So What If She's Got Tusks ? - Savannah Elephants

Masai Mara National Reserve

A long long time ago, when yours truly had just appeared in his High School leaving examinations, life’s first holiday with friends took me to Goa. Playing pool was a thing for us back then and I think it was there where a friend and I probably played for money and the table for the first time with a few guys from England. Now, I had no idea about the diversionary tactics that went on at pool halls. Our adversaries did and they were bagging India throughout the game and one of the jokes they found funniest was that cows here had horns and how that was the oddest thing in the world for the female to have horns. They were in India and bagging Cows. How original? But yeah, they won thanks to that and also that their women did their bit around the table too. To this day I think my friend was pretty pissed off that I lost the game cause I was distracted by a foreign lady leaning over the table. Hey, they were older man and lessons learnt ok? How this ties into Savannah Elephants is cause that incident is what came to my head right when I saw my first Elephant in Africa. She was a young mother with a calf ( Pic : 9 ) and she had tusks.

To me, Elephants have the kindest and most mischievous eyes. When an elephant looks at me, I always feel like they’re smiling and that they know something I don’t except when they’re telling me to piss off of course and that’s downright boot shaking scary ( Ref : Mother Nature’s Wedding Gift ). This was pretty much the consistant between the ones we see here in Assam and the ones in Africa. That said, the Savannah Elephants have much bigger ears. David was fast to point out that their ears are shaped like the map of Africa. Elephants dissipate body heat through their ears and the savannah gets hotter with less access to water compared to Asia. There are other differences like skin texture and the number of nails on each foot, etc that differ in the species. The stand out difference is the ears. Not all Elephants in Asia or Africa have tusks and of late African Elephants have started to evolve to being born without tusks altogether thanks to the ivory trade.

As a photographer, I learnt a neat trick for when you’re out photographing Elephants in Africa and that’s taking the door off your SUV. It lets you get all the low angle shots you want but you just need to remember to not get close to the Elephant or anyone else. We forgot and were ambling by some lions and a lioness stuck her head in the car. The whole scene and especially her expression is so hilarious if I think about it now, it wasn’t at that moment of course. Yeah the camp admin screwed that door in fast after that. Pretty cool memory though. Sadly, the door was firmly back on the vehicle when we had a very interesting sighting of a male and female Elephant one evening ( Pics : 13 – 16 ). We saw just the male first, marching towards us at a steady pace and stopped the vehicle. He was marching with purpose and we soon noticed that a smaller female was following him in the distance. I think he didn’t know that she was tailing him and when he noticed us, he slowed his march and took a stroll around and that’s when he noticed her as well. We were positioned to take head on pictures of him at the time and he gave her some time to catch up and then resumed his march. She caught up to him eventually and when she did, the two touched trunks in a greeting. I seriously wish I had a better angle of that but they were spinning around slow while doing that and we needed to reposition the car soon after they resumed their journey with her on his heels ( Pic : 16 ).

The time the screwed on door worked well was the day we took it off when the Elephants were the main target for the day. Yeah, we actually forgot about it being off for like a few days actually. That was the day we went after and met a herd of mostly females with a few calves ( Pics : 3, 4, 7, 10 & 11 ). I realised that day that Elephant mothers are very careful to let the calves have their own experiences. When a calf would approach us out of curiosity, the females would get alert and even take a few steps up, yet they wouldn’t get in the way of their child’s experience. They’d be watching the scene with those mischievous eyes as if saying, “You better behave Man, we know you will”. It’s behaviour that I noticed recently in Manas as well, when the mother of the calf taking a dust bath maintained her distance, yet kept a watchful eye on her young one who was doing it so close to our vehicle ( Ref :  Musth Makhna & Dirty Baby ) .

I’ve been chased off by Elephants like 4 times so far. There’s no shame in that. In fact, there’s pride in having gotten away with my shots. In reality, during all of those times, the Elephant just wanted to shoo me away and nothing more. That being said, you never want to be on the wrong side of a pissed off Ele, trust me and if you don’t, try you tube. I really want to observe their interactions a lot and yet I don’t want to risk tailing them around to piss them off in the process. Such a conundrum. To do, not to do. Guess we’ll all find out. But yeah, pool hall or not, don’t go to Italy and mock the pasta man, if anything it just shows that you’re actually a rude idiot. Bad manners is just, bad man.