Amy Bennett and Millicent Wanjiku
International & Local Interns

For the past week we have been taking a walk down Iain’s memory lane, converting his many slides into digital images. The slides are of his travels across Africa and Asia in the 1970s and contain very many famous images; from elephants to people to landscapes we are glimpsing his incredible life.

Late one evening we heard the news that Ebony’s calf had been killed by two young male lions.  Ebony herself was poached in February and when she was killed her calf tried to defend her, in doing so the poachers cut off her tail.  We went to visit her carcass a couple of days later and found the two lions still patrolling the area.  One of the two is fast getting a reputation as an elephant calf killer.  The Virtues family came to visit and it was touching to see them trying to decipher what had happened and whether the dead calf was one of their own.  We also came across Ebony’s other calf, a young female, whose temporal glands were streaming – a sign that she was grieving. 

Another interesting aspect of our time at camp is carrying out the Mammal Census.  What we see is different everyday and on one occasion we were very lucky to find lots of elephants, a break from the usual hundreds of dikdiks.  The 32 strong Royals family were really impressive and we got to see Thoreau, a massive bull with giant tusks.  We were also surrounded by a troupe of over 200 baboons and came across a pride of 5 hunting lions.

That same day Weird Tusk, a bull, appeared in camp and we realised quite how noisy elephants are when they eat, we could hear him chewing on acacia from the office.