This year, I’ve decided to dedicate a portion of the proceeds of my annual calendar to the amazing research and conservation work Bring The Elephant Home is doing on elephant behaviour, habitat, and wellbeing in South Africa and Thailand (and soon other parts of Africa, like Zimbabwe, Uganda, and more!).
The calendars are available in my photography shop. Just select the SHOP button, go to Specialty Products, and scroll down to the calendars.
Currently, I’m only able to ship within the US, but send me a note if you’re out of the US and want a calendar…we’ll figure something out.
While you’re in my photography shop, browse around… you may find something fun as a holiday gift. The photo lab I use does amazing prints, and we can ship pretty quickly for holiday gifts.
I started writing this post on a dark plane flying North over the African continent, visions of elephants and African wildlife swimming in my head. Now I’m home, back from another trip to Kariega with the BTEH team to do additional observations and work on an exciting elephant ID project that blossomed from that first trip.
How it started: I went down to South Africa last March sort of blindly. I had signed up for a volunteer program with an NGO called Bring The Elephant Home to help the researchers do behavioural studies on elephants at Kariega Game Reserve in the Eastern Cape. We spent 10 days there, in the field and in the classroom, learning about and studying these amazing creatures. Just a few months before that trip, they had removed the interior fences in the reserve, so one of the key questions we tried to answer was “what happens with the eles when you remove fences?” I wrote about that amazing experience here.
Fast-forward a year and a few months, and these elephants have been living in their expanded habitat for some time now.
5 observations after another 10 days in the field:
The herds seem to be thriving. There are new-ish calves and lots of mud wallowing. The eles really seemed jovial and happy.
1 / 7
All the herds seem to be spending a lot of time in the Harvestvale section of the reserve. There are still 3 matriarchs with GPS collars (Half Moon, Beauty, and Bukela), and the BTEH team has tracked them over the past year in a sort of migration pattern with the seasons. Last year, Bukela’s herd was very cautious about crossing over into their new territory, so it could be that the Kariega West herd has benefitted most with the new habitat.
They’ve made new friends and acquaintances. One of the most beautiful things to observe was that all the herds seem to be affiliating, if not intermingling. Time will tell whether this leads to new mini-herds or one giant one.
The bulls are roaming about in bands of 2s and 3s, and even these guys have crossed clans. We observed Matchstick hanging around with Holy Moly, and Sean (one delegate from each of the herds). Maybe Matchstick (from Harvestvale) is playing mentor – or host – to the other two (from KW).
Kambaku was in musth. He’s from the Kariega West side. It seemed probable that he mated with Mavis (from Harvestvale), so the bulls are probably enjoying the fact that they have more ladies to choose from.
Exciting news.
Last year, I left feeling like there had to be an easier way to ID individual elephants. So I organised a Hackathon team to work on an AI model that would help speed up and automate the identification process. While we didn’t fully solve the problem for Hackathon, we came close… and that led to a partnership of sorts between our Hackathon team, Bring The Elephant Home, Microsoft’s AI for Good Lab, and WildMe, the internationally-known NGO that works to identify and track endangered species worldwide. To date, WildMe’s WildBook population monitoring doesn’t have elephants in their re-ID model because they didn’t have a large enough data set to train the AI. So through this collaboration we are going to first train their re-ID model to include elephants, and then work on a mobile app that can be used in the field.
To say that we are very excited is an understatement!
More exciting news.
All research points to the fact that habitat expansion leads to thriving herds, lower environmental impact, less human/elephant conflict, less human intervention needed for elephant population control, and a healthier ecosystem for many of the interdependent species in the area. Together with the Elephant Reintegration Trust, BTEH is working on creating the world’s first elephant rewilding reserve. BTEH also supports initiatives to create an “elephant corridor” in the Eastern Cape that aims to pull down more fences between private reserves and build a network of connected wild spaces up to Addo National Park.
This year’s program felt like both a summation of research as well as a lens into the future. Many thanks to Antoinette and Brooke at Bring The Elephant Home for creating these exciting programs to promote elephant wellbeing and more successful human-elephant coexistence.
More to follow, with photos and stories, from an amazing 10 days with the elephants and the BTEH volunteer team.
Every year, I create a photo calendar for my friends and family. This year, I’ve printed some extra in advance, and I have them for sale at my photography shop!
