Experience the Knysna forest through the eyes of renowned author, Dalene Matthee.

“She walked through the trees, up a hill, every step bringing a different fragrance: a gardenia was blooming somewhere, white elder-honey dripping from a bee’s nest. Somewhere a genet slept. A wild pig, a bushbuck. A mouse was giving birth in a nest of leaves. A cross-berry was in flower. Toad-stools that smelled like bread. Another chestnut. Butterflies that smelled of the earth. A wild honeysuckle was in blossom and the small blue butterflies that played around it smelled like milk. It was a magic forest, a dreamforest where life was a dream, even if you were awake.”

A glimpse of the magic of the forest...

Karoliena Kapp’s dream-like experience of the forest

“She always won against the bush-loerie (Narina trogon). She simply hooted eight times through her lips and hid herself in the undergrowth. The bush-loerie is inquisitive and will always come closer to see where you are. Somewhat dim-witted, it always hooted again to find out if you would answer. But when it saw you were a human, it didn’t want to play anymore.”

“Somewhere above her head in the forest canopy

BIRDS

“They were as mysterious as the deepest forest gorge where few dared to venture, they could con-verse with one another in a secret code so that one of them could quickly drag away the bushbuck – under the keepers’ nose – that lay strangled in an illegal snare. They admitted their deepest fears with the frankness of children, shared their last piece of bread or sweet potato with each other; took the axe from a weak one’s hands and hacked his wood for him. They climbed the highest cliffs in the foothills of the mountains to reach a beehive for a little sweetness – or to brew some honey beer for a little gaiety.”

“Woodcutters sometimes made the most beautiful pieces of furniture for their simple homes without realising they were works of art.”

WOODCUTTERS

“A plantation is different from a forest. The one is God-made, the other man-made; one is needles, the other leaves; one standsin rows, the other in freedom.”

FORESTS & PLANTATIONS

Through Dalene Matthee's books, the stories of the Knysna Forest took on a new life. We followed Saul Barnard and Old Foot on the forest footpaths in Circles in a Forest. We got to know the people of the forest in Fiela's Child and The Mulberry Forest. And we got a glimpse of the magic of the forest through Karoliena Kapp in Dreamforest.

Dalene's special relationship with the Knysna Forest started in 1978 when she first visited the forest. In Dreamforest (Toorbos), Matthee's intimate knowledge of and insight into the forest, as well as her genuine caring for the trees, flowers and animals of the Knysna Forest once again became evident.

Here are a few excerpts from Dreamforest (Toorbos):

a loerie was gurgling and hissing to warn the elephant that there was a human walking along the sledpath… the bird was the elephant’s friend, a tell-tale that always alerted him when a human was close by.”

DALENE MATTHEE'S KNYSNA

The famous, elusive Knysna elephants belong to the same genus and species as all South African elephants:

Scientific classificationKingdom: AnimaliaPhylum: ChordataSubphylum: VertebrataClass: MammalSuperorder: AfrotheriaOrder: ProboscideaFamily: Elephantidae (Gray, 1821)Genus & species: Loxodonta africana (Blumenbach, 1797)

Afrikaans: Olifant Xhosa: Indlovu

about the knysnaelephants

Elephant herds divide themselves into female families (adult female relatives and their young), which are led by matriarchs (the oldest, most experienced cows in each group). Young bulls leave their families at about 13 years of age - either to live alone or in all-male herds.

In areas where multiple families live in relatively close proximity to one another, a number of families may form a ‘bond group;’ and where numbers of bond-groups occur in a single region, they may form super-groups known as ‘clans.’

social structure

When a sexually mature bull enters a state of reproductive readiness he’s said to be ‘in musth’ (from the Hindi term for ‘intoxication’). At this time, the animal will experience increased levels of testosterone (up to 60 times its normal load) and its temporal ducts, (which are situated midway between the eye and the ear) will excrete a thick, strong-smelling fluid called temporin.

Bulls in musth become extremely aggressive.

When a dominant bull in musth approaches a herd, the older females will allow it access to the female in oestrus - but they’ll block the way for younger males (which may or may not be in musth). Since it means that only the largest, most dominant bulls are able to cover the females, musth may therefore act as a barrier to inbreeding.

MUSTH

The famous, elusive Knysna elephants...

Elephants, humans, and Neanderthals are the only mammals known to exhibit (or have exhibited in the case of the Neanderthals) any rituals for burial of the dead.

Elephants will often stand quietly over a dead animal (or human) for up to two days after discovering the body, and will cover it with leaves, branches, and sand before moving away. They’re also known to revisit burial sites over many years. This may be the root of the old myth of an ‘elephant graveyard’ - a secret place whereelephants went to die.

burial

Elephants rely heavily on their highly developed sense of smell:

“When I try to understand what an elephant is thinking and feeling, I first watch its trunk and see where its attention is focused... The tip of an elephant’s trunk is almost never stationary, moving in whichever direction it finds interesting.”

- Dr. Joyce Pool, co-founder of Elephant Voices

Sense of smell

Elephants communicate in various ways:

Visually Elephants use a sophisticated sign language that employs a series of gestures and postures (displays).

COMMUNICATION

African elephants live in highlyordered family groups. The largest land mammals in the world, they can reach up to 4 metres in height, up to 6,350 kg in weight, and up to 70 years in age.

of the knysna forest

TouchElephants use all parts of their bodies to touch one another purposefully.

ChemicallyElephants gather detailed information from one another though odours found in urine, faeces, saliva, and secretions from glands such as the temporal gland.

Acoustically We humans are able to hear many of the elephants’ calls - trumpeting, snorts, barks, grunts, cries - but they also employ low-frequency rumbling noises, which they can hear from as far as 10 km away. People once believed that these rumbling noises came from the elephant’s stomach, but in fact they’re created in the same way as the human voice: air from the lungs is passed over the larynx (vocal chords) - which in African elephants can reache a length of about 75 mm.