Tending the Dead
15 February 2025
The maiden’s quiver tree is the Cinderella of three tree aloe sister species that grace the Richtersveld’s gravelly moonscape. Maybe she’s outshone by the towering charisma of the giant and common quiver trees— she’s stocky and stout — and this may be why her population trends haven’t been studied as closely as the other two.
But her future is as uncertain as her siblings’, with the desert’s climate ratcheting up from hellishly hot to unbearable.
The recent years-long drought has turned large parts of the Richtersveld into a dust bowl, and has hammered all three quiver tree species. The maiden’s quiver tree’s (Aloidendron ramosissimum) recent and dramatic decline seems to be barely noticed, except by an attentive few.
In November 2024, Prof Wendy Foden returned to one of her favourite parts of the continent, the Richtersveld — a desert that straddles the South African and Namibian border, along the Orange River, part of which falls in the |Ai-|Ais Richtersveld Transfrontier Park — to do run-of-the-mill survey of common quiver trees.
Foden is a specialist climate scientist at SANParks, South Africa’s conservation management authority, and is an associate professor at the School for Climate Studies, Stellenbosch University. Doing head-counts of common quiver trees has kept her busy for the two decades, and allowed her to see the distinct fingerprint of climate collapse on them: they’re dying out in the hotter, northern edges of their range, but still doing well in the cooler southern parts.
She was driving to a study that she’s visited often over the years, once again going to check in on a well-studied common quiver tree population with field assistant Kayleigh Murray, when they encountered a scene that was like “driving through a graveyard”.
“I was stunned by hundreds of dead maiden’s quiver trees. The dieback is enormous, it’s terrifying.”
Each skeleton of a tree, a headstone. And like any graveyard, more than a few of the tombstones were slumped sideways or prostrate in rictus.
There was barely a living aloe in sight.
Prof Wendy Foden’s video captures the tombstones of dead maiden’s quiver trees just north of the Orange River border between South Africa and Namibia. Her field notes from another population near the Namibian town of Rosh Pinah are as bleak: in 2003, she found that 17 percent of the population was dead; in 2008, this remained unchanged at 16 percent; by 2022, 54 percent of the forest was dead. (Supplied: Prof Wendy Foden.)
The recently updated IUCN Red Data list estimates that the maiden’s quiver tree’s numbers have dropped by 30 to 40 percent in the past two decades “as a result one of the worst recorded droughts in history for the region”.
One maiden’s quiver tree population about an hour’s drive west of the South African’ entrance to the |Ai-|Ais Richtersveld Transfrontier Park was not spared. A rough scan of the koppie found about two thirds of the population was dead.
Elsabe Swart, a senior manager with the Northern Cape Department of Agriculture, Environmental Affairs, Rural Development and Land Reform, knows the area better than most, having spent two decades monitoring the giant quiver tree (the critically endangered Aloidendron pillansii, above). She’s seen the same unsettling diebacks in maiden’s quiver tree populations.
“One of the spots where you visually observe high mortality is within the Richtersveld National Park,” she says.
Field assistant Kayleigh Murray, a doctoral researcher who works with Prof Wendy Foden on quiver tree monitoring, drives in near silence through what Foden describes as a graveyard of maiden’s quiver trees. (Supplied: Prof Wendy Foden.)
Foden’s work for the past two decades has included keeping track of population trends in the common quiver tree, the vulnerable-listed Aloidendron dichotomum (above). This is one of the few populations that is abundant enough to be called a forest, and is still thriving. It is outside the South African town of Nieuwoudtville, about eight hours’ drive south of the Richtersveld, where some of conservationists have found some of the worst-hit populations of maiden’s trees. .
Hard ground is turning to mobile sand dune in many parts of the Richtersveld, following the years-long drought which acts like an accelerant on the already smouldering fire that been burning for decades as the region is threadbare from overgrazing and mining. High winds, loaded with needle-sharp sand grains, sandblast seedlings and mature succulent bushes, killing off the pockets of vegetation that act as nurseries in which a quiver tree seedling might take root and be sheltered through its early months of growth.
Maiden’s quiver trees tend to put down root on the lower slopes of the Richtersveld’s rolling hills. The common quiver tree is often mid-way up, and the giant quiver tree often on the hilltops. This might be why the maiden’s quiver trees are getting hit the hardest — where the temperatures are higher.
The common quiver tree’s range (left) is a long, thin finger that crosses many latitudes from the Brandberg Mountains in Namibia, down to the South African town of Nieuwoudtville, about 1,400 km south. The giant quiver tree’s range (centre) is extremely narrow. As is that of the maiden’s quiver tree (right). Their extremely narrow home ranges gives them limited room to move into cooler or more suitable latitudes.