editorial
When you have to consult a thesaurus for another synonym for ‘abundance’, you know you’re dealing with somewhere very special indeed. So it happened when I was editing the captions for our cover feature, ‘Going Green’. Dale Morris’s portfolio of the Okavango Delta during the rainy – and traditionally less popular – season, is an appropriately verdant and lavish celebration of this time of plenty (page 48).
An equally lavish (though more wordy and, it must be said, cerulean) celebration can be found on page 40, where Cheryl Lyn Dybas explores the past, present and future of that most intriguing of fish, the coelac-anth. It may have survived for 400 million years – and there may be more than we ever thought – but the threats to its continued existence are mounting fast.
For me, however, one of the most memorable moments of this issue comes from Geoff Spiby’s contribution to the ‘On Assignment’ column (page 68). While his photograph of the dugong is wonderful (and all the more remarkable for its rarity), it is the inadvertently poignant picture he paints of his encounter with this great mammal that moved me. It’s not written with much sentimentality, but the image of this solitary dugong – the only known representative of its kind in the area – intent on munching sea grass and not showing the slightest bit of interest in the photographer, or indeed any obvious know-ledge of the precariousness of its existence, stayed with me for a long time.
Of course, I’ll never know what it was really thinking, but there are people out there who claim that they can communicate with animals. I thought long and hard before I accepted Geoff Dalglish’s proposal to feature one such ‘animal whisperer’ (page 61), and I’m well aware that many of you may view interspecies communication with a degree of scepticism, if not downright contempt. But I believe that Anna Breytenbach is the real deal and that she, and other communicators, may have much to teach us about the creatures with which we coexist. competitions
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