While supplies last (or until I can order more), I have 2025 “Big Things are Coming” elephant calendars available.
The calendars are 8-1/2×11, printed on the same heavy stock as my cards, and include photos, anecdotes and little moments of celebration throughout the year.
They are on sale for $28 each. For a limited time, use coupon code 20OFF2025CAL for 20% off!
To order: visit my photography shop, select SHOP, select SPECIALTY PRODUCTS, and scroll down to the calendar, pick a quantity, and ADD TO CART (I have yet to figure out how to do a direct link to the item or to have it appear on top of the list…).
Shop > Specialty products > scroll down > choose Calendar > Add to cart!
Thursday night: I landed in Cape Town at 9:30 at night, amid warnings that “the city isn’t safe” and “don’t walk alone” and, especially, “whatever you do, do not hike on Table Mountain alone. There are muggings.”
This last one bit me in the butt a little because one of the things I most wanted to do here in Cape Town was to hike up Table Mountain. So I spent the bulk of my return from Kariega wondering what I was going to do in Cape Town if exploring, hiking, or wandering aimlessly through the city wasn’t safe. I had 3 full days to fill, and I had only a short list of things to do and see.
Thing 1: Penguins. The only species of penguins in all of Africa resides on the southern end of the continent, with the bulk of them living on the Western Cape of South Africa. The African penguin sits squarely on the endangered list, with IUCN indicating that their numbers are in decline. The weird-looking critters were close enough to see, tourists be damned, so I was going to see them!
Thing 2: Table Mountain. Table Mountain and its foothills run like a rugged spine down the Cape, creating a dramatic backdrop. The unique formula of raging unemployment, governmental mis-management, and a drug problem of crisis proportions plus myriad tourists running around the city with giant dollar (euro, pound) signs emblazoned onto their foreheads has equaled a not-so-minor crime problem in this city. I’m of course (unironically) watering down the problem to a few key factors, which have exacerbated during the major drought in this part of the world these past few years. And so, even though there were too many reports of crime on the trails to ignore, I was determined to see the mountain somehow.
Thing 3: The southernmost point. To date, the most-southern point I’d ever been in the world was Kenton-on-Sea, in the Eastern Cape, where I had just come from. So to know that I was really, really close to the southwestern tip of the whole African continent, meant that I just had to try to get there over the next few days.
I have to note that during my 9:30pm ride from airport to guesthouse, I saw on the streets: Not. A. Soul. It was eerie, actually. The car stopped on the deserted street outside the guesthouse, and the Uber driver waited, wordlessly, out of the car, for me to get buzzed-in before he drove off. I was fried, a little sun-scorched, and missing the eles already. So I crashed – hard – and decided to figure out the next few days…tomorrow.
Friday. The easiest (and, as I was advised, safest) way to get around Cape Town is via an Uber. If I had enough days and fewer fears, I probably would have looked into the local train. And I frankly just avoided the “hop on-hop off” bus because I was really just looking for a less herd-like touristic experience. So, app in hand, I Ubered it down from Cape Town to the famous Boulders Beach and its resident population of penguins.
Truth be told, I’ll give the boardwalk out to see the penguins and Boulders a meh. After a hundred metres or so of wall-to-wall selfies with penguins, one can turn around and exit through the gift shop. The beach protection is needed, though, since there are fewer than 11,000 breeding pairs of these penguins remaining and the species could go extinct in the next decade or so. About 10% of the entire population lives right there. I didn’t do a count, but there were a lot of the strange little flightless waterbirds on the beach. 🐧
2 / 7
It was nice to discover a longer path outside of the main area, off the beach and away from the crowd. This path wends its way through some protected penguin nesting areas, where it’s possible to observe the little nuggets without bothering them. It was a surprisingly noisy, yet peaceful, experience: penguins are louder than one might imagine, and there were few tourists down this way, so I’d call it a win. I even encountered what the locals call a dassie…the African hyrax!
Highlight of the afternoon: a stroll back along the path and up to another beach, this time sans tourists. Here, I found a smaller colony of penguins lounging and playing on the rocks and sand. Weird insight: I can now attest that neither penguin courtship nor sex is a quiet sport.
