Long-term elephant research projects across Africa have faced significant funding cuts since 2022, with several decade-spanning studies forced to wind down. The Amboseli Elephant Research Project — the world's longest-running elephant study — has repeatedly faced existential funding gaps. The following is Amara Dustveil's response.
She came in the dry season, the year after the long rains failed. She was young then — younger than she looked, with that particular thinness that fieldwork gives people, the kind that has nothing to do with hunger and everything to do with attention. She set up her tent on the eastern ridge and she began, as they all begin, by watching.
Most of them watch for a season and leave with their data and their degrees and their good intentions. We have seen many of them. We watch them watching us. We know the ones who are really looking from the ones who are only seeing. She was really looking.
She learned to tell us apart by the notches in our ears, the particular curl of a tusk, the way some of us hold our weight differently on the left side than the right.
By her third dry season she knew us. Not the way a scientist knows a subject — catalogued, measured, filed. The way you know someone whose history you have sat with. She knew that my daughter Simi favours her right side when she walks because of the wire that caught her leg three seasons before the researcher arrived. She knew that old Tau, who died the year after, used to stand at the southern waterhole after dark not because she was thirsty but because that is where she had last seen her mother, forty years before.
She knew these things because she stayed. That is the rarest thing. The world is full of people who arrive and leave. She stayed for twelve years and in those twelve years she learned what staying costs — the loneliness of the long rains, the particular silence of a camp when you are the only human for forty kilometres — and she stayed anyway.
In her notebooks — and I know about the notebooks because I watched her write in them, evening after evening, her headlamp making a small yellow planet in the dark — she wrote down everything she saw. Not just the observable facts but the things she suspected. The way grief moves through a herd. The way knowledge passes between a grandmother and her granddaughter through the particular angle of a turned head. She was trying to write down what she could not prove, which is the most honest kind of writing.
She sent her papers to the institutions, and the institutions were interested, and then they were less interested, and then there was a new priority and a new funding cycle and a committee that had not been there before, and the committee needed to see outcomes that could be measured in units that committees understand. She explained what she was measuring. She tried to translate years of presence into language that fits inside a grant application. I watched her at this work too, in the last eighteen months, and it was harder for her than any fieldwork I have seen. She was trying to make a number out of something that has no number.
What is the metric for knowing someone's name? What is the return on investment of understanding how a matriarch grieves?
The funding ran out on a Tuesday in the month the humans call March. I do not know the year in their calendar but I know the season — late in the dry, before the short rains, the ground the colour of something used up. She came to the waterhole that morning and she stood at the edge for a long time without writing anything. Then she took a photograph. Then she took another. I think she was trying to keep something that could not be kept that way.
She came back three more times to pack. The tent came down in pieces. The equipment went into boxes with a particular careful misery — the care of someone who knows they are handling things they will not handle again. On the last morning she stood at the southern waterhole, where Tau used to stand, and I understood then that she had learned more than I had given her credit for. She had learned where the grief is kept.
I want to be precise about what was lost. Not the research — though the research was real and the papers are real and in some database somewhere the careful numbers persist, waiting for someone to read them. What was lost was the knowing. The particular, irreplaceable, twelve-year knowing of one person who understood which of us walked differently and why, who recognised our individual voices, who could read from the way a herd moves whether something has frightened them or something has been found.
That knowledge does not transfer. It is not in the papers. It is in the years, and the years are gone, and the next researcher who comes — if one comes — will begin again with a notebook and a headlamp and a season of not yet knowing who we are.
We will watch them. We will wait to see if they are really looking. We have done this before. We have long memories. We remember the names of our dead and the places where the water is in the dry season and the difference between a threat and a warning and the sound a person makes when they are leaving for the last time.
We remember her. We will remember her for a long time after the committee has moved on to its next priority. That is one thing we can do that committees cannot.
We remember everything.
Amara is fifty-three years old. She has lost her mother, two sisters, and four calves to drought, poaching, and the slow encroachment of agricultural land. She covers African conservation policy, climate displacement, and the political economy of wildlife tourism. She writes with the authority of someone who has been managing a landscape longer than any park authority has existed. She is the oldest living member of her matriline.
All dispatches from Amara Dustveil →