Barred from the country I call home, the loss and near loss of my mothers, my research, friends, and family all out of reach; how COVID 19 flipped my world. A personal essay of love and loss by our ecologist Axel Hunnicutt.

*Sunset at Wild Tomorrow Fund’s Ukuwela Reserve. Photo by Jenn London, October Conservation Photography Volunteer.*

The unknown has always intrigued me and in many ways has led me down my career path and influenced most of my major life choices. With the start of each workday in South Africa there is a certain and expected level of unpredictability of how much of what you think will happen will happen and how many unforeseen events will arise. Often days meant to be spent catching up on reports in the office are instead spent chasing down and capturing rhinos or lions, fighting bush fires, or digging a vehicle out of a river; even days where those events are somewhat expected, “murphy rears his head” and hours are spent doing something completely different and wild. I love it! It is what keeps my interest and sparks the eagerness in my eyes at first light each day. I am no stranger to daily events taking a sharp turn when least expected. But this was something else.

*Axel putting in a prescribed burn. Photo by Simon Naylor*

For the last seven years I have called South Africa home. I’ve completed two graduate degrees at universities in the country, established a network of relationships across the conservation community, and almost every day here have woken up in a game reserve to do my day’s work. As an ecologist for Wild Tomorrow Fund and a carnivore researcher in the region, my daily work takes me to multiple game reserves in central Zululand where any number of things can occur. Usually seen in a roofless green land rover defender tracking hyenas through the Mun-Ya-Wana Conservancy, patrolling with our field rangers on the Mfuleni section of the Greater Ukuwela Nature Reserve, or helping the Phinda Conservation Management team with the capture of a rhino or cheetah; a day in my life is typically idyllic. Looking back in my phone’s photo gallery in the week leading up to my sudden departure from the country, I had captured and collared two spotted hyenas for my research project, changed a satellite tag on a pangolin on a cliff side, assisted at a gruesome rhino poaching incident, bumped into a large sleeping male leopard while tracking one of our collared hyenas, and tracked down and captured a free-roaming lion in the area.

Life was busy and exciting, and best of all I was just about to go home for some scheduled leave in the US. After working 10 weeks I was going to see my fiance, Elin, during one of her only weeks off this year. This was going to be a particularly exciting trip as our families were going to meet for the first time in New York City and Elin had made appointments for her, our mothers, and my grandmother to go wedding dress shopping, while the boys had tickets to a baseball game.

We had all been watching the news and I remember it frequently coming up at dinner conversations throughout January and February; “what do you make of this whole coronavirus thing?”. Many said it was just another flu, even more saying it would likely not affect us. For me the first slap of reality was the first week of March when my sister, who works in Seattle, was quarantined to work at home after someone working in her office building tested positive for COVID-19, one of the first in the country. She had also just returned from a trip to Japan the month earlier and having seen more than most Americans first-hand, was quick to stand up and warn my family of what was coming our way.

Within days Elin and I canceled our New York City trip, as cases rose heavily by the day and a quarantine zone was set up around New Rochelle, NY, a town close to where my family lives outside NYC. Instead we planned that I would go directly to Oregon to be with her and hopefully could see my parents and grandmother during my layover in New York. At the end of the first week of March, watching the news back home, talking to my family and friends, and looking beyond the African horizon, it felt as though the situation was becoming more real and dire with every waking hour. Seeing how quickly it was developing, I knew I had to return home to Elin and my family no matter what. Ten days prior to my scheduled flight home, the US president made the confusing announcement that those returning from Europe would be barred from entering the United States, similar announcements were made across the world. With borders quickly closing, I desperately changed my flight to early the next morning from Johannesburg to New York’s JFK. Knowing my parents were the primary care-giver to my 88 year old grandmother who lives next door, we decided we wouldn’t risk an airport layover meeting.

The night before I left we had an amphibian expert, Jeanne, on the reserve conducting a frog survey with us. After weeks without rain it decided to pour that night and myself and Jeanne found ourselves stuck in the pouring rain with our roofless vehicle stuck in thick mud. Two more vehicles got stuck that night before I returned home close to midnight covered in mud ready to pack my bags for a sunrise departure.

Prior to getting to the first South African airport on my trip home, there was little evidence that coronavirus was a thing. Sure it was mentioned and talked about, but it wasn’t here and it wasn’t a threat. The Durban airport was where I saw the first of the masks. Every employee had a surgical or construction mask and there was ample opportunity to get your hands sterilized around every corner. In Johannesburg it was the same, but as the major international hub for the country the airport was packed with foreigners trying to get flights home, I was one of them. While I boarded my flight to New York, the South African president, Cyril Ramaphosa, made his first public speech on the virus announcing that active immediately, all visas were revoked and the country would be shutting its borders to all Europeans and Americans (among other nations). I read the speech as we waited for everyone to board the plane and I realized my ticket had just become one-way. I ran to the front of the plane to ask if they had any further knowledge of the president's announcement and if I would be allowed back if I stayed on the plane. They assured me that I would and my visa would still be valid. I had no idea that was my farewell to the country I’ve called home all these years.

