"Tsetse flies…that’s a good sign,” said Pedro. “We must be close to palanca”. I couldn’t summon up his enthusiasm for these maddening insects now attacking us in kamikaze waves. But like us, they were attracted (albeit for very different purposes) to a fabled creature rarely seen by human eyes during the past three decades.

I’d joined conservationist Pedro vaz Pinto in central Angola to seek an incredibly rare antelope subspecies that was only recently rediscovered after being feared extinct. The giant sable (hippotragus niger variani) is such a master of camouflage that it remained undetected even when its numbers were high. Reports of its existence from Victorian explorers passing through Angolan territory didn’t start to filter out of Africa until the late 1880s. Early word was that there were sightings of a sable that bore horns greater than any other antelope known to man. After it was taxonomically classified in 1916 as a separate subspecies of hippotragus niger, separating it genetically from the common sable, Roosevelt sable and Zambian sable, trophy hunters and museum-collectors began a scramble for this ungulate’s prized horns. Then decades later during the devastating Angolan civil war, which commenced in 1974, the sable once again faded into obscurity.

During that conflict, Angola’s national parks were emptied of wildlife as animals were slaughtered to feed hungry government troops and the UNITA rebels who were both engaged in bush warfare. When the war ended in 2002, conservationists began searching for the endemic giant sable. Unseen since the early 1980s, it was feared that Angola’s national symbol (locally called palanca negra gigante) had been lost for good.

Based out of the Catholic University in Luanda, vaz Pinto began Projecto de Conservação da Palanca Negra Gigante after the war. “I’d heard disturbing wartime stories about them,” he explains. “In 1982 a friend driving in Luanda saw two men carrying a palanca trophy head. They told him they’d hunted it on demand for a rich Russian client. I also heard of Cuban soldiers flying overhead in helicopters and machine-gunning them from the air. When the war finished I just had to discover if they’d survived.” In early 2005, his photographic evidence from camera-traps unequivocally verified they had.

While vaz Pinto painstakingly manoeuvred his 4WD like a slalom skier through Cangandala National Park’s near impenetrable woodland, we kept our eyes peeled for palanca. The 63,000ha national park, ten-hours east of Luanda, lies within central Angola’s belt of deciduous miombo woodland, which stretches across the Cubango-Zambezi drainage system of central and southern Africa. Navigating through blanket stands of feathery-leafed brachystegia mussamba trees was made harder by having to avoid humungous termite condominiums. How could we ever spot palanca in this, I wondered, bumping and bouncing around vaz Pinto’s Land Cruiser cab?

But the odds were now firmly in our favour, thanks to a remarkable operation undertaken in July 2009 to create the first giant sable captive-breeding herd. As we entered the newly erected 400ha enclosure within the national park, vaz Pinto scanned the horizon with a VHF-frequency tracking aerial and announced that two recently radio-collared giant sables were nearby. One of Pedro’s eagle-eyed game scouts, a local Songo villager, spotted what I could only make out to be brown blurs amid a bottle-green curtain of miombo.

Employing binoculars, I was soon watching several partially obscured females, each conker-brown in colour with distinctive white underbellies. I traced one’s thick black mane to a long face with almost badger-like facial markings, complete with two distinctive drips of white under each eye. However, its crowning glory –gravity-defying horns that curve backwards towards their tips and splay slightly outwards – was magnificent. “That’s nothing,” dismissed vaz Pinto. “Wait until
you see Duarte.”

The females inside the enclosure were all captured within Cangandala while they were grazing flushing grass in the freshly burned anharas (forest glades), which break up the park’s canopy. Once tranquilised, they were airlifted here using a helicopter. The nine captured females – Joana, Katia, Luisa, Neusa, Paula, Quiteria, Rita, Sara, and Teresa – comprise Cangandala’s entire remaining population of giant sable. Pedro vaz Pinto and his researcher Sendi named each of them. “Katia looks a little thin around her haunches,” he fussed as we observed them. “Perhaps we should rename her Kate Moss.”

“The palanca had absolutely no future here,” he said. “There were no males alive in Cangandala. The last images of three males were photographed on camera-traps in 2007, but since then they’ve not been seen. They may have wandered outside Cangandala and been poached,” he speculated. His investigations also worryingly showed the females were breeding with an unwelcome hippotragus, an oversexed roan bull producing hybridised offspring. How ironic would it
be for the palanca negra subspecies to have survived war, only to become extinct due to hybridisation?

With no breeding bull found in Cangandala, palanca’s very existence came down to one last roll of the dice. Vaz Pinto turned his attention to the only other giant sable outpost known to exist – Luando Integral Reserve. Ten times Cangandala’s size, Luando is isolated from here by 100km and human habitation, making natural cross-fertilisation between the two remnant populations impossible. Worryingly, during frequent visits over previous years vaz Pinto had never seen a bull.

A miracle was required, and it duly arrived. On the first helicopter flight over Luando, a bull was darted. Duarte was one of eight males eventually tranquilised in Luando, though he was the only one translocated to Cangandala to complement the new breeding herd. Two or more males could not be brought because they would literally fight to the death over the females. I’d read of the bulls’ legendary ferocity, flailing their great horns at opponents in a slashing, scimitar-like fashion.

Finally, I got to see the new stud. He wasn’t easy to spot as his lustrous coal-black fur camouflaged him within the woodland’s dark recesses. As his new harem browsed contentedly, he moved into a sunlit gap between mussamba stems and I saw for the first time his proud, handsome stature. His neck was abnormally muscular, like a bulked-up 100m sprinter, but his horns, greater than the distance from the ground to his withers, took my breath away. His spectacular weapons measured 55 inches – average for a male palanca, but still comfortably in excess of common sables. In 1949 a hunter by the name of Count Yebas shot a palanca with 65 inch-long horns, the largest antelope horns ever recorded.
 

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During four further marvellous days camping at the restored national park HQ, we visited the breeding enclosure daily. Every sighting was like Christmas for vaz Pinto. He was in his element, acquainting himself with a species rarely studied in modern times.

The capture operation has enabled him to estimate the population size of this subspecies that is listed as Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red List. “I think there are less than 100, but maybe as few as 50 across both locations,” he explained. Numbers have never been historically high, with the last estimate being 1000-2000 in the late 1960s. “This habitat is nutrient deficient and cannot support high densities of game,” explained vaz Pinto. “Even in 1970, when there were few predators, low levels of poaching and less human population pressure, numbers weren’t high.

For now, vaz Pinto hopes the breeding herd will deliver new offspring this summer. To accommodate expected births, the enclosure will soon be extended, and within a few years, courtesy of substantial financial donations from foreign oil-companies, the whole national park will be fenced to curtail gradual settlement encroachments.

But the future of giant sable, vaz Pinto concedes, lies within the Luando Reserve due to its larger palanca population and habitat size. As a first step there, he’s currently undertaking helicopter surveys to assess the giant sable population’s true numbers. Yet fencing Luando’s vast reserve of wetlands, floodplains, and miombo forest, will prove a Herculean task.

Travelling back to Luanda, I see images of giant sable emblazoned on everything from storefront signs to international football tournament posters. I can’t help but reflect on the paradox of giant sable images being used incessantly within a society that is largely ignorant of the animal’s perilous plight. However, with Angola facing huge post-war challenges, conservation clearly remains a negligible priority. And in all honesty, it would probably make little difference to the giant sable’s iconic status within this country if it did become extinct. Fortunately Pedro vaz Pinto is determined the palanca should remain flesh and blood.