Why the elephant is our all-time favourite…

At African Trilogy, helping to protect threatened wildlife species is part of our DNA

When it comes to sensation wildlife experiences, there’s little to beat South Africa’s Greater Kruger National Park. And when it comes to sensation wildlife – there’s nothing to compare to the incredible African elephant!

There’s no denying that elephants are probably our favourite animal here at African Trilogy. There’s just something about these incredibly intelligent beasts that endears them to us, and just sitting and watching them reveals so much about their nature, whether it’s a lone bull visiting the grounds of the lodge or a breeding herd spotted on one of our game drives.

Elephant society is intricate and special and in some ways very similar to ours. Mothers, daughters and related cows stay in the family unit their whole life while the boys are pushed out as soon as they near sexual maturity.

They then form bachelor groups with older, wiser bulls as their mentors. When the bulls are fully grown they move off to spend most of the rest of their life as loners, with the more dominant bulls often shadowing breeding herds and mating with receptive females.

African elephants can live to the ripe old age of 65, and go through six sets of teeth in their life – as the molars wear down through use they are gradually replaced by the next set. Elephants inevitably die when their last set of teeth wear out, literally starving to death as they can no longer eat anything but soft grass, which is not enough to sustain them.

You’ll see that elephants eat most of the time. This is because their digestive systems are not too great and they only absorb around 40% of what they eat, meaning they literally eat to live, and live to eat! They will consume vast amounts of vegetable matter from tree bark and foliage to grasses and fruits, and everything in between.

They are incredibly powerful and are known to push down trees in order to get to the most tender foliage.

The elephant’s trunk is an amazing piece of equipment, kitted out with thousands of sets of muscles and the ability to fell a tree, knock other animals off their feet or gently caress a baby or family member and pluck a single blade of grass. Both African elephant cows and bulls have tusks (unlike their cousins, the Asian elephant, where only the bulls have tusks) and like us they are either left or right “handed” – wearing down one or the other tusk much more on the side they favour. The tusks themselves are teeth which never stop growing. Sadly, they are the elephants’ “achilles heel” because these teeth are highly prized as ivory, and are the cause of their numbers being decimated through poaching. We are currently losing an African elephant every 15 minutes – that’s 100 every day. We can’t imagine an Africa without elephants. Can you?

You have the chance to see plenty of elephants during your stay with us at either Nyala Safari Lodge or Nyala Sands, or while spending time on a full day Kruger Park safari as part of your stay at eKhaya Bush Villa, here in the heart of Hoedspruit.

Part of our DNA is to make all of our guests aware of the plight of some of our most endangered wildlife species. And the MOST endangered of these animals is not the rhino, or the elephant – it’s an animal most have never even heard of – the pangolin.

Although hardly ever seen due to its secretive habits, this amazing little scaly anteater is the world’s most trafficked mammal, with its scales and its flesh highly prized in Asia. Here in South Africa we have the ground pangolin, also known as the Cape or Temminck’s pangolin. There are three other species in Africa – the giant pangolin, long-tailed or black-bellied pangolin and tree or white-bellied pangolin.

The Cape and giant pangolins are ground dwellers whereas the black and white bellied species are arboreal, living and hunting mainly in trees.

All of these amazing little animals live exclusively on a diet of ants, eating millions each week, spending their time foraging for ant nests, digging these up and mopping up the insects with an incredibly long, sticky tongue that’s actually longer than its body!

Not much is known about pangolins – for example, we have no idea how long they live in the wild. They are exceptionally difficult to keep in captivity too. These gentle creatures are easy to catch as when they are threatened they curl up into a protective ball, using their scales to protect themselves. Their scales are made of keratin – the same material as our fingernails and the horn of one of Africa’s other endangered mammals – the rhino. This makes them top of the poacher’s list as their scales are used in traditional Chinese medicine throughout South East Asia. The Chinese also consider pangolin meat a delicacy.

Because we do not know how many pangolins we have in the wild, it’s impossible to work out what the chances are that this amazing animal will go extinct in our lifetimes. But we do know that shipping containers full of tons of scales are regularly apprehended in the far east, en route to China. Every ton of scales represents roughly 2000 pangolins and it’s estimated that we have lost more than a million of these animals in the last 10 years.

So while you may not see a pangolin during your stay with us, we encourage you to find out more about this wonderful little animal and do what you can to raise awareness of its plight!