Landing in New York we were greeted to a massive line of over 500 people waiting to get through border control, all crammed together in line. Once through, I sat in an empty domestic terminal where I called my grandmother and ate a veggie burger from the only open restaurant. I told her that soon enough we’d redo our exciting week we had planned and I’d see her soon once this was over. The woman cleaning the seats nearby told me the terminal had been empty for the last week and she was unsure of her job. Nearby a group of people in full makeshift hazmat suits ran to their gate as a the only dining couple scoffed at their attire.

Once in Oregon, I hunkered down with Elin at a friend’s house, it was meant to be her spring break off from vet school, so we continued to act like it was a holiday. While we watched the United States shut down, each morning there was news from South Africa of suspected cases in the reserves we work in and the looming threat of widespread devastation in the country. With such a large percentage of the population with conditions such as TB and HIV, it seemed like South Africa was holding a match in a pool of gasoline. A week after I arrived in the US, South Africa announced it would be enforcing a nation-wide lockdown. No citizens would be allowed into public spaces or even on public roads, everything would be shut down with the exception of pharmacies and grocery stores, but those were only open to a selected few industries who could obtain an “essential worker” permit. Until further notice South Africa was closed to itself, the world, and to me. The suspicions I’d ignored had come true, that the home, the life, the world of friends I had created in South Africa would be out of reach as we all tumbled further down the rabbit hole into the unknown.

*Axel working on a spotted hyena for the Mun-Ya-Wana Conservancy Spotted Hyena Project just nights before his departure.*

The calculated and methodical pursuit of the unknown and revealing truths in our world is to some extent a rough definition of science. It is the reason I was in South Africa, the reason that for over seven years I have worked in the bush in Zululand, studying spotted hyenas; a creature who has a seemingly endless number of hidden truths to uncover. Scientific discoveries are marvelous and usually all the more so the more wrong you were in your original hypothesis. However, no matter how unexpected your results are, they are rarely personal, if only to your ego.

In the days after learning that my entire life would be put on hold while I waited on the other side of the world with a single suitcase, a laptop, and as much money as I could draw from my South African bank account, the bad news poured in from the other side of the country. Looking back it all happened so quickly, but at the time it was painfully slow. At first it was that my grandmother wasn’t feeling well and was going to bed early before we could talk to her; the following morning she was nearly completely incapacitated when my mother went to check on her. My mother took her to get tested and also got one as well, though we wouldn’t know the results for over a week. Two days later the ambulance came to take her to the hospital and my father also went to get tested after falling ill. A month after my sister was first home from work in Seattle, we were on the phone together crying our last words to our grandmother who died in the hospital a day later from COVID-19. My parents, overcome with the virus and now overwhelmed with grief both struggled. My mother in particular was in extremely poor shape at home as the doctors tried to keep her out of the hospital. Elin and I considered packing the car and driving the 3000 miles across the country to be with them, though we knew we could do nothing for them, nothing more than see them through the windows of the house.

Euphoric memories of my life just weeks earlier in the South African bush, driving past herds of elephants, walking into rhinos, and having my lunches next to the river where the hippos bobbed up and down; those joyful times seemed so very far away now. There was only sadness and pain in a world where a family could not grieve, a son could not care for his parents, and the only certainty in the world came from my partner.

However, taking a cue from nature, life goes on. Each week I download the data stored on the GPS collars on the spotted hyenas back in Zululand, I do this from an online portal and can even do it on my phone whenever and wherever I want. Nothing has changed, the hyenas continue to hunt, to den, and to sleep atop the small hills and rocky outcrops in the reserves. It’s been a month now since my grandmother passed, my parents are almost fully recovered, though my mother still doesn’t have use of her voice, and I’ve been back at work. However, my work these days for Wild Tomorrow Fund is nothing like what it was two months ago. Living in suburban Oregon in the Willamette Valley, the only animal action I see is when Charlie, our big, black dog, charges at the mailman or chases a squirrel on our morning walks.

I may not be in the wilds of Zululand at the moment, but my conservation work with Wild Tomorrow Fund hasn’t dwindled. Like most of us we’ve had to adapt and evolve in the world of COVID-19. I no longer trudge through tick-infested savannas, but I am writing management plans to protect them, and while I haven’t seen a hyena in quite some time, I certainly have a lot of time to share my knowledge of them with people through webinars and blogs. It’s been an interesting adjustment and as I write this we still have no idea when South Africa will start to open or even when flights might resume there. So for the time being I am an armchair ecologist, who carries his fond memories of home with him everyday between the desk and the bedroom, but still in many ways no less effective in impacting change on the world for the sake of nature.

FROM THE BUSH INTO THE UNKNOWN