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Sometimes you go to the elephants, other times they come to you. This afternoon just after I left you, a call went up for us all to grab our stuff and get “saddled up”. A herd of maybe thirty or so elephant was meandering through the brush not 100 yards from camp. It may seem like it would have been fun to just walk over to them and say hi, but, of course to just go walking up to several dozen elephant wouldn’t have been prudent.
Jul 20, 2004 4th Bridge Camp, Moremi Game Reserve, Botswana
Tom Schueneman2006-03-27 15:36:52
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Sometimes you go to the elephants, other times they come to you. This afternoon just after I left you, a call went up for us all to grab our stuff and get “saddled up”. A herd of maybe thirty or so elephant was meandering through the brush not 100 yards from camp. It may seem like it would have been fun to just walk over to them and say hi, but, of course to just go walking up to several dozen elephant wouldn’t have been prudent. So we “saddled up” and set up a position nearby to quietly watch them feeding and interacting with each other. As we stood in the trucks, so many heads sticking out of the tops of the Land Cruisers, the elephants made a slow procession by us. We stood quietly observing and as long as the Matriarch wasn’t too concerned with us, no one else was either. After all, an elephant has to stay busy feeding to get their three or four hundred pounds of roughage they require every day. Apparently an elephant will spend eighteen hours a day feeding and only twenty minutes or so sleeping – imagine, a power nap every day and you’re fine; the flip side spending most of the rest of your day eating. There was one young juvenile elephant that stopped near our trucks, lifted his trunk at us (smelling us) and did a little shake of his head while stomping his feet a bit. After a minute or two he moved on with the others in search of more to eat. Alwyn explained he was probably just trying to show his mom and aunts that he was a tough guy.
Elephants are fascinating to watch. Their movements are very deliberate, almost in slow motion. To stand and watch them moving through the mopane woodland in the warm afternoon sun is meditative.
After about forty minutes we moved off to continue our game drive. We came across some giraffe and another group of elephants a few miles down the trail. This herd of elephants was much more skittish than the ones near our camp. Even though we stayed well away from them, a mile or more, Alwyn could
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Botswana Gallery
