There are few living beings more powerful than the African elephant. While in Kenya collecting data on migration pathways of elephants, I took some time to photograph these giants as they carried about their daily business. These photos in particular show the complexity of the behaviors surrounding daily life and, more strikingly, death.
All photos were all taken in 2007 in the land surrounding Amboseli National Park, southern Kenya.
The matriarch. Every herd follows one. Self-selected maternal leaders guide hundreds of elephants to safety in times of drought, storms, and occasionally lions.
Weighing in at up to 7 tons each and traveling in a herd of 85 elephants, predators wouldn’t dare attack this group for food. In occasional circumstances, lions might attack a baby when the herd is small and few females can protect young.
This one-month-old infant belongs to a large herd. When threatened, all adult females surround the young facing outward, building a wall of tusks with the added threat of trampling predators. The infants also keep warm by running between large elephants, reducing its chances of catching pneumonia on cold nights.
Acting alone and independent of herds are the adult males. Often left to care for itself, it is thought that this is one criteria in which a female might chose its mate. Surviving alone implies strength, good immunity and is skilled forager. All of these are good things to have for a successful offspring. Males are often aggressive as well, so another potential reason they do not live with the herd is because of the competition they might have with other males in a herd.
Two males are tusking. To display strength, males will combat each other using tusks and their twisting trunks. Unless competing over resources, this is typically only done when a female elephant is present.
DeathThough depressing, death is easily one of the more intriguing aspects to an elephant’s life. Complete with grieving rituals that may last up to 6 years, it is perhaps the most compelling case for why people have always connected with elephants for as long as we know people have interacted with them. Though we don’t know their emotion, or if they even have them, we certainly relate to their behaviors, and when personified, remind us of ourselves.
An infant has passed. At 2 weeks old, this elephant tripped while attempting to master his coordination in walking and bled internally. Distressed, the mother trumpets to gather other elephants in the heard that are a few hundred feet ahead of her. Attempting to get the infant up and walking again, she flips him back and forth with her trunk, but alas, he keeps falling over.
Though not considered to be tears, elephants secrete a liquid behind their eyes at times of extreme distress or relief (for example, finding water after a desperate search). This male is visiting the site of a deceased elephant it once interacted with.
For years after a death, herds will visit the site of a fallen daily. If the death was recent, the elephants will toss dust, twigs and grass over the body to cover it from scavengers, such as vultures and hyenas.
This mother and daughter meet heads and stand still while visiting the site of a deceased elephant. When initially gathering, several elephants often make physical contact with another.
In a ritual surrounding the site, elephants will line up or form a circle, passing along the bones from one elephant to the next. This is done at every visit made by the heard.
Eventually, the bones of a dead elephant are so scattered from the rituals and from scavengers taking parts, the herd no longer recognizes the specific site of death. At this point, the elephants will finally stop coming to the site. This is sometimes about 6 years later. Pictured here is a close-up of a skull of an elephant – the other bones are nowhere to be found.
Since adult males do not often belong to herds, their last days are often along riverbeds in their early 70s, eating leaves soft enough for the aged elephant to chew. Though an elephant has 6 sets of teeth, each are good for about 10 years. After 70, the molars become worn and unable to chew. These elephants die of hunger, not old age. This is a picture of ones worn teeth.
Though people think that elephants carry bones to an “elephant graveyard,” an elephant graveyard is the location in which these old elephants spend their last days. Since water can be scarce, many elephants choose the same site along the river to get its final days of sustenance, leaving a large pile of bones over time. Pictured here is a skull lying in an elephant graveyard.
Conclusion
Perhaps what I find the most fascinating is the context of our life when considering an elephant’s life. In the past 70 years, our world has seen countless wars, Duke Ellington, nuclear weapons, a moon landing, Saturday Night Fever, cell phones and the Internet. Meanwhile, one elephant is walking back and forth from a watering hole to a forest without the knowledge or care for anything else in the world, every single day. Though we differ greatly, we are able to relate to their seemingly emotional reactions to events we could consider catastrophic in our own lives (like death).
