The hunt for elusive “ghost elephants”.

A new species of elephant is rumored to be hiding deep in the mountains of Angola. Conservationist and ornithologist Steve Boyes has been searching for this elusive flock for years, and the story of his journey is in the spotlight. Ghost Elephantsan exciting documentary directed by his director Werner Herzog. The film debuted at the Venice International Film Festival last summer and is now coming to National Geographic and Disney+.

It may seem unusual for an ornithologist to set out on a quest to find remote pachyderms, but for Boyes, the connection is a natural one. He grew up in South Africa and wanted nothing more than to be an explorer like the people he read about every month. National Geographic magazine. “I grew up waiting for the magazine to come; I wanted the maps,” Boyes told Ars. “These will be my garden, or the field over there, or the river—wild places, imaginary and real.”

Boyes’ parents often took him and his brother into the wild, including trips to Botswana and Tanzania. “We used to put ourselves in baboon packs and ride with impalas,” Boyes said, and while his brother was terrified of elephants, Boyes rode with them from a young age. Ghost Elephants contains some spectacular underwater footage of elephant feet wading through water and elephants swimming alongside, behaving in accordance with Boyes’ experiments with the animals. Under the right conditions, if they don’t feel threatened, elephants will “come and swim around you and with you and interact with you,” he said. “So I’ve always been fascinated by elephants.”

As an adult, Boyes conducted his PhD research Meyer’s parrot In the Okavango Delta, the only place in the world where elephants live the most. They shared a kind of symbiotic relationship with parrots. “Every tree where parrots were fed, elephants were fed,” he said. “The elephants were disturbing the trees to create nesting holes for the parrots.”