
Discovering Elephants by DNA
Baby Elephantom
The Awakening
My Soul's Land