`We never thought we’d end up this way,” confides zoologist Delia Owens, sipping apple juice through a cafeteria straw.
“The last six years have been the worst of our lives,” she says. “We nearly lost our health and our marriage. We’ve been shot at. It was hard to get up in the morning. Sometimes I forgot why we went to Africa in the first place.”
That draws a smile and a shrug from her husband, zoologist Mark Owens. “Scientists can’t just go and study animals in the wild anymore,” he contends.
“People don’t realize the extent to which gangs of commercial poachers have sterilized huge tracts of Africa. We’re conducting an environmental salvage operation.”
“That’s true,” Delia agrees, “but you really went around the bend.” She hands him a bit of bagel. “You lost it. You totally lost it.”
When last seen, in 1985, the Owenses had reached the summit: best-selling authors, celebrity African conservationists, regulars on “The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson.”
Yet within a few years, stress was to turn Delia into a heart patient and Mark into a monomaniac fighting a one-man war against bands of ruthless meat and ivory poachers in Zambia. Poaching has cost the southern African nation 115,000 of its 160,000 elephants in just a decade.
Night after night, as Delia fretted alone in camp, her enraged husband would take off in a Cessna and fly in and out of storms seeking poachers’ campfires in the dark. Then he’d drop cherry bombs on them. Not surprisingly, the poachers would try to blast him from the sky with their AK-47s.
Scientists didn’t used to behave this way. Desperation has come to symbolize conservation’s last stand in Africa, as represented by the plight of its signal animal: 10 years ago, Africa’s elephant population stood at 1 million; already it has been cut in half.
Poachers are now shot on sight in Kenya, which lost 70 percent of its elephants. Paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey, who left his early-man fossil sites to become the country’s new director of wildlife services, has cut the rate of elephant killings from three a day to about one a month. Thirty poachers have died so far.
Zambia, however, has no such policy. “Mark and I disagreed about how to fight poachers,” Delia says. “He wanted us to get personally involved. I argued that we should supply good equipment and encouragement, but if we went after the poachers, they would come after us. Unarmed, we made easy targets.”
The Owenses have been building a small-scale jungle economy to save the wildlife in the remote and ruggedly beautiful Rift Valley of northeastern Zambia, an area the size of Delaware.
Their struggle is profiled in a new book, “Eye of the Elephant,” which recently brought them to Chicago on a promotional tour.
When the couple arrived in Zambia in 1986 ostensibly to study lions in North Luangwa National Park, virtually everyone in the district ate poached meat sold illegally in all the marketplaces and by scores of black marketeers.
Hunting parties of 140, many armed with military weapons, were killing 1,000 elephants a year. Only 5,000 remained of the original 17,000. The valley where the Owenses settled had once been home to 8,000 rhinos. None were left.
Corruption reached high. Game guards refused to go after poachers. The park warden dealt in ivory, skins and meat. Foreign diplomats smuggled out contraband.
“The area was so heavily controlled by a cartel of poachers that it was regionally known as the second Ivory Coast,” Mark says. “It was as bad as it gets.”
The Owenses helped villagers start sustainable cottage industries such as sewing and woodworking shops, beekeeping, maize mills, fish farms, sunflower presses. They taught them how to raise more of their own food, especially sources of protein such as poultry, fish, beans and peanuts.
“Hungry people do not make good conservationists,” Delia notes.
That was the idea, though: to undercut community support for poaching, to promote tourism, to convince the Zambians that in the long run their wildlife would be worth more to them alive than dead.
The Owenses say Zambia’s new democratic government is firmly behind them. They have 20 full-time employees now, and a Georgia-based non-profit foundation that, along with other sources of funding, generates about $600,000 a year.
But the big commercial poachers in Zambia, who supply the booming international trade in illegal ivory, decided the couple should die.
“That’s the chance you take,” Mark says. “Scientists today simply must become activists. Otherwise, sooner or later, we’re all going to bump heads in the middle of a parking lot watching the last African creature go down through the last hole in the tarmac!”
Delia, however, demurs. “I don’t think we help elephants by dying for them,” she says, softly.
After Mark “lost it” and took on the poachers by himself, Delia, though only 43, suffered a heart attack. She left him and moved into her own camp for eight months to continue her own programs and think things through.
Off to Africa
It had all started in 1974 when they were newlywed students at the University of Georgia. The Owenses wrote to zoologist George Schaller, renowned for his work on many African species, particularly Serengeti lions, and asked his advice about how to get started.
“Just go,” he advised them. “And hurry.”
Accordingly, they auctioned off their possessions for $6,100, doffed their backpacks and boarded a plane for Africa. There they bought a beat-up, third-hand Toyota Land Cruiser and drove deep into Botswana’s “Great Thirst”-the vast Central Kalahari Desert-to contribute to science and the conservation of animals in one of the world’s last untouched wildernesses.
They were romantic throwbacks. Mark, 29, boyishly handsome with a camp counselor’s charm, already had a master’s degree and was trying marriage for the second time. Delia, 24, was fine-boned and delicately beautiful, with a lilting drawl, a rueful wit and an ace in the hole: a beguiling writing style.
Otherwise armed with only a daring dream, youthful grit and naivete that bordered on the dangerous, they sought to join an exclusive club. Only a few wildlife biologists in Africa-Schaller, Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey among them-had become famous enough through books and marketing to become symbols of freedom and adventure to millions.
Both Goodall and Fossey became deeply involved with their study animals-Schaller, ever the objective scientist, never did-and both suffered. Goodall saw her students kidnapped. Fossey was murdered for trying to save her mountain gorillas from poachers.
