Baobabs and Wire; Elephants and Mud

Early morning on the deck at Chilo

Early Morning at Chilo Gorge

leads into a fabulous day of exploring the newly wet Gonarezhou…on the lookout for our guests favorite animal…Elephants!….today strangely absent today from the landscape! They must have moved far and wide with the little shower of rain we had a night ago….we keep hunting…

Anyway, we see fun little stuff, such as lady tortoises, Spoonbills…

Spoonbills hunting for breakfast

 

a ponderous and stately monitor lizard…

reptilian splendour…

we find many signs of elephants….(poor baobab!)

evidence of elephants at work……

and at last, we find a perpetrator!

naughty but hungry….

caught in the act, this bull is intent on extracting as much succulent fibre as he can from this doomed baobab…

Yum!

and then decides to manage an itch on his posterior, after his meal…

aaah…relief!

Gonarezhou has numerous huge baobabs, many over two thousand years old…I love these multi purpose, all-embracing monoliths-

BAOBABS rock!

Here is my “Baobab Silhouette”, an acrylic painting on canvas…..

Sadly, in Africa,  we have to think of ways to protect them from my other wonderful favorite mammoth, the Elephant! They are going down like nine pins, chewed on by elephants in this present hot and dry period that we are having…a sad loss to the general environment…

Innovative ways to protect them are being tried by the Gonarezhou Trust, Ant Kaschula, Clive Stockil and of course the Chilo Team….

such as Hardwood barricades:

Stone barricades:

My favorite method is one I have tried successfully over the years on hardwood trees at our Bush house, Tsavene, and entails wrapping chicken mesh or diamond mesh snugly round the trunk of the tree to a height of at least three metres. The elephants just don’t mess with it !

Carrying on with our drive, we come across a very, very unusual and special find…Clive shows us a footprint and digging left by a little Pangolin…! Wow…so amazing to find evidence of these highly secretive nocturnal creatures who eat only termites and are highly endangered…

Pangolins, fascinating creatures, that fire my artistic imagination….

We are later delighted to meet up with the naughty baobab-eating bull again, plus a cow herd that has just crossed the Runde River, who politely stroll past us….showing off their tiny tots…

and then give us a wonderful half hour of mud bath antics

in a small depression that has collected just enough water to become a mud jacuzzi…

and a last farewell to the gentle giants as they wander away from the mud pack session, with the Bull bringing up the rear, and very much part of the group…interesting social interaction, he seems totally accepted in this “ladies’ society”!

Just as we need to think innovatively to protect baobabs, so do we need to think outside the box to create space for elephants in this ever shrinking wilderness that we all have to share….we are excited to be sharing our Gonarezhou elephants with a team from Tusk Trust who will visit…a dynamic group who are doing so much for elephants and rhinos, plus other endangered species, Africa-wide…

“The Last Elephant” by Lin Barrie