Tag: African elephants

Posted in Africa, Elephants, Jabu, Morula, Sandi

Maps of Africa

Posted on by Cheryl Merrill

An excerpt from my book:

Under a sun-bleached sky that is no longer blue, dry coughing barks from black-backed jackals lope in from our left . . . Wraack, wraack, wraack. . .  Black-backs are scavengers, more aggressive than other types of jackals, and occupy the same ecological niche in Africa as coyotes do in North America.  They are bold enough to steal meat within the reach of a lion’s paw – although their main diet consists of insects, lizards, snakes, rodents, birds and ripe fruit.  Unlike coyotes, black-backed jackals do not howl.

Up ahead of us Morula slaps her ears flatly against her shoulders.

Whoooosh, thwack . . . Whoooosh, thwack . . . Whooosh, thwack . . .

 Elephant air-conditioning, for a creature that produces enough heat to warm a small house.  Elephants are pachy-dermed, thick-skinned.  Some of Morula’s blood vessels are buried as deep as one-and-a-half inches under her skin.  Since she doesn’t have sweat glands, her ears act like giant heat exchangers, regulating her body temperature. As her ears open, her body size increases by roughly one-fifth and her ears provide a huge area for thermoregulation.  The air moving over swollen arteries on the surface of each ear cools her blood as much as nine degrees before it returns to her body.

The veins in Morula's ear

I take a photograph of her ear in mid-flap.  Where Morula’s ear attaches to her shoulder, wrinkles give way to rising rivers of blood, pumping five gallons per minute across the surface of her ears.  The pattern of arteries on an elephant’s ear is as unique as a fingerprint, and often used for identification.

Whooosh, thwack . . . Whooosh, thwack . . . Whooosh, thwack . . .

The breeze she creates dies before it reaches me.  I take off my cap and fan my own neck.

My teeny, itsy ears are built somewhat the same as hers are, with an upper rim of cartilage and a fleshy, lower lobe.  But I don’t have an auriculo-occipitalis, an ear muscle the size of a weightlifter’s bicep.  I can’t flap my ears.  I can’t even wiggle them.

Whooosh, thwack . . . Whooosh, thwack . . . Whooosh, thwack . . .

In the late morning heat Morula’s ears are in constant motion.

Ears of African elephants resemble huge maps of Africa.  Ears of Asian elephants flop forward at the top and hang like small, wrinkled outlines of India.  Morula’s ears fold backward, giving them a smooth, tidy appearance, a map pressed flat.  Although the ears of all elephants have a similar construction – cartilage covered by a thin layer of skin – Morula’s ears are roughly three times larger than those of her Asian kin.  African elephants have the biggest external ears of all mammals, perhaps the biggest of all time.  Each one weighs approximately one hundred pounds.

And no two elephant ears are the same.  As pliable and soft as worn canvas, the leading edge of an elephant’s ear is often caught and torn on branches or by the tusks of other elephants.  In Kenya I watched an adolescent flare her ear and trace its outline with her trunk like a matador holding out her cape.  Backlit by sunlight, three perfectly round holes on its border reminded me of diamond studs.  Nearby, a huge bull posed for my gulping camera as I shot an entire roll of film in less than two minutes.  Only later, with the film developed and the prints in my hands, did I notice the edges of his ears were as scalloped as an old lace tablecloth.

Whooosh, thwack . . . Whooosh, thwack . . . Whooosh, thwack . . .

Jabu sidles up to Morula to investigate the thorn branch in her mouth.  Sandi intercepts him and reaches into her bag of treats.

“Jabu, be nice to Morula,” she says.

Jabu holds out his trunk, cups his treat and puts a handful of pellets into his mouth.  While he’s busy, Sandi reaches back into her bag and transfers treats to the inside curl of Morula’s trunk.  Morula fans her ears, her perfect maps of Africa, and continues munching on her thorn branch.  She finishes the branch before eating her treats.

Jabu, Sandi & Morula
Posted in Africa, Elephants, Morula

A Morning Walk with Elephants, Part 3

Posted on by Cheryl Merrill

An excerpt from my book:

Last night Stanley’s Camp radioed Doug to inform him a guest had purchased the activity option of joining us on a foraging trek.  In partnership with Doug and Sandi, the hosts at Stanley’s offer their guests the experience of a lifetime – an opportunity to walk for several hours through the bush with three unfenced and unfettered elephants, culminating in a picnic lunch at the end of the trek.