“But Dian was no kook,” Delia says firmly. “She seemed anti-social because she was up there alone on her mountaintop. She saw her animals being mutilated, and she didn’t have anybody to come home and talk to.”
“She also had no alternatives to offer the local people,” Mark points out. “Good intentions are not enough.”
The Owenses brought something new to wildlife science: the photogenic, dedicated young husband-wife team willing to spend the next seven years in the Kalahari isolated from society. They pieced together the ecology of an unexplored hellhole of bush-covered dunes with no roads, people or waterholes for thousands of square miles.
The desert denizens, having never known man, didn’t fear the Owenses, and for the first year the Americans lived without a tent. Their starter home: a clump of trees and their truck.
Lions by the bedside
But in the freshness of morning, they would awake to find giant Kalahari lions snoring peacefully beside them. Curious leopards, giraffes and brown hyenas soon were dropping by unannounced to drink their dishwater, raid their pantry and play with their gear.
“It was perfect for us,” Delia says. “Not for everyone. But for us.”
Backed by spurts of minimal funding, the Owenses did good science. About 20 papers emerged from the 120-degree heat and drought, punctuated by apocalyptic sandstorms that chiseled through their malaria-infested paradise.
The couple radio-collared desert lions-the largest on Earth-and learned how the prides survive with little to eat and nothing to drink sometimes for years by living off the fluids of their prey.
And timid and secretive brown hyenas, among the rarest and least-known large carnivores, found a mother in Delia. She made them seem as fascinating as Goodall’s chimps, transforming their image from loathsome solitary scavengers to rather touching, hard-working, neurotic beasts with strong family ties.
Yet, because there’s no place to hide anymore, trouble sought out the Owenses’ torrid Eden.
Powerful cattlemen and politicians wanted to dissolve the Central Kalahari Game Reserve and divide it into large private ranches even though the sandy desert savannas could not sustain cattle for long. The Owenses wanted the area to be conserved for the benefit of local people through wildlife tourism.
The dispute boiled over when the scientists stumbled over one of the century’s worst wildlife disasters.
Wire fences, erected in the preserve to enclose large commercial cattle ranches, were blocking antelope migrations and killing vast animal populations.
As the Owenses proved with heartbreaking photos and films, more than 1 million hooved animals, and the predators that relied on them, died after being cut off from their natural watering sites. No one had ever seen these migrations before the Owenses did. No one will ever see them again.
With an incredible story to tell, the couple left the Kalahari in 1980 to tell it and to complete their graduate work. They returned in 1985 after publication of their first book, “Cry of the Kalahari,” which soon was heralded as a wildlife classic, and propelled them to instant fame.
Banished from Botswana
But it cost them. The government, furious over the scandal, kicked out the scientists on May 15, 1985. Banished from the Kalahari, the Owenses spent a year restlessly prowling along the shoulder of the tormented continent-Zimbabwe, Zambia, Zaire and Tanzania-tiptoeing away from trigger-happy soldiers as they looked for some other place where biologists might fit in and perhaps make a difference.
They finally settled on North Luangwa, the most remote and rugged of Zambia’s 19 national parks, a 2,400-square-mile tract of raw wilderness, impassable in the rainy season, plagued by tsetse flies, threatened constantly by flash floods, fractured by deep ravines and coated with sand and mud.
Considered terra incognita by the Zambian government, the park was too wild to protect. There were no tourist facilities, no roads, no one living there. No one knew what was going on.
When the Owenses arrived in October 1987, they found hippos by the hundreds and crocodiles lazing in the river, while lions roamed the bush and elephants sauntered into camp to nibble the honey-sweet fruit of the marula tree. The Owenses were content again.
“But as we were putting the mud on our first little hut-our first home after living in tents all those years-we heard gunshots,” Delia recounts.
Soon, they knew what was going on in the park.
“Everywhere we went,” she says, “we started seeing dead elephants. How could we study lions when elephants were being slaughtered at our doorstep?”
The results of the Owenses’ project so far: When they began, 1,000 elephants a year were being shot in North Luangwa Park. By the end of 1991, the number had been reduced to 12.
Employing poachers to build roads and hospitals works better than dive-bombing them with cherry bombs, Mark has found. Once he got to know some of them, they explained that they had no other jobs. “We want to conserve,” one man told him, “but there is no job in conserving.”
Kids meet the neighbors
And the children of the region actually have a chance to see live elephants. They never have before. In her new book, Delia writes of using copies of International Wildlife Magazine or Ranger Rick to teach village youngsters about the glory that grazed just a few miles away:
“As I hold up a glossy centerfold showing an elephant family grazing on a savanna, the children `oooh’ and `aaah,’ clasping their small hands over their mouths. Squeezed tightly together in a semicircle, they lean forward taking in every detail of the photo.
“One young boy reaches out a finger to touch the shiny page, as though he expects the elephants to be there. I feel a tightness in my throat and a tear in my eye.”
When the Owenses were children, it was books by the husband-wife explorer team Martin and Osa Johnson that helped set their imaginations ablaze about Africa.
“Her great book was `I Married Adventure,’ ” Delia recalls. Then she brightens.
“I’m going to write a book. I’ll call it: `I Married Misadventure.’ “
———-
Those wanting to learn more about Mark and Delia Owens’ work in Africa may contact Helen Cooper, Owens Foundation for Wildlife Conservaton Inc., P.O. Box 53396, Atlanta, Ga. 30355.
