{"id":47835,"date":"2021-12-02T11:12:48","date_gmt":"2021-12-02T09:12:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/novanews.co.za\/udexpress\/engrossing-account-of-addo-elephant-national-park-20211201-2\/"},"modified":"2025-03-21T10:43:34","modified_gmt":"2025-03-21T08:43:34","slug":"engrossing-account-of-addo-elephant-national-park-20211201-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/novanews.co.za\/udexpress\/engrossing-account-of-addo-elephant-national-park-20211201-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Engrossing account of Addo Elephant National Park"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

For as long as I live in Nelson Mandela Bay, I will never ever take the Addo Elephant National Park, situated so close by, for granted again. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why is this?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The answer lies in two words:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cShaping Addo\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This book is a masterpiece, written by Mitch Reardon after years of his own intensive research on the park, his own observations while staying in the park, drawing on various doctoral dissertations and master theses as well as delving into the history of the park. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And for those who wonder about the Addo elephant\u2019s addiction to oranges in earlier years: it is true. After the establishment of the park in 1931, one of the schemes to boost tourism to the park was to let visitors feed the elephants oranges during the fruiting season by floodlight, Reardon writes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not only does he take the reader back to the early days when clashes between the Addo-elephant and farmers in the Sundays River Valley resulted in a carnage which at the end saw only 16 elephants left, he also takes the reader through the land, the veld, the different vegetations, the Alexander Bay beaches as well as the islands in the Indian oceans that all form part of the greater Addo-park.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the introduction to Shaping Addo, Reardon writes: \u201cAddo is home to the densest concentration of wild elephants anywhere in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This struck me, because for the first time I realised that only an incredible and biodiversity rich piece of nature can sustain almost 650 elephants, even in times of crippling drought.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Thicket<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And yes, piece by piece you find the answers in the different chapters of Shaping Addo. What stood out for me, was the chapter (Life in the Thickets) dealing with the dense vegetation of the thickets, also referred to as valley bushveld or Albany thicket. Of course, the remarkable spekboom, the elephant\u2019s big favourite, is part of this Addo thicket which consists of 112 vegetation types and 1 560 plant species.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reardon doesn\u2019t shy away from the tragic part of the Addo Elephant Park in the early 1900\u2019s when the Uitenhage and P.E. Farmer\u2019s Association demanded the elephant\u2019s total extermination. Major Jan Pretorius, who was contracted to do the hunting, described the thicket as a \u201chunter\u2019s hell.\u201d He killed more than 120 elephants according to his own estimates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One can feel one\u2019s anger rising while reading the tragic history, yet find solace in the words written by Reardon: \u201cIn hindsight many may have condemned what Pretorius did as wanton and grotesque, but history is about looking at the past without imposing contemporary values on those events.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thus, with a \u201clighter\u201d mind one can follow Reardon as he describes the various landscapes, biomes, fauna, flora, islands and marine life of the Addo Elephant National Park.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Addo dung beetle<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But let us not forget the flightless dung beetles, the black invertebrates that are the decomposers of elephant and buffalo scat. To them the dung is food and brood balls, to us the beetles are the sewage removal teams who work for free. In the chapter \u201cAfter the Storm\u201d the Addo flightless dung beetle is discussed in very interesting detail.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Also interesting is the black backed jackal, described in the Chapter \u201cJackals and hyaenas\u201d. After my having read through this, it felt to me as if the jackal has decided: \u201cTry to kill me and I will multiply.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, the ways and means of the Addo elephant also had me spellbound, but the details on the red hartebeest, rhino, bat eared fox, lion, eland, zebra, buffalo, the gannet (with its phenomenal plunge dives) the whales, the dolphins and African penguins also kept my eyes glued to the book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From every page of Shaping Addo it\u2019s clear that Mitch Reardon, who worked as a ranger in South Africa and Namibia before becoming a wildlife photographer and writer, draws not only from his own extensive knowledge of nature, but also on decades of research as well as physical observation to present a very readable and super informative book on the Addo Elephant National Park.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Also remember to take Shaping Addo with you the next time you visit the park, because the index at the back of the book will lead you to the page of the subject you want to know more about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One cannot but agree with Penguin Random House South Africa when they say: \u201cShaping Addo is an engrossing account of how a seemingly insignificant sanctuary (for the Addo elephant) was transformed into an astonishingly successful mega-park, and the most ecologically diverse protected space in South Africa.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n