As we walk along the dusty road to the rendezvous point for Stanley’s guests, Doug tells me we will meet up with Stacey from New York City.

Rather than submitting to elephant-back safari rides, Jabu, Morula and Thembi provide one-on-one interactions with guests like Stacey, a unique chance to learn how elephants behave in the wild from elephants who accept humans as part of their herd.

The posh tents at Stanley’s Camp are located in a private concession at the southern tip of Chief’s Island, four hundred square miles of dry land in the vast wetlands of the inner Delta.  Private concessions in Botswana lease exclusive tourism use of wildlife areas from community trusts, providing both jobs and taxes.  A committee elected from the six villages within the community trust area NG32 leases 406 square miles to Stanley’s parent company, Sanctuary Retreats.

Exclusive use means exclusive sightings of game – no flocks of vehicles following a single lion.  It also gives Jabu, Thembi, Morula – and their local wild cousins – a daily life without a huge human presence.  Only one sandy pass-through road connects concession to concession.  It is lightly traveled, used mainly by the occasional researcher or for overland supply trucks.  Most tourists fly in.

Our rendezvous point with Stacey is an island of bush.  In the surrounding lagoon of grass a few stalks shiver and crosshatch as a mouse or grasshopper nibbles at their stems.  Otherwise, the lagoon is perfectly still.  The island is a good hiding place for elephants.  Sandi and I will step out to the road when we hear a vehicle coming.

As we wait for Stacey, Doug asks me, “Have you ever seen an elephant’s nictitating membrane?”

No, I haven’t.  Not many chances to do that, where I live.

“Steady Morula.”  He puts both hands up by her left eye and uses them to hold it open.  An opaque membrane slides from the corner of her eye toward the front of her face, toward her trunk.

“It helps protect the eye from sand,” Doug says, “or when she sticks her face in a bush.”

Morula stands perfectly still.

Such trust, I think.  I hate it when a doctor holds my eye open, shines a bright light into it and causes tears to course down my cheek.

Morula’s tears are oilier than mine are, produced by a gland in the nictitating membrane and from a modified sebaceous gland located in her eyelids.  Human tears originate from large lachrymal glands located behind our eyebrows which discharge when irritated or when we are emotional.  When our tear ducts (actually drains) are overwhelmed, tears spill from the corners of our eyes.

Doug releases Morula’s eyelids.  She blinks several times, then knuckles her eye with the tip of her trunk curled as tight as a fist.  As she rubs a dark smudge, a triangle of tears, spreads like a delta from the corner of her eye.

Morula and I stand together, watchers watching, measuring each other.  Steadfast, she looks down her nose at me.  I gaze upward into an iris of liquid oak with sun flecks and shadows in it.

I remember the camera hanging from my neck and lift it.  I feel the earth breathing, the air turning older; each moment caught, then left behind.

“Hello,” I whisper.

Morula's eye

The light from her eye just now reaches mine.

Posted in Africa, Elephants, Morula

A Morning Walk with Elephants, Part Two

Posted on by Cheryl Merrill

An excerpt from my book:

Morula stands around fidgeting, if an elephant can be said to fidget.  She lifts her right leg and swings her foot.  Puts it down, backs up two steps.  Lifts her leg and swings her foot again.

Sandi is quick to notice.

“Morula, here,“ Sandi commands and Morula complies, touching Sandi’s leg with her trunk.  I join them.

Sandi has the calm face of a mother with large, exuberant children.  Her eyes have white creases at their corners from squinting into the sun.  She wears a huge, floppy cloth hat with a brim longer in back than in front.  It’s black under the brim and light green on top.

“How many commands do they understand?” I ask.

“Verbal? About a hundred.  And that’s limited only by our imagination, not theirs.”

Morula leans in like an eager teenager.

She’s a little too close for Sandi’s liking.  “Morula, over and back.”  Sandi taps on Morula’s leg.  Morula backs up a step.  “Over and back.”  Morula is carefully responsive.  When you’re as big as she is, every movement has consequence.  Each step backward is slow, deliberate, and precisely placed.

