Photographing elephants, where I went wrong.
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The first time I went on safari, to the Masai Mara, not long after we arrived in the park I saw 2 elephants partly obscured by a tree, on a hillside about 2 miles away, and it was nearly dark. But everything I knew told me that elephants were rare and endangered so I thought how lucky I was to have seen some so early on my first safari, and shot off half a dozen photos.
The next morning we started early, as you must if you want to see some decent game on safari, and after about 45 minutes we saw half a dozen elephants about a mile away flitting between some trees in the half light of the dawn.
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And so it went on. A dozen elephants half a mile away, two dozen elephants 400 yards away and so on. The following week I went to Amboselli National Park, dominated by the great bulk of Kilimanjaro just over the border. There is a small hill there and from the top I could see no less than EIGHT herds of elephants, probably numbering 600 elephants in total. Shortly after that as we stopped at the edge of a swamp with Kili (first name terms now) in the background, my 80-250ML lens attached, some elephants emerged from the trees behind us and came so close that I could not frame one in my view finder.Elephant culling on the Kruger
Elephant numbers crashed from 1.5 million in the 1970s to something like 4-600,000 today, but there is still probably more of them than there is room for. Therein lies the debate. As the human population expands, pressure on their habitat increases. The Kruger Park now has terrible problems deciding whether they should cull elephants as it is believed the carrying capacity of the Kruger is about 7000 elephants. No one would do this given the choice, but as the population grows each year the elephants start to lay waste to parts of the park to the detriment of other wildlife. The problem is that for each year the cull is postponed the problem gets worse, as the population increases by 10% per year. Thus in year one 700 elephants would have to be culled to keep numbers level, but in year two the number would have to be 1470, 2250 in year 3 and so on.
I don't know the answer to the problem, and few people who have to find a solution know either, and I don't envy them in anyway.
And as far as photographing elephants goes, heed the advice of the sergeants of Wellingtons dreaded Redcoats at Waterloo. 'Wait until you can see the whites of their eyes.'