For someone who feasibly lives merely a day’s hard drive from the glorious expanse that is Namibia, I visit very seldom. I suppose that’s the way it is – life gets in the way, other destinations beckon…but that will change soon. We will be embarking on a 24-day camping adventure, with families in tow, across […]
Tag: Etosha National Park
POLL: Should the sale of elephant ivory be legalized?
World Elephant Day was not necessarily good news for Africa’s elephants: Pressure is mounting in southern Africa to lift the ban on the sale of ivory. In the mid-1980s, during the last great elephant poaching crisis, Africa lost nearly half its elephant population, roughly 600,000 animals, in a decade. But the world responded in 1989 […]
POLL: Is Trophy Hunting Helping Save African Elephants?
African elephants are in trouble. Their numbers have fallen from as many as ten million a hundred years ago to as few as 400,000 today. Recent losses are largely from poaching for the illegal ivory trade (some 30,000 elephants a year), but also because of the shrinking habitat for elephants, as people open up land […]
Lions Return to Rwanda for First Time Since Genocide’s Aftermath
Jes Gruner was excited when he told me over the phone that the lions had made their first kill. A week after their release into the Akagera National Park in the northeast of Rwanda, the lions took down a waterbuck on the lakeshore and were gorging themselves on the carcass. Gruner, the Park Manager of […]
Why Elephants Are As Ritualistic and Violent As the Mafia
Every summer, Caitlin O’Connell, author of Elephant Don: The Politics of a Pachyderm Posse, packs her bags and travels to northern Namibia to study a group of male elephants. What she witnesses as the males jockey for power and position around a water hole is both shocking and heart-warming: violent conflicts, tender scenes of affection. […]
Shake if Off
All is quiet, except for the sound of doves and guinea fowl in the distance. The sky is bright blue on a winter’s morning. I am sitting in an underground research bunker in Etosha National Park in Namibia. He approaches from the southeast, ambling like they usually do. His footfalls are quiet, eerily quiet, like […]
The Handshake
Secret societies have it. Mob bosses have it. Elephants have it. Secret Handshakes. My time spent in this research bunker at a very remote waterhole in Etosha National Park will always bring back fond memories of really seeing and experiencing the daily lives of elephants up close and personal. Elephants are highly social creatures, and even […]
Dawn of the Striped Ones
It’s early on a summer morning in Namibia’s Etosha National Park. The first summer rains have just started to fall – so everything looks and smells fresh. There’s still a lot of cloud cover overhead from last night’s deluge…but there’s a gap for the sun to rise into on the Eastern horizon. As I drive […]