Once Sandi has her positioned, she gestures to me. I step forward and place a hand on Morula’s trunk.  Studded with sparse bristles, her trunk feels like a stiff old brush.  I look up.

Three-inch lashes cast shadows down Morula’s cheeks.  She blinks and her lashes sweep against her skin like small brooms.  A bit of matter is clustered in the corner of her lower eyelid.

Morula's eye

Each of the more than 200 lashes around my eye is shed every 3 to 5 months.  Has anyone ever done research on the shed rate of elephant eyelashes?

I could.

I could stand here forever looking into the oak burls of her eyes.

Posted in Africa, Elephants, Jabu, Morula, Thembi, Uncategorized

A Morning Walk with Elephants, Part One

Posted on by Cheryl Merrill

An excerpt from my book:

The sun rises with spokes on her head like the Statue of Liberty.  She rises into an immense lemon sky that almost turns green before it turns blue.  She ignites the tops of trees with her torch.  Bare, wood-muscular branches of a jackal-berry tree stretch above my head, tips ablaze with light.  Crisp and clear, the air tastes of damp sage mixed with cold sand.

Doug sets down his coffee cup and leaves to fetch the elephants.  Skirting a tree-line filled with purple shadows, he crosses an open field of grass.

Sandi and I wait, our hands wrapped around steaming cups.

Half an hour later Doug returns.  Jabu, Thembi and Morula are right behind him.

Sandi whispers, “Let’s go, Jabu,” and he turns away to follows her down the dusty road in front of camp.

 Plain-Jane Morula is next to saunter past, her broad, honest face etched with a network of creases and wrinkles, the tip of her trunk canted in my direction.  Thembi lags behind, with Doug at her side, but soon catches up to Jabu, picking up a stick like he does, stashing it between her trunk and tusk like he does, dropping it just as soon as he does.

The order in which they assemble never varies.  First Jabu, then Morula, and finally Thembi.  Yet, when we set off on our morning walks, it is always Morula, the oldest, who brings up the rear.

We mosey away from camp at a slow ramble, all in a line – Doug and Sandi, three elephants, and me.

Yesterday I traveled by jet.  Today I fall into place behind an elephant.  My mind is having a hard time keeping up with a change greater than eight time zones and two hemispheres.

I’m clumsy in this new world.  The old discarded one of concrete and cell phones trails me like a lost dog.  I kick at it, but it circles back to nip at my heels.  It just won’t leave me alone.

Tufts of grass nods gently in the wind of our passing.  Isolated clumps of finger grass wave six-digit tassels at us.  The fingers of a slight breeze hold my hair up to the sun.

Morula stops, turns, and takes a single step toward me.  Somehow she doubles in size.

Morula

My heart leaps, captive within its ribs, desperate to flee.  I know Morula is not wild, not truly.  I know she has spent half her life with Doug and Sandi.  Nevertheless, I’m paralyzed.  I forget how to breathe.  Everyone else is up near the front of the herd, as far away as another continent.

Morula stands in half-profile, stares at me with one nut-brown eye.  A feathery tuft of hair sticks out from her ear canal.  Her mottled forehead glistens like cracked mud.

Slowly she blinks her eyes, flaps her ears, and a lifetime later swings around to overtake Thembi.  I exhale as they entwine trunks.

Cicadas chirr, stirring up the morning.  I stare down at huge round footprints in the dust.  I look up; the elephants are receding.  Last in line, I’ve been left behind.

Wait for me! shouts every cell in my brain, as I scramble to catch up with the herd, take my allotted slot in the order of march.

Posted in Africa, Elephants, Jabu

Jabu by Moonlight

Posted on by Cheryl Merrill

An excerpt from my book:

Leaves from mopane branches litter the ground around my feet, discarded by the elephants as they strip bark.  In the daylight the leaves are reddish-colored and striped with green.  But tonight they are bleached to the color of tinsel by the moon, a hundred silver butterflies.

I look up at Doug.  “Is it true that one night you slept curled up in Jabu’s trunk?”

“Not very comfortably.”  His grin broadens.  “Hey, here comes Jabu.  Here’s my boy.”

It’s hard to believe an elephant weighing six tons with a huge, restless trunk could sneak up on us.  But Jabu has.  Like tires with low air pressure, his cushioned feet smother twigs, branches and the sound of his own footfalls.  He is amazingly silent as he stands before us.  He shifts his weight from one side to the other.

