Field Stories | Raquel de Castro Maia

Field Stories

Some stories cannot be told in a single image. They unfold across valleys and decades, through recovery, discovery and return.

These are stories written by the land itself: elephants remembering an ancient corridor, an orchid hiding in plain sight, a farm learning to be wild again, the extraordinary diversity of fynbos and its hidden guardians, the quiet return of species, a place for giants and the teams making space for life.

If you have a story the world should know, let me tell it for you.

Rewilding · Eden to Addo

Following the Elephants: A Corridor of Hope

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For thousands of years, elephants moved freely between the forests, mountains and coastal plains of the Southern Cape, until fences and fragmentation cut those ancient pathways apart. Today, the Eden to Addo Corridor Initiative is working to stitch a 400-kilometre stretch of the region back together, reconnecting five of South Africa's biomes and relying largely on private landowners willing to bring their farms into a shared conservation network.

Among the species this work is trying to protect is a single, isolated elephant, believed to be the last truly wild elephant in South Africa. This is the story of what it takes to restore a corridor, not just for elephants, but for an entire living system, water, seeds, pollinators and predators alike, that depends on the freedom to move.

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Fact file

African Bush Elephant

Loxodonta africana

Genus Loxodonta · Elephantidae

Endangered

Habitat: Diverse sub-Saharan habitats, savanna grassland, woodland, forest, wetland and farmland, from sea level to mountain slopes
Lifespan: Up to 70–75 years in the wild

Key facts

The largest living land animal: adult bulls stand roughly 3.0–3.4 m at the shoulder and weigh about 5.2–6.9 tonnes.
Both sexes grow ivory tusks throughout life; the longest recorded tusk measured 3.51 m and weighed 117 kg, the trait that drives the poaching crisis.
Herds are matriarchal: a family unit is led by the oldest female, who guides the group to food and water and coordinates cooperative care of calves.
Assessed for the first time as a species separate from the forest elephant in 2021 and listed as Endangered, with over 60% of the savanna population estimated lost since 1965.

Botanical Discovery · Critically Endangered Flora

The Orchid That Was Waiting to Be Seen

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As the last light settled across the fynbos-covered hills of Gondwana Game Reserve, five white flowers appeared beside a rough track.

They were easy to miss. Nestled among restios and low shrubs, the blooms rose only a short distance above the ground. Yet there was something distinctive about them.

Identified as Satyrium muticum, commonly known as the Sticky Satyre, the orchid was classified as Critically Endangered. On paper, it was a species on the brink.

Yet landscapes rarely read the same reports as scientists.

When the flowering season returned the following year, new populations emerged from the fynbos. Then more. Some numbered well over a thousand plants.

A species can spend decades hidden in plain sight. And sometimes the future of a species changes not because it was rescued, but because it was finally seen.

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Fact file

Sticky Satyr Orchid

Satyrium muticum

Genus Satyrium · Orchidaceae

Endangered

Habitat: Dry to moist lower slopes (up to ~200 m) in fynbos and renosterveld of the Western Cape; only four small, fragmented subpopulations are known
Lifespan: Terrestrial perennial orchid, growing from a tuber

Key facts

A range-restricted South African terrestrial orchid, very rare: roughly 2,500 mature individuals remain, with the largest single subpopulation under 200 plants.
Unusually for the genus, it lacks the paired nectar spurs typical of most Satyrium species; it is pollinated by monkey beetles that carry its pollen packets on their backs.
Threatened by urban expansion, agriculture and forestry, with ongoing habitat loss recorded at three of its four known sites.
SANBI Red List: Endangered (assessed 2018), under criteria B1ab(iii,v)+2ab(iii,v); C2a(ii).

RangeWestern Cape, South Africa (highly localised)

Rewilding · Twenty Years of Recovery

The Land Remembers

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Long before fences, livestock and cultivated fields reshaped the Southern Cape, elephants moved through these valleys.

Lions hunted across the foothills. Black rhino browsed among dense thickets. By the early nineteenth century, much of that world had disappeared.

