One cannot ignore the immediate urgency of the relentless anticipation of waiting for the rains… If it is quite intolerable for us people, it’s hard to imagine how it must be for the wildlife in some regions… recently flying and observing the herds and movements of the various species have given us opportunity to witness their response and reactions to the environmental conditions.

With a shake of her massive head, she quickly moved around the vehicle, leading another 30 elephants behind her. Dust filled our nostrils, ears and eyes, but we kept them wide-open, anxiously looking through the haze for more. We realized we weren’t on the edge of the corridor, we were right in the middle of it!

Taking pride in Botswana and our national parks, we decided to ensure that the banks were clean and no harm would come to wildlife due to the deposited debris.

The Okavango panhandle is a unique area… a system where wildlife, in particular elephants, and people struggle to live within a confined area.The purpose of the survey is to answer pertinent questions as to the area’s population of elephants, their growth rate, their limited movements, an insight to human-elephant conflict in the region, and to potentially be able to put forward various management options to relieve elephant compression and their conflict with people.

Kachikau’s death is tragic and sadly unnecessary. The issues surrounding the incident are extremely complex, but they threaten African elephants throughout the continent.

After long and hesitant stays… the elephants have finally begun to make their seasonal movements

It was agreed that the remaining 9 elephants would be translocated and released back into the wild… Elephants Without Borders was approached to offer advice and to discuss the possibility of helping on the post-monitoring program of the herd. EWB suggested that satellite collars

This season, we were quite busy and took collars off eleven elephants and deployed eight others, in a wide-variety of areas, thus far!

Southern Africa is burning, areas in Namibia, Zambia, Angola and Botswana are up in flames. The region is now subject to some of the highest levels of biomass burning in the world… our collared elephants moved in relation to the fires.

Deploying collars on elephants is quite an event, perhaps one could say a production. Exciting… my adrenalin was high as we made our approach, spotting a bachelor herd of 8 elephants in the shade of a tree