As if it was a curious eye on the end of a long, snaking probe, the tip of his trunk hovers two inches from my nose.  And I’ll bet he’s pleased he’s making me nervous.

He sucks my scent out of the air as delicately as picking petals from a daisy.

Trunk raised.  Trunk dropped.  Trunk raised.  Trunk dropped.

He loves me.  He loves me not.

His massive head is a continent, wrinkled by tectonic plates of life.  Tufts of hair stick out of his ears, an old man’s ears.

Doug motions me closer.

Standing on night-cooled sand, I lean my cheek against Jabu’s leg.  The chalk of my bones softens.  As the weight of night drapes across my shoulders, we warm each other, both of us children made from the dust of stars.

Jabu
Posted in Africa, Elephants, Morula

Morula by Moonlight

Posted on by Cheryl Merrill

An excerpt from my book:

As if the night air has muscle, it flexes, then strengthens, when a bulky umber apparition condenses out of darkness.  Doug moves away from Thembi as another elephant backs blindly toward us, lifting first the sole of one foot and then another for our inspection, carefully feeling her way.  It is an oblong moment, stretched by suspense.

“No, no, Morula,” Doug says, and then turns to me.  “It’s the way elephants greet each other, but I’m trying to get her to greet us face-to-face.”

Enchanted by the thought Morula might consider me a fellow elephant, I have no qualms about putting the flat of my palm against her trunk.

Her skin contracts like a giant slinky under my hand.  I gently rub up and down, up and down.  The nerves at the tips of my fingers tingle.

Astonishing warmth.

Crumbles of mud.

Bristling hair.

Morula

The massive dome of her head blocks the stars.  Her forehead is cobbled; my eyes follow its boulevard up to the night sky.

She exhales.  A gentle rumble flows past my fingers and stirs the dust at my feet.  In the distance a hyena slouches through its whoop.  Then it is quiet again and the stars lean in to listen to her breathing.

Posted in Elephants, Thembi

Thembi by Moonlight

Posted on by Cheryl Merrill

An excerpt from my book:

We walk out to the elephant’s enclosure under the lidless eye of a full moon.  Puffs of dust stir around my feet, pale little clouds that settle to the ground.  The scent of sand and dung layers a gritty, farmyard taste at the back of my throat.  Soft rustles in the waist-high grass are unseen snakes or mice or birds.

Moist as a swamp cooler, musty and bacterial, the night air condenses into cold pools and sends my fingers into my pockets.  Warm air under the trees brings them out again.

My vision is elemental, full of shapes without fine details.  As I walk, shifting slabs of moonglow keep rearranging trees as if they are pieces on a giant pearled chessboard, their trunks whitewashed the color of ash.

The elephant’s enclosure is hidden in the bush, around a few bends in the road and down a dusty path, out of view for the guests at Stanley’s Camp. The enclosure consists of two heavy cables strung high and low through seven-foot wooden posts set in concrete.  A second, lighter wire is suspended outside the periphery.  Cowbells dangle from it, an early-warning system for invaders or escapees.  Granted, an elephant could bust out of (or into) this enclosure in less than a minute.  It’s more of a security blanket for the Trio, a protected space for eating and sleeping.

Just ahead a huge smudge of charcoal broadens.

Elephant. 

Hushed and gaping, tugged like a blank comet into an immense gravitational presence, I orbit a little to the left in a cautious arc.

With a low throaty rumble MmmmRRRRRrrrrrr, his own elephant greeting, Doug slips under her jaw and stands by her side.  Glasses on his face are two mirrored moons.  He reaches up and strokes the skin just in front of her ear.

“Steady, Thembi,” he says, “you’re a pretty girl, aren’t you Thembi?”  He pronounces her name “Tem-bee.”

She nods Yes.  Later I will learn Thembi always nods Yes at the word “pretty.”  But she is a beautiful elephant, all her proportions flawless.  And Thembi knows she is pretty.  She holds herself perfectly still in half-profile, the way beautiful women do all over the world when under regard by an admiring eye.

