All right, good morning everyone. We've had a herd of elephants in the area during the night and
we're going to try and attempt to pick up on them this morning. We've hit a bit of a ridgeline here;
we heard the elephants, the herd is below us. And we can hear them feeding - a little bit of movement,
and so we've given ourselves a little bit of distance and we're actually going to try and
walk in, get a decent safe approach. Beautiful sun rising in the background, nice chilly morning.
We're going try and work it. We've got a lovely hill and we're going to work it, try and get
the herd below us and actually spend a little bit of time with these amazing creatures.
Looks like a breeding herd and a couple bulls following. So let's see what we can do.
Graham do you see the kudus down there? So it looks like we've got -
I can see one, two, three, four female kudus.
Obviously this is quite different to being in a vehicle and just with us being in this upright
posture they can see us as a human as the apex predator of the environment. You already see
them starting to move off and compared to a vehicle we'll actually stand out quite a bit.
Unfortunately, we can also look at this as what we call a secondary disturbance. We've already said
that we've potentially got a herd of elephants below us, and what we don't want to do is spook
another animal to run off and potentially scare those animals off or alert them to our presence.
A couple elephants - you can see one, two, three about four, five members of the herd
up on the hill over there. Just like us they're trying to find a bit of sun this morning trying
to warm up a bit. So it's perfect for now. We're going to have them on the opposite hill.
Beautiful sighting and enough distance and safety between us. We can actually
find a spot on the rock and sit and observe them for the morning.
What a what a better way to spend a Sunday morning on lockdown.
So we see a lot of the time with herds especially these big breeding herds get
very, very large you actually do find herds splitting. Often the matriarch having the main
herd itself and then her older daughter will actually split off with a group.
And you actually find them doing their own thing. You often find a group coming together,
congregating for water, decent food sources, a bit of a get-together,
bit of a catch up. And then you actually do watch them go off on their own ways.
Actually seeing that little bit of a split in this group already, one group sticks together.
One cow high up on the ridge and doing her own thing. So it sort of shows you that
the herd's getting big enough now that they are going to split off potentially into two separate
groups and especially coming into winter food sources are scarce not as abundant as summertime;
makes more sense for 60 tons of elephants to split up and try and find food all over and try to
savage one area as a whole. I wonder if we don't have a young bull a little bit lower down
right at the bottom, quite a youngster, you can see separated from the herd.
Generally males will hang back or bulls would hang back, follow the herd slowly
but keep a distance from the herd. And it's a question we actually get a lot of the time is
don't elephants stay in herds. Not all of them, your family members, your
females, their youngsters, all their relations will stay together in one breeding herd itself.
But, unfortunately, everyone is related. So once the youngsters, the young males become sexually mature
they do start showing an interest in their female family members. So by the age
of about 13 or 14 they are actually kicked out of the herd and they've then got to go off on their
own. They can join up with a bit of a bachelor group or an askari, but once they get big
the bulls actually stay on their own. You get the odd one following - that's it.