AN ELEPHANT MOTHERS DILEMMA, THE STORY CONTINUES

Last month I wrote about the female elephant and her very tiny calf struggling to get to water in the Boteti Riverbed. The calf looked too weak to make it the fifteen kilometres from the dry interior of the Makgadikgadi Pans National Park. It had collapsed in the hot sand where there were no trees for shelter. The mother stood over the calf offering her bulk to provide shade. She was so hot that she used her trunk to suck moisture from deep inside her stomach, pea green gut juice was splashed over her head and ears to keep cool. This was the first female I have ever seen in the vicinity of the Boteti, distances between water for the young are just too enormous. The bulls manage okay and so we see many of them.

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