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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.
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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.
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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.
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This post’s featured image was taken beside a waterhole in Etosha National Park in northern Namibia.
Visible are two members of one species, and more than hundred of another.
A mature African elephant is currently “our” planet’s most massive terrestrial animal.
Imagine this:
On one side of a colossal pair of scales you place one of the pictured elephants.
In order to balance those scales you would then need at least forty thousand of the pictured birds…and if a substantial flock of red queleas was present, forty thousand would not be an unusually high number!
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On our recent travels in south India we saw wild Asian/Asiatic elephants many times.
As you can see, such encounters with Elephas maximus do not only occur inside national parks and other “reserves”!
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Etosha National Park is one of Africa’s largest and finest national parks.
Okaukuejo is the southernmost of its six major “camps”, and its main administrative centre.
By day and by night, Okaukeujo’s waterhole offers visitors oft-superb, comfortable, relaxed and close wildlife viewing.
As this three part series illustrates, the night of 05 November 2022 was very rewarding.
One CommentWhat elephants may be lacking most of all is not language but the Rosetta Stone to prove they have it and clue us in to what on God’s green earth they’re talking about all the time…. They have a vocal range of ten octaves (a piano has seven), and up to three-quarters of the sounds they produce are inaudible to human ears.
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