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Title: When an Elephant Charges, Do Nothing”: Biologist Richard F.W. Barnes Recounts Three Decades in the African Bush

United States, 10th Nov 2026 - Beating About the Bush: On the Frontiers of Elephant Conservation” follows wild elephants, and the farmers who live beside them, across Tanzania, Gabon, Ghana and Togo. The first lesson wildlife biologist Richard F.W. Barnes received in Tanzania’s Ruaha National Park went against every instinct he had. “When an elephant charges, do nothing,” a ranger told him. “If you run, then the elephant will come after you.” That advice opens Beating About the Bush: On the Frontiers of Elephant Conservation, his memoir of a career spent on foot among wild elephants. The book is available now on Amazon. Born in Africa, Barnes first went to Tanzania to study chimpanzees with Jane Goodall at Gombe. Events in 1975 changed his plans. Soon afterward he was tracking elephants through the bush of Ruaha with two park rangers as his guides. That first project led to three decades of fieldworkacross the continent.The memoir moves from east to west in three parts. In Tanzania, Barnes measures the damage elephants do to baobab trees during a heated debate over culling. A few years later, poachers kill about half of the park’s elephants. Return visits reveal a “missing generation” of young animals. In the rainforests of Gabon, he leads a team that counts forest elephants through the one sign they reliably leave behind: their dung. There he contends with pythons, river rapids, and a slipped disc far from any road. In Ghana and Togo, the focus turns to farmers who can lose a season’s food toelephants in a single night.That last thread runs through the whole book. Barnes writes about the strain elephants place on rural communities, “particularly the burden elephants impose upon the poorest of the poor.” He recalls a woman in Gabon who confronted him after elephant...

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