Posted: 9/10/2024
Among the Ana Trees
By Avery Roberts
The months leading up to the long-awaited trip to South Africa were spent in preparation. Items were crossed off the packing list, ideas were formed of all the perfect photo opportunities with my brand-new camera, and weekly meetings allowed for us to learn of the great biodiversity of Kruger National Park. It was during those meetings where our projects for the month were revealed to us. One project involved distance sampling of zebra populations and the other consisted of researching fever trees and their regeneration patterns. With that in mind, I never considered the possibility that there would be something else entirely occupying my thoughts.
While we did spend a great deal of time working with fever tree stands, measuring their height and diameter-at-breast-height (DBH), and counting fallen trees and limbs (my task), my sole focus was not on fever trees, but ana trees. This was the case for a few reasons. One being that of the two stands we plotted, the second was a mixed stand with fever trees and ana trees. Since ana trees were also dominant in those areas this meant that they must also be included in our research. Another reason being that I was assigned to write a reflection over ana trees. Before the trip, South African trees, and trees in general, were hardly on the forefront of my mind. How could they be when my whole life I had been dreaming of towers of giraffes and herds of elephants?
Much of my knowledge about this tree came from one of our assignments. Named the "raffle tree reflection," our task was to write a reflection on a randomly assigned tree, both on the species as a whole and an individual tree located somewhere in the concession. This assignment required a deep dive into the details. With a height of 120 ft and a DBH of 90 cm, my ana tree was dominant in its area within the mixed fever and ana tree stand. Research from the camp library (as we had no internet access) told me that the spines on ana trees are paired, meaning that they grow two right next to each other. Their dark brown bark is apparent, but what we could not see was their coiled seed pods as they had already dropped for the season. This assignment did well to get me acquainted with textbook knowledge of the species, but since it was not completed until our final week, everything that I had known up until then was based on observations. This often involved standing at the base of a tree in the area and looking up over one hundred feet to the top of its crown, wrapping my arms around the trunk of my tree as I measured for diameter, or even walking through thorny seedlings in complete silence as we searched for the perfect spot for data collection.
My first in person observation of ana trees was what initially hooked me. What began as an evening activity where we drove out to the landing strip in search of wildlife. This included waterbucks, baboons, zebras, nyalas, and what would become one of my favorite encounters – elephants. As we watched a bull on the shore of the Luvhuvu River, just up ahead a breeding herd was foraging in the ana trees. We sat silently in the Land Cruiser as our field guide, Nathan, explained to us that photographers came from all over the world to get a picture of the elephants standing within these mighty trees. At the very same time, a vehicle could be heard approaching us head on, and as the matriarch and her young one were standing in the road, they had nowhere to go but right towards us. When the rest of the herd picked up on the matriarch’s uneasiness, they immediately rushed together and circled their young, trumpeting and flapping their ears in hopes of scaring away whatever had caused the distress. Eventually the vehicle stopped to wait for the herd to calm down and disperse. As we sat a while longer watching them continue to forage, excitedly discussing what we had just witnessed, a lone bull approached the herd. The matriarch, in no uncertain terms, told him to back off and continue on his way. He did just that, but not before stopping to strip the bark of an ana tree in order to feed on the nutrient dense cambium layer.
While these encounters may be some of my most memorable experiences of the trip, they were also what began to change my attitude towards trees. I had been handed the knowledge that made these trees something more. Not only were they my ticket to the perfect picture, but an essential piece of the landscape that I was living in, providing food and structure, shelter and shade. Observing them allowed me to see first-hand the role that they play and enabled me to develop an understanding of these trees in a way not possible from just reading about them. I am forever grateful for this knowledge, and I can only hope that one day I will be back among the ana trees.
