I spent most of the day with the elephants.
And you can just imagine how much dung they leave in their wake as they each drop a pile every 40minutes or so. Luckily dung beetles are out in force to remove this stuff as soon as it lands. And efficient they are. Even though it seems they just spend all their time fighting over dung piles. Surely this stuff is not in short supply! And gee guys find a better reason to fight. Boys tend to fight over girls. That I can sort of understand, but fighting of a pile of that stuff???
The elephant herds were all together moving up the Mahande drainage system. The grass is standing really tall there at the moment and the elephant are taking full advantage of it. Especially the bulls who tend to graze more than browse. The cows on the other hand browse more than they graze.
This is apparently ‘cos the bulls have a larger bite size and so can take in enough low grade food, grass, to keep them going. The cows with their smaller bite size don’t get enough from grass and so look more to browsing to supplement their diet.
So we often find the bulls in the grasslands and cows in the woodlands. Except when there’s a cow in oestrus. Then the bulls stick closely with the cow herds.
Chipfongwe is doing well but most of the time I was only able to see the top of his back as he drifted through the towering grass. Can’t be much fun for him either, just never being able to see the outside world.
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