Steve Boyes on ‘Ghost Elephants’: Experiencing the birthplace of science

South African naturalist Steve Boyes speaks on ghost elephants, ancestral tracking, and Werner Herzog’s documentary exploring Angola’s elusive highland giants

Werner Herzog’s new documentary, Ghost Elephants, which had its world premiere at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival, follows South African naturalist Steve Boyes on his quest for an undiscovered species of elephant in the Angolan highlands.

The documentary, which premiered on National Geographic on March 20, is beautifully shot, (the poaching sequences are distressing) and buttressed by Herzog’s distinctive narrative style, tells the tale of these giant, yet elusive creatures.

Boyes has a two-fold plan of action; to capture the mysterious pachyderms on film and to find a DNA link between the ghost elephants and the Fénykövi elephant, a massive specimen in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC.

Speaking from New York during the theatrical premiere, Boyes traces the beginnings of his Ahab-like quest. “In 2015, we spent six months in armored vehicles trying to get through minefields to gain access to the source of the Okavango Delta.” They arrived in winter. “Coming out of the Highlands and going through the forests, everything was shut down.”

In an attempt to defeat the silence and stillness, Boyes would go for a run every afternoon when the party stopped on the river. “I would go to the highest ridge and whistle. Once I found footprints of people who had been honey hunting, and I pursued them. I was obsessed, I wanted to meet someone,” Boyes says with a laugh.

On one of those runs, Boyes found elephant dung. “I found what I call an elephant garden, where an old bull elephant lives. He had broken all the trees around to make a clearing, and then broke the tops of trees so they would grow from the bottom, for young elephants to feed on. What he was doing was hoping that when the breeding herds came through, they would stop in his garden, so he could interact with them. He was just a lonely old bull elephant.”