Month: November 2023

The featured image, above, shows a most unusual circumstance: desert-adapted elephants right inside the walled, gated, “tourist accommodation” section of northern Namibia’s Palmwag Lodge.

The “invasion” was unexpected but it was not at all violent – nobody was attacked, no buildings were damaged, and no trees or bushes were uprooted or seriously hurt.

Jimbo – this chapter’s star individual – is an adult, desert-adapted elephant.

As is generally true of adult bull elephants, his is a mostly-solitary existence.

Only two nations are now home to desert-adapted elephants: Mali and Namibia.

Namibia’s live in that nation’s northwestern corner (some of them do set foot in the southwest corner of Angola) – an area long known as “Damaraland”, although the currently-preferred name is “the Kunene Region”.

Contrary to popular misconception, they do not comprise a separate species; desert elephants and African bush elephants (aka “African savanna elephants”) are fellow members of Loxodonta Africana, the current world’s largest terrestrial mammal species.

The desert-dwellers are very different/distinctive, but what sets them well apart from savanna/bush elephants is largely a matter of behaviour/culture rather than genetics.

I really loved the pictured signpost.

We did indeed see Jimbo, not very many metres away from it; neither he nor we encroached upon the other’s “personal space”.

Jimbo himself will star in this little trilogy’s second chapter.

“3” will feature some other desert-adapted elephants; their behaviour was much more unexpected/unusual.

All three chapters involve the same northwestern Namibian location, inland from the Skeleton Coast.

Overlooking the sweeping northern Damaraland landscape, the peaceful oasis of Palmwag Lodge & Campsite is set amid swaying palms, robust mopane trees and rich red rock.