A great part of the conservancy is the lack of established roads and, therefore, the lack of need to stay ON the roads like you need to do in the reserve. This meant a lot of off-road exploration, which gave me ample opportunity to put to use all that off-road driving skill acquired in high school. On our first evening, we drove down to a riverbank and parked opposite a big group of about 12 elephants of all ages and sizes. This "Big Mama," as we christened her, is the dominant female that leads the group, and she spent the next hour happily chowing down on this brush inside the riverbank.
Seeing that all of the animals were on the other side of the riverbank, we decided that this would be a good time for me to try out my "trumpeting" skills that I'd been working on for the last couple of weeks after hearing about an elephant research who can "talk" with the elephants. This is another thing that you can't do in the Mara Reserve (also known as antagonizing the animals). Anyway, after a few strong trumpets, we were surprised to see many of the elephants look at us and hastily retreat up the riverbank to group up on the opposite side. Wow...didn't expect them to actually respond!
We waited a few more minutes, watching the elephants eat, and then observed that a baby and a couple of older animals were moving across the river about 30 yards away from us. A fairly large female was leading the group, and she was looking at us very suspiciously:
Without taking her eyes off of us, she climbed to the top of the riverbank, spread her ears out wide, and started shaking her head around at us. These are all signs of anger and aggression from elephants, and we decided to name this overly emotional girl "Rhonda." Rhonda wasn't content just to flap her ears at us, though, and a minute later she started pawing the ground and taking quick steps towards and away from us, all while making ominous grumbling noises. At this point, Cath ordered all of us inside the car (we'd been sitting on the windowsills and roof) and said something along the lines of, "Uh-oh...that's not good." Rhonda seemed to remember my ill-advised trumpeting from before, and she also didn't seem to like the clicking of my camera, or our general presence anywhere near her.
Thankfully, Rhonda cooled off after a few minutes and moved away to antagonize some baboons, so our attention turned to another adult that we called "Roger." Roger was probably actually a female, but it seemed like an appropriate name to us as we observed him pushing himself so far into a tangled fallen tree in pursuit of choice leaves that he got completely stuck. Luckily for him, elephants are MASSIVELY strong, and he proceeded to simply smash the offending tree into the dirt and go on his merry way. This led into a discussion of how elephants can flip over a truck using only their TRUNK and unpleasant images of what could happen if one charged full speed into ours...
Ready to move on to the next adventure, we put away our cameras and started to drive away from the riverbank. We must have come a little too close to Roger's backside, though, because he swung around in front of us and let out a full-fledged, super-loud trumpet. Yikes. We were about to calmly back away when Joe yells, "Here comes Rhonda!" and we turned around to see our old friend Rhonda running FULL SPEED and trumpeting with her trunk in the air through the bushes about 30 yards away from us. CRAP! Thankfully, Rhonda diverted away from us to stand in front of a baby elephant, Roger calmed down and went back to eating, and we were eventually able to slowly make our way out of the midst of the herd, which had managed to completely surround us during the last hour.
Whew...I don't think I'll ever forget that moment when I was sitting in the driver's seat with an angry elephant trumpeting 20 feet in front of me and another one charging from the opposite side, yelling "Cath, what do we do??" and getting no good answers from the expert! At least we had this to look at and calm us down during the whole process:
ps - you can also hear Jane's take on our trip TO the reserve here
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