Tracking elephants with Joseph at Onguma
Joseph has been tracking the Onguma herd for eleven years. He can tell you which elephant is which from a footprint, a scent, the shape of a broken branch.
On the eastern edge of Etosha, where the private reserve meets the park boundary, there is a herd that moves in a loop nobody has ever written down. Joseph knows it because he has walked it since he was nineteen.
Reading the ground
A footprint tells him the age from its diameter and the direction from the way the sand has spilled at the leading edge. Cracks in the sole pad identify individuals the way a fingerprint would. Dung temperature gives him a time window. Broken mopane at shoulder height gives him a height, and therefore a name.
None of this is performance. He does it while talking about football, glancing down every few paces, and adjusting the route without announcing it.
"The animal is always telling you where it went," he said. "Most people are just looking at the wrong end of the road."
Why it matters
Tracking skill of this kind is disappearing faster than the wildlife it follows. Guides trained on a vehicle radio network can find animals; guides trained on the ground understand them. We build our Etosha days around the second kind, which means some mornings we find nothing at all and learn a great deal anyway.
