May 18, 2015 – We have been in South Africa for almost 15 months and we have not seen a single elephant except those on the Tembe Elephant Park webcam. So we were excited when we saw some at a distance and then drove to where they were. Mary took the picture of the big elephant that was about 20 or so feet away.  After she took the photo he wandered over to a near by bushy tree and tore off a good size branch and started eating it. The next four photos show the progress of his meal. One of the interesting thing about this bull is that he only has one tusk – you can see it clearly on the away side in the photo where he is selecting his meal. He probably lost the other one in some fight.

Just behind the bill bull, there was a group of 4 or 5 other elephants playing in the water. I never got a clear shot of them because we could not drive close without disturbing the one that was eating and that was not a good idea.

  We decided to go around to the other side of the body of water and see if we could get a better shot of the ones in the water. As we were driving we came across a pile of fresh elephant spoor – a really, really fresh pile – and saw the young elephant on the left in the bush near the road. I like this picture because it seems it is looking right at us. The picture on the right is a large female that had just got out of the water. Notice the small size of the tusks…

From across the water we took these two photos of some of those who were playing in the water. They all are rather young and small. They reminded me of children who are playing in a wading pool in the backyard and having a great time.

As we were heading to the gate to go home we found this good size herd getting drinks from a dam area. Notice that there are all sizes in this family. Right down at the bottom of the photo there is a very young one, a little larger one and then on the other side of one of the adults is an larger but still small one. So we had a good time looking at elephants near water but we did not see any others in our 5 hours of driving.