Pink Elephants

The elephants hereabouts in the Makgadikgadi find shallow muddy pans and roll in them. Here is a fully dry pan:

When the salty mud dries, the elephant looks almost white.

But as the sun sets, they are gradually transformed:

This was a small breeding herd of females and youngsters. The sun is quickly getting lower:

No rose-tinted spectacles or tot of gin is required to see this effect.

But at this time of year, most of the elephants here are solitary aging males. This one is in musth, shown by the secretions leaking from the gland between his ear and his eye.

If he were still young and virile, he’d be quite dangerous at this time, rampaging around in search of females. But he is near the end of his life, tusks broken off, too tired for all that fuss.

As the elephants move through the landscape, you sometimes find their bedrooms. They choose a small sloping bank, and scrape a depression in it. They lie so that their feet are lower than their head, making it easier to get up in the morning! In this shot, TJ is standing near the head rest area, the feet would be in the foreground.

Here you can see the impression of his wrinkled trunk, and a single tusk:

My final shot of this story is a rare view of the underside of an elephant’s trunk. The sides fold inwards, so he can get a good grip on a bunch of grass or a mouthful of twigs.