SAVING THE GIANT SABLE IN ANGOLA

The giant sable bull arrived dangling beneath legendary wildlife pilot, Barney O'Hara's MD500 helicopter, the antelope's four-foot-long horns curving back toward its flanks like the scythe of a backhoe.

- JOHN BASSI

AS THE AIRCRAFT CAME INTO view, hundreds of people who had been waiting to greet the massive antelope at the dry, grassy edge of Angola's Luando Strict Nature Reserve, broke into tears, song, laughter, dancing. For the Angolan people, the giant sable is a national symbol, adorning everything from soccer jerseys to postage stamps. But this giant sable represented something even greater; hope.

As Barney deftly delivered the tranquilised bull to the ground, a group of shepherds and scientists loosened the strops and rolled the sable onto a stretcher. A dozen people, under the watchful eye of another wildlife legend, Dr Pete Morkel, hoisted the stretcher into the belly of a Eurocopter AS365 Dauphin, a second, larger helicopter.

The crowd pushed forward. Some people tried to get one last glimpse, others hoped to hug or shake hands with curly-haired biologist Pedro Vaz Pinto, who stood nearby, looking a little dizzy with disbelief. Somehow, against enormous odds, he had just led a team in tracking, tranquilizing, and transporting the 500-pound bull, which would journey another 60 miles north to Cangandala National Park, where it and nine female giant sables would comprise the world’s first captive breeding program for the nearly extinct animal.

“It was an absolute magical moment”, Pedro Vaz Pinto reminisces with an incredulous smile many years later, having witnessed many magical moments over the course of his 20-year mission to save the charismatic ungulate. However the animals future remains terrifyingly fraught. It remains beyond comprehension that this icon, the national animal of Angola, remains completely ignored by the government and its survival is dependent on a small handful of private individuals.