(Dan’s comments are italicized)

I’ve been ‘wild camping’ in the Okavango Delta five times over the years (the first time in 1986 at the age of 27; this last time in 2025 at the age of 66) and it never gets old!! It fascinates me that I could be watching some of the same elephants over these 40 years as African elephants live for 60-70 years!! I think we met an elephant that was older than me last year; he was HUGE and the poor thing dribbled urine as he walked so he was exceptionally smelly (I just hope nobody is saying that about me as I walk past 😱)!

Elephants remain my favorite animal, partly because I believe the world would be a better place if we were more like them. Every time I watch elephants, I think about the 1986 book by Robert Fulgham entitled All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten; I’d change ‘in kindergarten’ to ‘from elephants’! Just a thought.

But I digress. I’m at my happiest studying elephant behavior so am excited to share some of my favorite elephant photos from the delta.

I tried to keep the number of photos to 10, but seeing as I’ve already failed…

Are these my favorite photos? I don’t know; I had to make a choice and, today, these made the cut. This camera is fantastic, but taking 200+ photos in one encounter is easy to do. We have decided to save each photo as RAW, which is at least 10 times larger than JPEG. And as we cannot post RAW to the blog, I need to spend at least an hour every night converting every picture so that Rhia can then spend hours processing each one…but it’s worth the effort as we get to share our joy with our friends.

Although elephants are my all-time favorite animals, giraffes come a close second (especially as this was our Rachael’s favorite animal).

As I must end this photo odyssey somewhere, I’ll do so now with a handful of random photos.

We spent many, many hours watching elephants and giraffes (sorry, not sorry 🤪). But while doing so, I would drift off, pull out my binoculars and start birdwatching. I’d simply like to highlight some of the bird encounters. Of the 568 listed birds in Botswana, I checked 44 off the list. I’m not good at identifying what our friends call LBJs  (little brown jobs), nor the multitudes of far off sightings, nor the ones I heard but did not see. These are just the ones I am confident I saw.

Here’s a quick anecdote to end this post. We were listening to the unmistakable call of the blacksmith lapwing (it sounds like a blacksmith hitting an anvil with a hammer) when I commented that the bird couldn’t have been named anything else with that call. Dan looked confused and then… eureka!!! He was excited to realize that the bird is so named because of this distinctive call…and not because he’s black and white 😵‍💫. Bless his cotton socks! At least his hair’s growing back nicely 🤣