Elephants: looking after the world around them.
August 2026
Remember. Listen. Care. Cooperate. Protect your family. Look after the world around you.
That’s how elephants are. If only we could be more like them. It sounds easy enough? But it’s not. We can’t be more like elephants until our leaders stop being pigs.
“Be more like elephants” is the slogan for World Elephant Day, which was last Wednesday, Aug. 12. Coincidentally, it was the first day we saw elephants on our 12-day Secret Gems trip through Kenya. https://www.zawadisha.org.
It was a sizable herd, beautifully healthy. About 15 strong, several adult females with their calves and adolescents. They were eating their way toward our vehicle.
To my untrained eye, it appeared to be a big group of big beasts moving every which way. But, of course, that wasn’t the case. They were moving with deliberation in a specific direction. And for a reason. Elephants always have a reason.
A lone calf failed to keep up. She was busy feeding on the acacia tree near our vehicle. An adult who had been moving with the herd stopped and turned around toward the calf. She slung her trunk forward and back, forward and back, and not until the calf ran toward her did she move on.
“Elephants show us that empathy is strength. That relationships matter. That memory connects generations. That cooperation can overcome challenges,” say the conservationists of World Elephant Day.
We all know that across Africa and Asia, elephants are facing man-made challenges that threaten their numbers. Wildlife conservationists come together once a year and to focus our attention and widen awareness. And education is on-going.
The last few days we have been in Wildlife Works Sanctuary in the Tsavo National Park, some 280 miles south of Nairobi. The area is famous for its iron-rich rust colored dirt. And the elephants here are known as the red elephants of Tsavo. They roll in the mud and give themselves dust baths daily as protection from sun and insects.
Just before dusk on our evening game drive yesterday, we saw two red elephants at a watering hole. We stopped and whispered as we jostled for position in the Land Cruiser to snap pics and adjust the binoculars.
They drew the water into their trunks and drank. Orange water splashed everywhere.
The silhouette of these two magnificent beings against the red dirt and sun-setting sky is a picture I won’t soon forget.
After a moment, the elephants turned and walked away, directly toward two well-camouflaged adult female lions scratching their backs on the dry grass.
If not for the elephants we would have missed the lions, the only large animal we hadn’t yet seen on our two-week trip. So this was a big win to be sure.
We drove around water hole and stopped in front of the lions. They appeared to be more interested in the nearby herd of zebras than they were in us. One of the lions, no more than twenty feet away, looked at us, yawned and looked back at the zebra.
These two girls were definitely on the hunt. They moved closer to the zebra, and we lost sight. The wind was in the zebra’s favor. They danced around nervously running away.
David, our driver and field guide, said they would likely make a kill during the night, which we will be looking for in our sunrise drive. I’ll let you know if we find anything.
Meanwhile, back to the elephants for a moment. No more preaching. I’m just so grateful for this opportunity to come back to the elephants – again.
P.S. We didn’t find any evidence this morning of a successful lion hunt last night.
