Elephants of Amboseli on PBS

I'm watching an amazing episode of NATURE right now on PBS. It is called "Unforgetable Elephants," and chronicles the filmmaker's various journeys filming and getting to know elephants. His primary focus is the family of an elephant named Echo in Kenya's Amboseli National Park. To contrast the lives of the elephants in Amboseli, the filmmaker (Martyn Colbeck) also went to an extreme desert environment in Namibia where elephants manage to survive some of the harshest conditions imaginable, trekking over sand dunes to reach water holes that provide just enough vegetation to support the elephants. Colbeck also films the forest elephants in the Congo. However, he repeatedly goes back to Amboseli; on one visit, he witnesses Echo giving birth to a new calf, and on another he shows a run-in between Echo and the Maasai who also use the land for their cattle.

Echo's baby was so cute! She was named Ebony and the filmmaker tells the story of another family stealing her from Echo. Apparently it was some sort of statement about the other family's place in the elephant hierarchy, but Echo and the other big females in her family made sure they got Ebony back!

Family ties are very strong among elephants, as evidenced by the story of Echo's 34-year-old daughter Erin. She had a run-in with the local Maasai, and the spear wounds got infected. The Kenya Wildlife Service had to be called in to medicate Erin, because she would certainly have died; her calf might have been lost, too. Through the whole experience, Echo did not leave her daughter's side until the humans had stepped in to intervene. Unfortunately, Erin did not survive, but the other elephants led her calf, Email, away and took care of him.

You can learn more about this episode online at: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/unforgettable/interview.html

I'm having fun tonight learning more about elephants like the ones I saw in Kenya. Kenya is never far from my thoughts, and I look back fondly on the places and people I saw there. I am glad that I have been able to continue learning about the country that welcomed me last summer.