Giants of Kruger - Elephants

When I think of elephants - these huge, intelligent and social land mammals - I just realize how small this incredibly big Kruger park is. When the Sabie Game Reserve was established in 1920 there were only 120 elephants in the area. In the 70s their population grew close to 9000. By now this number is over 11,500. The living capacity of the park is about 8,000. Of course this holds several problems for the biggest land mammals on Earth..







But from our own experience with Tarryn every encounter with the elephants were majestic and notable. Sometimes they just walked out of the bush and that was both a surprise for the big one as much as it was for us. It was a memorable moment when an elephant was showing his back to the road and as we were cruising we stopped by. When he turned around after a while he couldn't figure how we got there suddenly and scared us with his trunk. But we stood the test, we stayed there while looking at the elephants body language. Nothing happened and in couple of minutes time the big male was back to eating some roots again.

Another great story to remember when our car gear change broke down due to the shaky road. The gear box just fell apart and it was not usable. Just imagine. Tarr couldn't go forward so we had to wait as a whole family was passing in front of us from the left to the right. And one of the young ones got curious and came close to us to examine the alien object. That can be quite scary I can tell you ! Thankfully - just as Tarr started shaking next to me - we released the hand brake and we went backward to a safe distance from the curious elephant. Later on we had to fix the gear box on the spot. An hour after that experience it all became a great story to tell.

Of course we always had to give right-of-way of this big animals when they decided to cross the road and stopped at a safe distance, but we could spend hours just to look at them as they were eating grass, bark and leaves close to us.

Elephants very rarely attack humans but as we found out due to their migration habits and increasing numbers in the park they crash through the park's fences, terrorizing nearby villages and wiping out fields of crops.

Yeah these beautiful creations can cause some trouble to humans, but at the end of the day they were here first and cant be simply surrounded by a fence even though as big as Kruger itself.

to be continued...