Every day, I probably see between two and 20 elephants, though sometimes I see quite a bit more (likely into the hundreds). That’s because elephants are protected in Kruger National Park. There are guards here who look out for poachers and the elephant population has been steadily growing for many years. In fact, there are so many elephants here that people are starting to think there might actually be too many!
The same isn’t true for most of the African bush elephant’s range though. They’ve been wiped out from most of their ancestral territory. Once, they roamed freely throughout most of sub-Saharan Africa, but now they mostly only survive in land that people have set aside for them, like national parks and private reserves.
African bush elephants are incredible animals. Although I mostly study them when they’re dead, I do see live ones all the time. I see them on camera traps where we study how they behave around their dead, I see them daily in the field when I’m heading to a particular site, and I even see them blocking the roads in the park. They’re absolutely massive creatures and they have very tight-knit social groups. I’ve seen extremely old matriarchs (likely over 70) being escorted by their daughters and granddaughters to water.
