Dorob National Park

Tern eggs, horse skulls and the tracks Mad Max left

On 20 November 2003 a Damara tern was caught on its nest on the gravel just south of Swakopmund and given two yellow rings. In August 2008 the researcher Justine Braby found the same bird roosting on Lighthouse Beach at Tarkwa Bay, Lagos, about 4,000 km up the coast. It had been trapped back in Namibia on 11 November 2007 and was trapped again on 11 November 2008, both times within metres of the original scrape. A bird 23 cm long, flying to Nigeria and back to the same patch of gravel in the same weeks of November.

The barriers Rod and Sigi Braby put up

Almost every Damara tern in the world breeds in Namibia, and a coast survey in 1991 showed that the gravel flats among the dunes from Walvis Bay to Swakopmund are the most densely used breeding ground of all, with up to 200 nests in a season. The pair lays a single egg in a scrape on bare ground, and only about a third of chicks get as far as flying. Jackals, crows and kestrels take some. Quad bikes and bakkies crushed others.

Rod Braby, once a warden at Möwe Bay and later chief warden for Erongo, monitored two colonies here with his wife Sigi from 1995 to 2010. Cable barriers and signboards went up at the first of them in November 2000 and breeding success rose from a little over half to about 80 per cent. Their daughter Justine built the ringing records into a University of Cape Town PhD, which notes that drivers were still cutting the cables years on. One tern ringed as a chick in November 1993 was caught on a nest in 2004 and again in 2008, fifteen years old.

The colonies are closed, so do not go looking for nests. The first eggs are laid in early November, breeding runs to about February, and the birds have left by April. They fish close inshore, in and just behind the surf, dropping from a few metres up, so the place to look in summer is the water’s edge between the two towns, not the plains. Even there they are small, pale and easy to miss.

Why one colony is called Horses Graves

The Brabys’ two study colonies were Caution Reef, 8 km south of Swakopmund, where 120 pairs were counted in the 1994/95 season, and Horses Graves, 4 km south of town. The second name is no figure of speech. In October 1915, a few months after the German surrender, the Union Defence Force moved its horses and mules down to the coast because feed had run short inland. Glanders broke out. A Ministry of Defence telegram of 15 May 1916, found in the South African military archives, gives the count: 1,695 horses and 944 mules destroyed at Swakopmund in November and December 1915. The vet sent from Cape Town with mallein, the reagent used to test for the disease, arrived ten days late because his ship, the British Prince, was wrecked on the way.

The bones lie in the dune valleys 4 to 5 km south of the Swakop River, inside the area now cabled off for the terns. The few 4x4 drivers who came across them described long mounds of bleached skulls, most with a bullet hole in the forehead, and a more recent visitor found rusted horseshoes and scraps of halter among them. Dunes here move up to 2 m a year, so the bones vanish under sand and then surface again.

What a film crew can do in six months

Wheel marks on these plains outlast the people who made them. Dune guides still point out ox-wagon ruts left by the early German settlers, and the lichen researcher Jennifer Lalley worked out that a machine-cleared track through a lichen field needs several hundred years to heal. One of the big Teloschistes lichen fields starts 4 km north of Wlotzkasbaken.

So it mattered when Mad Max: Fury Road arrived in July 2012, a year and a half after the park was proclaimed. The shoot had been planned for Australia until heavy rain turned the desert there green. Filming ran to December, six months in all. Tommy Collard, who guides in the dune belt, said the crew cut tracks into untouched ground and then dragged nets over them to hide the marks, pulling plants out as they went. The coastal project NACOMA hired the ecologist Joh Henschel to look into it. He reported that some areas had been destroyed and that a ploughing device had been used in one place, and his report called the ministry’s permit too unspecific to manage the shoot by. The Namibia Film Commission answered with a full-page advert in the state newspaper New Era rejecting the allegations. The film won six Oscars.

Salt tables and Bennie’s red lorry

People who drive north from Swakopmund towards Henties Bay and the Skeleton Coast describe gravel, sea, and very little between. Anglers have named the fishing spots, and the names are the best reading on the map. Bennie se Rooi Lorrie is where a young man lost his favourite red truck. Sarah se Gat was one keen fisherwoman’s regular hole.

Wlotzkasbaken is about a hundred owner-built houses, each with its own water tank, no fences, plots marked with rocks. One traveller on the way to Cape Cross wrote of unmanned roadside tables selling salt crystals, with a slotted bottle for the money, and of nearly treading on a horned adder between the lichen fields.

As for big animals, the ministry lists springbok, oryx, zebra and brown hyaena for the park. Trip reports from the coast road mention seals and seabirds and nothing bigger, so do not plan around them. Far inland in the north of the park is the Messum Crater, a collapsed volcano some 20 km across and 132 million years old. It was first recognised for what it is in 1939 by Henno Martin, the geologist who a year later went to ground in the Namib for two and a half years and wrote The Sheltering Desert.