Elephant Curiosity

The Morning of the Elephant focus began slightly different from the majority of our monitoring drives on Karongwe Game Reserve. The reason for the focus was to identify all the individuals in the group and compile an I.D kit for each elephant. Normally we would be following an ever increasingly confusing ‘beep’ from our telemetry aerial leading us to a collared animal, however as none of Karongwe’s Elephants (Loxodonta africana) have an active collar we had to do it the old fashioned way and look for them. Finding a herd of elephants is considerably more difficult than you may think!

After around 90 minutes of driving around following tell tale signs of elephants (a trail of destroyed trees and fresh dung) we came across a 4 year old male and a 2 year old male. The tiny two year old had already won everyone on the trip over by simply being a baby elephant but when he decided it was his duty to defend his family and charged our truck he cemented his place as one of the favourite animals we had seen so far on Karongwe. When he flared his ears, pointed his trunk and ran towards the truck trumpeting at us, barely able to see over the trucks bonnet, we wondered for a second why he was feeling so brave, then Duma his mother appeared from the bush as if she had never been there. It was easy to see why the young male had felt so brave when his enormous mother had been watching us all along. One more quick high pitched trumpet and he ran off to stand bravely by his mothers side.
After a few minutes Duma and her two calves wandered off, disappearing back into the bush so we decided to drive around to see if we could find a better view. After waiting a few minutes something spectacular happened. The entire breeding herd and 2 adult bulls walked from the bush and surrounded our truck as they fed, at least 12 elephants meandered past us, largely ignoring our presence as they went about their daily business. It gave us a good photo oppurtunity. This lasted for a few minutes before they continued their journey through the african bush. Despite the short duration of the event, it is something which will last in the memory of everyone present for a long time.

John Pemberton, Volunteer, UK

Elephant Curiosity