Elephants

Do you have a favorite animal in the wild?  Mine, hands-down, is the elephant.  Known for intelligence, fascinating behavior, methods of communicating and complex social structure, elephants captivate and scare me a little, too.  They’re big – the African elephant is the largest living land mammal – and totally impressive.  Their muscular trunk serves as a nose or an extra hand or foot, a means of signaling or a tool for gathering food, water, dusting, even digging.  This long trunk permits an elephant to reach as high as 23 feet while at the same time pick berries or caress a baby elephant or companion.  This trunk can twist and coil, tearing down acacia branches and large trees or fighting.

Elephant tusks are elongated incisors with about one-third hidden in the skull.  Both male and female African elephants have tusks, although among Asian elephants, only males have them.  Elephants favor one tusk over the other, using the favored tusk more often as a tool, thus shortening it with constant wear. 

Elephants spend most of the day eating (some 16 hours), drinking bathing, dusting, wallowing, playing and resting (about three-to-five hours). Because an elephant digests only 40 percent of what it eats, it needs tremendous amounts of vegetation and 30 - 50 gallons of water a day.  They eat a strictly vegetarian diet

The African elephant’s ears are more than twice as large as the Asian elephant’s and have a different shape, often described as similar to a map of Africa. 

In Botswana, in the Okavango Delta with my second husband, John, I encountered elephants up close on more than one occasion and describe these events in my memoir, Banged-Up Heart:  sighting two young male elephants within seven feet of our vehicle; being awakened one morning by the ear-splitting sounds of an angry bull elephant a few feet from our cabin;  walking with three elephants “tamed” by an eccentric Oregonian who encouraged us to caress the smooth breast of the female elephant beside us; and dining al fresco when an elephant behind us places her gigantic trunk between us.  

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