ELEPHANTS

One of our most interesting and entertaining animals was 'LAZI, JR.' .. a young elephant (about a year old) who was wandering the brush with his mother. As we stopped to watch them, about 30 yards away, the mother wandered into the brush, leaving her son alone. As if on cue, he started performing for us. He was munching on some branches initially and used his trunk to toss them down. He moved to the side and raised his leg, then turned and raised his other leg ... he lifted his trunk as high as he could ... he spun around ... shook his head ... then he backed into the brush where his mother had disappeared. We all thought the show was over ... but, here he came again for an encore! The 'show' lasted about 5 minutes and our guide, Lazi, (for whom we named this youngster) said he'd seen young elephants play around before but not for as long or as interestingly as this young boy.
















Elephants are generally even-tempered and pretty much ignored us most of the time, although they definitely made eye contact, unlike the big cats. We had a few of the youngsters do some mock charges but it's just bluff .. and practice for when they're big boys.





A popular place to find animals doing interesting things, is at the water hole or river. On this particular day there was a herd of elephants clustered around at the river's edge ... after a while, they moved on, leaving a mother and her offspring who enjoyed a little playtime with the water.


One time we found ourselves in the middle of a herd of elephants. There were several youngsters, some nursing, and one of the adults came very close to our Landrover to check out the 'intruders'. You can see how close they were. The outstretched ears are a warning.



Here's one of the small babies we saw - he was in the herd that surrounded us and every time him other slowed down or stopped, he started to nurse. They are entirely dependent on their mothers for for 3 - 5 yrs and nurse for up to 4 years.