The one thing that stuck with me that day was a conversation with the Uber driver. I had spent the morning with a migraine and got into the car slightly subdued and groggy from a nap. The driver was amiable enough, and so as he drove, we chatted, and he mentioned that he lived in a township just outside the city. I asked how it was, and he answered, “It’s poor but okay. I’m saving money for my family.” We talked about the expansive beaches, white sharks, the recent forest fires…as the subject changed from where do you stayto more touristic things, I thought little of the conversation until later the next day.
Saturday. It was About an hour into my day-long tour with an amazing local guide, Shafiek from In2Africa Tours (hint: if you are in Cape Town, please let me know and I’ll get you his contact info!), that he began to talk about the neighbourhoods and communities in and around Cape Town – and the social structures therein.
And so, I learnt a new definition I didn’t know I needed. Until that moment, I hadn’t realised that here, a “township” is no more than a favela or shantytown, remnants of worker housing encampments established during apartheid, now transformed into sprawling stretches of shacks and tin-roofed huts, interspersed with rubbish heaps, precariously spiderwebbed together by pirated electrical and cable lines. People live here because even though Apartheid ended 30 years ago this week, wage disparity, majority white land ownership, and rampant unemployment prevail.
It made me feel self-conscious, privileged, a little bit ashamed.
Having done a lot of work in affordable housing at home, it also struck me not for the first time this trip, that while where I was in South Africa didn’t really feel like Africa-Africa, its first-world façade hides the cracks underneath. Back home too. A clean, comfortable, safe place to live is a basic human necessity. Maslow, meet Cape Town.
Putting out of mind for the moment the things that were entirely out of my control, I focused on trying to muster excitement towards the day’s itinerary: another trip down the coast, but this time all the way down to the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Point via the Atlantic side, and a checklist of sights to see and things to do. My guide did an amazing job of creating an itinerary of less-touristy, nature-oriented attractions. The day went well: we wended our way through the different coastal towns, the cliffside homes looking precarious on the rocky slopes. A small boat ride took me to see a nearby harbour island called Seal Island, and its residents Arctocephalus pusillus, or Cape fur seals. The genus translates to “bear head”. Go figure.
4 / 6
Back on shore, we weaved our way across the beautiful Chapman’s Peak Drive, which was built into the side of the mountain in the early 1900s, only to be closed nearly a century later due to rockslides for more than a decade. Three Ts helped it come back to life in its current iteration: technology, tourists, and tolls, giving better commutes to locals and better access to the geological and botanical wonders of the mountain to all (or at least all who wish to pay for the privilege). Apparently 2 species of Fynbos occur here on the Cape and nowhere else on earth.
Down the Cape we went, passing Simons Town again, and landing at the Cape of Good Hope, where I ventured up to the old Cape Point lighthouse (the new one is apparently lower and brighter, hence safer!) and then down again via the absolutely lovely Kaap die Goeie Hoop-voetpad overlooking Dias beach, leading down to the Cape of Good Hope proper.
Unexpected animal behaviour.
In this part of the Cape, ostriches and baboons and eland live by the sea. And while there are “caution: baboons” signs everywhere, the individuals I saw seemed almost introspective, meditative. This group of baboons has apparently evolved to eat fish and mussels. Snacks snatched from unsuspecting tourists serve as fillers. Luckily, The baboons I observed seemed much more concerned with the ocean than with my snacks. Which I dutifully left in the car.
A note in an exhibit in the visitor center sums it up nicely:
Since the beginning of our species, our survival has depended on our knowledge of nature, our original Mother. All early humans understood nature intimately, and saw other species as kin. With the environmental crisis looming, now more than ever, we need to draw on our ancestors’ wisdom. We have compromised our life support system, which is the biodiversity of our planet. We need to rebuild our threads to the wild, because ultimately our connection to nature will determine our survival.
We need to remember that we are nature, we are not separate.
Animals, encountered; points, pinned; we headed back towards Cape Town on the False Bay side, stopping for photos in Muzienberg and some other scenic towns along the way before spending a few minutes wandering the early evening streets of Bo Kaap, the Muslim section of town, and grabbing some street food to bring back for dinner. With Ramadan in full swing and the shops closing early for iftar, the breaking of the fast, I had a plan for Monday morning before I headed to the airport: a visit to the much-renowned Atlas Spice Shop there.
