Elephants

In this photo the elephant was in a dip about ten feet or more below us. A couple of minutes later it started to walk up the incline and our guide backed up our vehicle to give it room.

From the EXIF data from the image file, I shot with a Nikon D500 with a 70-300mm lens at 92.0 mm. I asked ChatGPT to work out how far away we were.

Work out how far the animal is from the camera in this scenario: Imagine a full grown elephant standing between broadside on and three quarters to the camera, and the animal fills three quarters of the frame horizontally in a photo taken with a Nikon camera with an APS-C sensor and a focal length of 92mm

And ChatGPT says the answer is about 37 metres.

Tourists Trampled By Elephants

My wife has a subscription to the Times and shared an article with me this morning about two women – Easton Janet Taylor age 68 and Alison Jean Taylor, age 67 – who were killed by an elephant in Zambia a couple of days ago.

The Times also reported that last year in separate incidents, Gail Mattson, age 79 and Juliana Tourneau, age 64, were killed by elephants in Zambia.

What’s with Zambia? Does it have a worse situation than elsewhere?

I looked up reports of elephant deaths and Zambia doesn’t feature apart from those deaths.

But in South Africa last year, a South African tourist age 59 was trampled by elephants while trying to shield his grandchildren who had wandered near a herd.

And a Spanish tourist age 43 who exited his private car to photograph elephants was trampled by a herd.

Tamara and I In South Africa

I shot the photo above and the ones below on a trip that Tamara and I went on to South Africa in 2019, specifically to see animals.

On researching where to go it became clear that we would have to visit private reserves because they have the animals.

One reserve we visited, perhaps the best, covers 54,000 acres, which is equal to 85 square miles, or 219 square km. We didn’t want to go anywhere the animals were obviously penned in, but on looking at how big 54,000 acres actually is, we saw it is a big area. Here is the area superimposed on London.

And in the photos below I love the one of the two elephants munching on the shrubs because from the way they are getting ‘stuck in’ as the vernacular British English has it, they could be two little guinea pigs or rabbits or any small animals munching on parsley or carrots – just at a different scale.