Africa Wild

Hi Richprince,

You are correct, the posing elephant above is not a youngster any-more. The sunken temples are not too deep and he still has a good tuft of tail hair, so he could still be good for another 5 - 10 years during which time he could add 20 inches of tusk length every 5 years and that could make him quite impressive.

Unfortunately he seem to be in the habit of abusing his tusks by breaking trees. His tusks are too "curly" for digging in the ground.

Some elephants develop a habit of breaking trees and then often also break their tusks like the elephant in the first photo below, who [ while we were watching him ] forcefully put a tusk in the fork of a tree and broke a huge branch off twice as thick as his tusk. On the photo it can be seen that he already has a broken tusk. His friend on the 2nd photo also had broken tusks which were too "curly" for digging roots so, the two of them appear to be actively deforesting the area between Mopani and Shingwedzi.





By the way, notice the fork tailed drongo in the bush right next to the elephant on the first photo - ever noticed that virtually every small group of elephant [ or loners ] have a fork tailed drongo accompanying them to scoop disturbed insects out of the air ?

Interesting observations 100p!

Wonder if ellies get as upset over broken tusks as girls do over broken nails?

@ ALL,

I just changed the name of a tusker I named long time ago as Babalala. I renamed him as Babalala 2 (like in the old days with Letaba 1 and Letaba 2).
Reason: At the time I named him I was not aware (my mistake) that the name Babalala was already used for a tusker.

To avoid confusion with ID'ing I changed the name.

noted

@ ALL

Just added a NEW section to the tusker site: Potential Tuskers of Kruger

Purposes of this section:
Presenting potential not yet named Tuskers or Big Tuskers of kruger.
Getting a complete view on them from all sides including tusks, ears and trunk.
For ID reasons, you can check the named ones and if you cannot ID , you can check this section too
As soon as a complete view is available and the bull is or devellops as a (big) tusker he will be added to the named sections with his own page and name.

If you have pictures that matches or pictures of bulls with interesting long and or thick tusks do not hesitate to contact me and please post them here if possible

Set up is per region : South, Satara, Letaba, Mopani, Shingwedzi and North
The potential tuskers will get a temporary name like Shingwedzi_01, Shigwedzi_02 etc for Shingwedzi region , Mopani_01 for Mopani area etc etc...

Sample of this new section:
Region Shingwedzi
http://www.tuskersofafrica.com/tuskerp/shingwedzi1.htm

Let's have more fun with the tuskers

Had a look, these are two pretty bulls

well done

Great idea Aat!!

I posted these pics already and you could not ID him but he's definitely a potential big tusker. We saw him near Hippo Pools in August 2013.