Sunday arrived and I made a plan to see Table Mountain. I decided to take the cablecar up and down and do as much hiking at the top as I could. Sun shining, I crossed fingers against the potential for mid-afternoon fog that could envelop the mountaintop in minutes. After wandering around the close-to-base paths for a bit, I stumbled upon a trail snaking through the scrappy and rocky terrain and bounded by the Fynbos mentioned earlier. It felt like the moon, like being above treeline but here there are really no trees, regardless that it isn’t even that high (1,086 metres/3,563 feet), compared with highest peak in S. Africa at nearly 3x its height. Little black lizards darted around the rocks. I saw another couple of dassies. And some of the very alien-like king protea flowers! Few humans were on this section of trail, but I bumped into a small group of Brits and fell in with their local guide for a while. He was leading them to Maclear’s Beacon, the highest point of Table Mountain and used by cartographers as a triangulation station. The hike wasn’t terribly challenging, but checked the boxes next to “hike” and “views” for the day!
7 / 15
As I was decidedly not done exploring, I decided to venture to the waterfront.
It felt like adjectives juxtaposed in close proximity: sketchy and industrial, shmancy and touristy. A stark illustration of what lies just a scratch beneath the surface. So I wandered around the wharf (deemed safe, as evidenced by the preponderance of armed guards), ogled the ginormous seals on the dock, then ducked into a Turkish restaurant and had a fantastic late lunch before getting out of dodge.
Monday. I spent my last morning spice-shopping, getting harassed by creepy men on the streets of Bo Kaap, chatting with the lovely owner of the guesthouse, skritching the head of the neighbour’s lab puppy through the gate, and gratefully transiting to the airport for my flight home.
8 / 6
And like that the trip was at its end. This one felt too short: I wanted more time with nature, with the gentle giants back at Kariega, with the birds and the wild things. While I don’t feel any great need to go back to Cape Town, I have it in my heart to go back to Kariega and to work again with Bring the Elephant Home in the (foreseeable) future.
Just in case you don’t want to scroll all the way up to the top find the links to the earlier blogs from the trip:
And I’ve put loads of shots from this trip and beyond into my photography shop… you can order prints, cards and more of many of the pics in this post (and more). And use the code TGM-15 for a 15% discount.
Okay, so every day wasn’t elephant counting and monitoring and dung sampling. Yes, I really went to South Africa for my vacation and spent at least a small amount of time looking at, taking photos of, measuring, and rooting around in, elephant dung.
The Bring the Elephant Home program was structured to give us several days in the field, a day or two in the “office” doing projects (I wrote a blog post, created a few new visuals for the team, and contributed a BUNCH of photos for the ID project… and I’m trying to put together a Hackathon project to use AI for elephant ID. More to come on that as it progresses!), and time to see the local area and learn even more about Xhosa culture.
We watched some presentations on other conservation being done in South Africa and abroad, one by Bring the Elephant Home’s Antoinette van de Water on her work on the value of elephants [read the white paper here, or take a look at her TedTalk here], and by the amazing work being done in rewilding by Brett Mitchell of the Elephant Reintegration Trust. Their motto, “helping elephants in captivity or distress to gain the freedom they deserve” says volumes about the work they’re doing. (Know any gajillionaires? A new project they’re working on to create a sanctuary and rewilding center near Kariega needs funding. Let me know and I’ll put you in touch with the right people!).
A small public service announcement: If you are fortunate enough to see elephants in their native land and have the opportunity to ride or touch captive elephants, please DON’T! Just please don’t patronize these businesses. These types of business exist at the expense of the health and welfare of the animals. [read more here]
Elephants are sentient, endangered beings, mistreated and quite often drugged in order to be submissive enough for human entertainment; in the process they suffer years of emotional and physical hardships. Having seen captive elephants first-hand in Thailand and India, and wild elephants in Africa, I can assure you that there is nothing more exquisite than watching a wild elephant in its natural habitat. There is absolutely nothing satisfying about watching a captive elephant. [rant off]
One of the events later in the week was an offsite visit to the home of one of the Kariega Foundation’s staff for an afternoon cooking demonstration! Xhosa cuisine is comprised of quite a lot of meat, but also their staple starch called samp, a corn meal derivative that seemed a lot like the East African fufu or ugali, made with cassava, that I tried in Botswana and Zimbabwe. Beans or sauces (meaty and non) are poured over the samp, as other cultures would use rice or potatoes.
Lunch!
