Live update from South Africa by Antoinette van de Water about the importance of resilience for conservation organisations and people living with elephants, integrated solutions for human-elephant conflicts, the publication of our beehive fence paper and the introduction of our exciting new Tom Yum project! Do you want to learn more?
After recording this update, we encountered a herd of elephants and buffalo at a waterhole. You can observe how all the elephants look after the baby. Each footstep is carefully placed to make sure the baby is safe. You see the juveniles lifting their trunks like a periscope to detect scents of potential dangers or other information (even the baby is doing it at the end of the video), spreading their ears, lifting their heads to appear bigger and even splashing water in the direction of the buffalo. The buffalo are unphased and just continue with their jostling, sunbathing whilst being groomed by oxpeckers. Life is good!