Elephant Encounters
Elephants are special, sentient creatures of high intelligence that experience a vast range of emotions much like us and rely entirely on close family for love, comfort, safety and support. They thrive on shared wisdom, born of experience, recognise each other as individuals, and call one another specifically by name.
It's our passion at Elephant Watch to understand all we can about their world and share this with you. We'll introduce you to many of our favourite individuals in this fascinating society of 1000+ elephants that we've known since 1997.
We'll introduce you to all of our favourite individuals in this Each calf born today has a family history that can be traced back about four generations, and our guides love to dive into the stories of each of their lives.
elephants in this explaining their acts of compassion, why they grieve their dead, and their memories are legendary.
As we present families like the Winds, the Storms, the Spice Girls or the Rivers to you, and introduce their impressive matriarchs, Mistral, Monsoon, Cinnamon or Euphrates, we'll explain how old ties between cousins and daughters, or late aunts and great grandmothers, continue to influence relationships in the younger generations today, as well as evolving alliances or emnities between unrelated families.
Elephants are phenomenal communicators that can cover eight octaves in a single scream or boom out messages in infrasound, a frequency that is far below human hearing, that is picked up by other elephants in the distance, as far away as ten kilometres.
The intimacy of our encounters with Samburu's elephants are remarkable. Born of consistent gentle interactions spanning many years, the elephants have come to know and trust us, so they tend to welcome our vehicles right into the heart of their herds as their lives unfold un-hurried (in elephant-time) in a completely relaxed and natural manner.
Our understanding of these elephants is enhanced further by the unique perspectives and insights offered by the Samburu nomads that are your hosts, your guides, and will soon also become your friends. Our entire team at Elephant Watch hails from the nomadic community whose charm and irreverent sense of humour is renown. Not only have the nomads lived their entire lives among elephants, but their knowledge of the landscape, the seasons, the flora and the fauna is unsurpassed.
What we love most about their wildlife-tolerant culture is that it's blazing a trail for peaceful co-existence between people and elephants in East Africa and beyond. Many young nature enthusiasts from this community are now emerging as the new faces of conservation in Africa, and their people are increasingly recognised as crucial stewards of the land.
