Elephants of Botswana

Category: Uncategorized | Date: Sep 13 2009 | By: elephantsofbotswana

This morning, after finalising the 2010 Calendars, Sim and I headed out to find elephants.

The bush is looking quite incredible at the moment, as the knobthorn trees are in flower and the leadwood trees are in seed, bringing wonderful shades of yellow and orange to the field. The birdlife is magnificent at the moment too, we saw crimson breasted shrike, a yellow billed kite,  lilac breasted rollers, cattle egret and little egret, spurwinged goose and all sorts.

At first crossing (a deep crossing where the water comes over the bonnet) we found some elephants, unfortunately they were mostley hidden in the thick bush but I think it was the ‘B’ herd (all the female’s names start with a B) and they were all looking terribly skinny and feeding off what looked to be a dead tree. It is a hard time of year as we wait for the rains, which is quite as we are surrounded by water from the floods. However, the trees are in winter mode and the wildlife that has been contrained to small amount of land have eaten most which is available.

We spent some time with them and moved on and continued with our route. There is  still plenty of water around, making the driving a little tense, but we managed to survive without getting stuck. Tomorrow we are going to do the road survey so I hope we manage the same then!!!!