Thembi
Posted in Africa, Elephants

Where the Elephants Live

Posted on by Cheryl Merrill

An excerpt from my book:

In the atlas on my desk there’s a satellite photograph of a giant bird footprint pressed into the southern part of Africa – an inland river delta the size of Massachusetts.  Swollen by November rains in Angola, Botswana’s Okavango River floods south, arrives in May or June, fans out and terminates at a fault line that stops the river in its tracks.  Most of it evaporates or sinks into the Kalahari sands.  Not a single drop reaches the sea.

But as the river pushes south, it filters through a 5,500 square-mile-delta, the largest in the world, an unparalleled ecosystem with an ark-full of animals.  And as the river dies, it leaves behind orphans: ponds no bigger than puddles, abandoned lagoons that shrink into brackish waterholes, and four main dead-end channels – the bird’s footprint.

Okavango Delta

Doug and Sandi’s camp is on Chief’s Island, about thirty-seven miles, or fifteen minutes flying time from Maun – rhymes with “down.”  Maun is an outpost, the last town before venturing into the Delta.

The pilot let me sit up front.  As his chattering Cessna lifted north I saw many haphazard dirt streets crossed by a few thin, barely-paved roads.  Dusty paths led to round bomas fenced by thornbush.  Shaded by an occasional acacia or mopane tree, each boma contained a tiny hut plastered with mud.  Some corralled a cow or a goat.  As we flew higher, Maun’s taller, three-story buildings flattened and disappeared.  The town melted into the desert.

Meandering two-rut tracks lost their way and vanished.  A waterhole appeared, left behind by last year’s flood.  Another came into sight and then another.

Soon a thousand or more blue eyes hypnotized me, stared upward, unblinking, as the shadow of our Cessna crossed them.  Etched in the sand by countless hooves, game trails meandered through the dry landscape, all headed to pockets of water stained cornflower blue by the sky.

We dropped lower.  A thousand mirrors signaled the sun.  Lower still, and the mirrors turned blue, became waterholes again, puddling the Okavango Delta as far as I could see.

Right before we landed on a strip of dirt near Stanley’s Camp, the pilot and I glimpsed a cheetah sprinting for cover.  With that single spotted blur, my life divided between home and Africa.

Posted in Africa, Elephants, Morula

Morula

Posted on by Cheryl Merrill

An excerpt from my book:

Morula stands square on. Her cobbled forehead broadens from her nose upward in a triangular shape.  Her eyes are nearly hidden, tucked behind the curve of her forehead.  She raises her head to focus on me.  She’s motionless, concentrating.  I can’t even hear her breathing.

I have this odd feeling that she wants me to like her as much as I want her to like me.

I take the lens cap from my camera and glimpse a tiny reflection of myself in its mirror.  Is this what she sees – another one of those small humans, with its odd aura of scents?   Does she see details: my hat, my camera, my idiotic grin?

Morula

The top of a tree is visible over her right shoulder, as if she has a giant corsage tucked behind her ear.  Short bristles like an old man’s buzz cut outline the top of her head.

Because of the way she’s standing, ears flattened against her shoulders, Morula seems slim, her skull almost hollowed.  The tip of her trunk flops over itself in a loose coil and points straight down like a curved arrow.  It begins to twitch in an irregular rhythm.  I take a goofy photograph of Morula – like she’s bored and playing with the only thing at hand – her trunk.

Behind us, around us, for 360 degrees, the Botswana landscape surrounds us.  And neither one of us pays it a bit of attention.

Posted in Africa, Elephants, Thembi, Uncategorized

Thembi

Posted on by Cheryl Merrill

An excerpt from my book:

With a low throaty rumble MmmmRRRRRrrrrrr, his own elephant greeting, Doug slips under Thembi’s jaw and stands by her side.  He reaches up and strokes the skin just in front of her ear.

“Steady, Thembi,” he says, “you’re a pretty girl, aren’t you Thembi?”  He pronounces her

Doug & Thembi

name “Tem-bee.”

She nods Yes.  Later I will learn Thembi always nods Yes at the word “pretty.”  But she is a beautiful elephant, all her proportions flawless.  And Thembi knows she is pretty.  She holds herself perfectly still in half-profile, the way beautiful women do all over the world when under regard by an admiring eye.

But her pose does not last long.  She turns her attention to a pile of mopane branches.  She picks up a single branch, strips its bark and stuffs the curled peelings into her mouth.  Thembi is after the sweet, green inner bark of the smaller branches.  Dessert first, the main course later.