Oct. 6, 2008
FEET DON’T FAIL ME NOW
Thanks to guests Lottie and Denzil Murray-Lee of England, you can see the latest surprising scenes from the Okavango Delta.
The couple embarked on a walking safari with Xugana guide Joel Body and tracker John Dikeledi on Palm Island yesterday morning and came across this determined old bull elephant. By golly, this fellow had a single-minded, motivating hunger for fruit from the palm tree. The fruit, however, was out of reach even for this behemoth.
Something unusual, that’s what. While Body and Dikeledi had seen elephants raise their front feet a bit to help them secure a better position for feeding, they had never seen an elephant use yesterday’s method. The old bull planted his right foot up one palm tree and the left foot on another, then stretched himself erect, his trunk aloft like a telephone pole.
That elephant stood “like a person,” Dikeledi said. (Like a person of such ungainly bulk that he appeared he might topple over backwards at any second.)
But the old bull elephant braced himself for the task quite handily indeed. With his pushup maneuver, he was able to reach that high branch and shake it hard to break loose the fruit.
From their vantage point, Body, Dikeledi and the Murray-Lees had a fine view of the elephant’s wide-open mouth. The Murray-Lees declared this two-legged elephant feasting a highlight of their trip -- in Denzil’s opinion, another moment of “magic” in Botswana.
--Maria Henson
volunteer, Desert & Delta Safaris
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