Hunting for elusive “ghost elephants”

Deep in the Angolan Highlands lurks a rumored new species of elephant. Conservationist and ornithologist Steve Boyes has been searching for this elusive herd for years and the story of his journey is the focus of Ghost Elephants, a haunting, evocative documentary directed by Werner Herzog. The film debuted at the Venice International Film Festival last summer and is now coming to National Geographic and Disney+.

It might seem unusual for an ornithologist to embark on a quest to find remote pachyderms, but for Boyes the connection is perfectly natural.  He grew up in South Africa and wanted nothing more than to be an explorer, just like the people he read about every month in National Geographic magazine. “I grew up waiting for the magazine to arrive; I wanted the maps,” Boyes told Ars. “Those would become my garden, or the field beyond, or the river—wild places imagined and ...