Then, slowly, another story began to emerge.

In 2004, a former livestock farm near Mossel Bay became the foundation for what would eventually become Gondwana Game Reserve. Over the next two decades, degraded farmland was transformed through one of the Southern Cape's most ambitious rewilding initiatives. Indigenous habitats recovered. Wildlife returned.

Today, lions once again patrol these hills.

Because beneath the fences, roads and centuries of change, the land has never forgotten how to be wild.

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Place

Gondwana Private Game Reserve

Type: Private game reserve (rewilded fynbos)
Region: Garden Route, near Mossel Bay, Western Cape

A rewilded former-farmland reserve in the Cape Floral Kingdom, restoring endangered fynbos and renosterveld habitats, and the wildlife that lived there before European settlement, alongside an active conservation foundation.

Key facts

≈11,000 hectares on South Africa's southernmost coast, developed expressly to rewild the region
Free-roaming Big 5, including the world's southernmost free-roaming elephant herd, the first elephants re-established in a fynbos / renosterveld landscape
Over 1,000 fynbos plant species; a ~1,000-ha protected block for specialist species (bontebok, Cape mountain zebra, sable)
Site of the rediscovery of the Critically Endangered orchid Satyrium muticum, first found on 13 September 2017 by Raquel de Castro Maia; now the largest known population (6,000+ plants by 2020)
Endangered species present include Cape mountain zebra, bontebok, serval and brown hyena

Species fact files

Fact file

African Bush Elephant

Loxodonta africana

Genus Loxodonta · Elephantidae

Endangered

Habitat: Diverse sub-Saharan habitats, savanna grassland, woodland, forest, wetland and farmland, from sea level to mountain slopes
Lifespan: Up to 70–75 years in the wild

Key facts

The largest living land animal: adult bulls stand roughly 3.0–3.4 m at the shoulder and weigh about 5.2–6.9 tonnes.
Both sexes grow ivory tusks throughout life; the longest recorded tusk measured 3.51 m and weighed 117 kg, the trait that drives the poaching crisis.
Herds are matriarchal: a family unit is led by the oldest female, who guides the group to food and water and coordinates cooperative care of calves.
Assessed for the first time as a species separate from the forest elephant in 2021 and listed as Endangered, with over 60% of the savanna population estimated lost since 1965.

Fact file

Sticky Satyr Orchid

Satyrium muticum

Genus Satyrium · Orchidaceae

Endangered

Habitat: Dry to moist lower slopes (up to ~200 m) in fynbos and renosterveld of the Western Cape; only four small, fragmented subpopulations are known
Lifespan: Terrestrial perennial orchid, growing from a tuber

Key facts

A range-restricted South African terrestrial orchid, very rare: roughly 2,500 mature individuals remain, with the largest single subpopulation under 200 plants.
Unusually for the genus, it lacks the paired nectar spurs typical of most Satyrium species; it is pollinated by monkey beetles that carry its pollen packets on their backs.
Threatened by urban expansion, agriculture and forestry, with ongoing habitat loss recorded at three of its four known sites.
SANBI Red List: Endangered (assessed 2018), under criteria B1ab(iii,v)+2ab(iii,v); C2a(ii).

Place

Gondwana Private Game Reserve

Type: Private game reserve (rewilded fynbos)
Region: Garden Route, near Mossel Bay, Western Cape

Key facts

≈11,000 hectares on South Africa's southernmost coast, developed expressly to rewild the region
Free-roaming Big 5, including the world's southernmost free-roaming elephant herd, the first elephants re-established in a fynbos / renosterveld landscape
Over 1,000 fynbos plant species; a ~1,000-ha protected block for specialist species (bontebok, Cape mountain zebra, sable)
Site of the rediscovery of the Critically Endangered orchid Satyrium muticum, first found on 13 September 2017 by Raquel de Castro Maia; now the largest known population (6,000+ plants by 2020)
Endangered species present include Cape mountain zebra, bontebok, serval and brown hyena