Hidden in the Angolan Highlands is a purportedly new kind of elephant. Conservationist and ornithologist Steve Boyes has spent years tracking this hard-to-find herd, and his expedition is the focus of Ghost Elephants, an eerie, evocative documentary directed by Werner Herzog. The film premiered at the Venice International Film Festival last summer and is now headed to National Geographic and Disney+.
An ornithologist searching for distant pachyderms might seem surprising, but for Boyes the link is natural. He grew up in South Africa and longed to be an explorer, inspired by the people he read about every month in National Geographic magazine. “I grew up waiting for the magazine to arrive; I wanted the maps,” Boyes told Ars. “Those would become my garden, or the field beyond, or the river—wild places imagined and real.”
Boyes’ parents often took him and his brother into wild places, including trips to Botswana and Tanzania. “We used to embed ourselves in baboon troops and walk with impalas,” said Boyes, and while his brother feared elephants, Boyes was comfortable around them from an early age. Ghost Elephants includes beautiful underwater sequences of elephant feet moving through water and of elephants swimming on their sides, scenes that reflect Boyes’ own encounters. Under the right conditions, if they don’t feel threatened, elephants “will come and swim around you and with you and interact with you,” he said. “So elephants have always fascinated me.”
As an adult, Boyes carried out his PhD work on the Meyer’s parrot in the Okavango Delta, which hosts the largest elephant population on Earth. The parrots and elephants had a kind of reciprocal relationship. “Every tree that the parrots were feeding on, the elephants were feeding on,” he said. “The elephants were creating the nest cavities for the parrots by disturbing the trees.”
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