Fears of cultural appropriation dancing in my head, our faces were dotted with Xhosa-style paints, and we donned handmade clothes and beaded neck wraps. Our smiling hosts guided us into the kitchen and outside to the fire upon which we heated stews and baked the bread we had just hand-rolled. Note: It was a bad time to have quit bread, as these hot-off-the-fire rolls were simply divine. The afternoon culminated with a demonstration of local song and dance by kids from the neighborhood, replete with drums and chanting. This dancing show gave me pangs, as in cultural experiences I’ve had elsewhere in Africa: I wondered if the kids participating in the show resented their elders for making them show off for the visitors, or if the joy on their faces during the dancing and singing was genuine, and whether they were grateful to share this expression and pride of culture. I hoped for the latter, as they did appear to be quite enjoying themselves. The smiles were genuine. Ours too.
Over the course of the 10 days, we learned, we did research drives, we walked along the white sand beaches of Kenton-on-Sea, and even did a night drive through the dirt roads we spent so many days travelling in our quest to find the herds. Jackals and kudu, white rhinos and rhinoceros beetles (one, landing on my neck, was an unwelcome visitor!)…and the Southern Cross in the Milky Way-spattered sky. But the highlight of the evening, as we were heading back to camp in the darkness, was a weird little creature we saw scampering down the dusty road, looking like a cross between a tiny bear and a marmot. He ducked down into a dry gully as we stopped, popping up only a metre away from the vehicle to stare down his smarmy nose at us. A honey badger! To quote even our naturalist, “I’ve never seen one of these in person before.”
9 / 13
We went up to Addo, a national park an hour away that boasts an elephant population of ~300. It’s rumored that a couple of Addo bulls are planned to be transferred to Kariega to help balance out and give some adult supervision maybe to a young and randy bull population over there (stay tuned, maybe that will be a new research opportunity!). The day was drizzly and spitty, but it was still fun to see dozens and dozens of eles at the different watering holes throughout the park.
It’s not without irony to me that there are really no wild wild animals remaining in South Africa. Their wild stocks have been poached and hunted to near-extinction; the wild lands, animals and all, are all now locked behind fences to protect them from the most alpha predator of all.
It was fitting, then, on our last day, that we spent time in the pouring rain visiting the APU, the Anti-Poaching Unit, at Kariega. These rangers steadfastly protect their eles and rhinos (black and white) from said predators. In fact, while visiting the team, we were privileged to a sighting of Thandi and two of her calves. Thandi is famous in these parts for being the only rhino to have survived a brutal poaching attempt in which two others in her crash (an apt collective noun for rhinos!) where brutally murdered. Thandi’s face was mauled when they hacked off her horn, but hers is a survival story that speaks to the valiant efforts of surgeons and conservationists alike to restore her face and her family. Since the poaching in 2012, she has created a small battalion of rhinos and now has grand-babies roaming the thicket and savannah of Kariega in her honour. On our first game drive, we met Colin, Thandi’s 2nd calf. According to Kariega’s website, that calf was named Colin in memory of the reserve’s founder, a man loved and admired by many, who had died just days before Thandi gave birth. The name Colin means ‘victory of the people’. White rhinos in this case.
Colin
Black rhino
Black rhino (notice the radio collar on his leg?)
Not a rhino 😉
Thandi and 2 calves
The skies cleared just as we realised we were running late for lunch and our ride back to Port Elizabeth. We hadn’t managed to spot more than one or two elephants in the distance all day. But just like a cheesy movie, as we were losing hope, we managed to get a ping from Beauty’s collar – the one that had been malfunctioning all week. She was about a kilometer away from the fence at the edge of the Kariega Conservation Center. Of course she was. So as it turned out, in our last moments of our last game drive on our last day in Kariega, we were treated to a close encounter with the whole of Beauty’s herd, a brightening sky, and baked-in memories to last half a lifetime.
Late that night, in a hotel room in Cape Town, which felt like a million light years away from the reserve, I saw a WhatsApp message to our group from Brooke, the PhD researcher: “Beauty and Half Moon came up to the fence to say goodbye.” Later still: “Bukela’s herd crossed the river!” This was the exact thing we were there in South Africa to help observe: What happens when you remove a fence.
Next up: a few days in Cape Town and a long trip home.
THIS JUST IN: Want your very own elephant prints or cards? I just launched my new print store… take a look HERE. And use coupon code TGM-15 for a 15% site-wide discount!
