In my post on the baby elephant nursing by our room at Nxabega Tented Camp, I mentioned that you never know how habituated elephants and others animals might be, and how they might react. In Incident Report: 24 Hours of Elephant Charges, we see an example of just how true this is, and how scary interactions might be.
Botswana’s Okavango Delta floods annually not because of local rain, but because of rain in the mountains of Angola to the west, which flow into the Delta. The timing and amount of the rain, and the timing and size of the annual flooding, vary. In late May of 2022, the floods were a bit late. Elephants wander in from the Kalahari desert to the southwest, and these elephants don’t see people as often as those who stay in the Delta area or to the north. That means they can be a bit more testy, and in a single 24-hour period we had two examples of this, one funny and the other not so much. Teen-aged elephants likely precipitated both.
The first encounter came when a group of elephants that included juveniles, calves, and adult females moved from drinking at an open-water area to the nearby road, which we happened to be on. The teens saw a baboon troop and decided to torment them, rushing into some palmetto bushes and trumpeting as the baboons screamed. The adults couldn’t see what all the fuss was about, but they did see us, and they started to get a bit concerned. There were three groups; mothers and calves mostly on the road ahead, teens to the right torturing baboons, and another group of females to the left.
At one point, presumably chasing a baboon, one of the teens burst into the clear to our right, trumpeting. This alarmed all the elephants, and they displayed a little and then charged us. When this happened, every elephant did the same, but we were well back from them and they didn’t seem all that serious. In fact, it was funny to see a whole elephant family, including calves, charge. We simply backed up and they settled down.
The following morning we had an almost-repeat of the incident. Key word is “almost”. We had a different family with teens, adults with calves, and other ellies. There were no baboons, but the teens still ran off to the right and got into mischief, trumpeting and getting everyone riled up. You could see the females with the calves were getting a bit more upset than usual. Anticipating some action given what had happened the day before, I had my smaller Nikon Z6 with a 24-105 lens in hand because it made it easier to get onto something quickly.
That turned out to be good because the matriarch charged, and this one was no joke. Our vehicle was closer to her this time, and there were three groups of elephants and a termite mound. Our ranger had to pick a path that wouldn’t take us into any of those things, and then move quickly. Our tracker was sitting in the usual seat on the front bumper, and he had to hold on for dear life because there was no time to get him in. The elephant chased us as we drove as fast as possible, trumpeting her anger.
One of the two rangers we had said his heart was in his mouth for that one, and my wife said that it was one of the few times she was frightened. It’s very hard to say how serious this ellie was; when they really intend to hit a vehicle they tend to have their ears back and their trunk tucked under, but they can do that at the last minute. We were told that elephants kill more safari travelers than any other African animal, and there was a recent episode where one charged and overturned a vehicle used by a group of rangers in training. You take wildlife seriously if you want to be safe.