Caitlin O'Connell's Blog, page 26

Home For The Holidays

Looking forward to ringing in the new year with extended family and wishing you all the best for the holidays!

Why can’t we all just get along?

This elephant from Left Hook’s family group is chasing a small family away from the waterhole. They had been drinking at the source of the spring, the prime spot where this dominant female wants her family to drink. Harsh times in Etosha’s desert environment where water is a precious resource and elephant families are forced to defend their water rights against others.

Baby Ele of the Day

Can’t beat a baby elephant to brighten your day. Sorry we have posted so little lately but we are in the last months of a big push to get out two new elephant books for 2015 and our Baby Elephant In The Wild book just got picked by Amazon editors as top 20 nonfiction children’s books for 2014!

Thanks to everyone for your questions, notes and support.

Don’t Forget to Vote!

Elephant Don - Part 1

After living for over a decade in the heart of their families, bull elephants develop a wanderlust and start to distance themselves from family. At the same time, mom, aunts, and even grandma get fed up with these bulls throwing their weight around and encourage a parting of ways with a good swift tusking or two…or three, leaving them with two choices upon reaching sexual maturity—wonder alone until they die, or seek the company of other males.

In parts of Etosha, more often than not, young males have chosen the companionship of others. But cranky old pachyderms and testosterone driven young upstarts don’t always get along. Sometimes it takes a “Don” to knock some sense into these tanks of meat to prevent an all-out lethal clash of titans!

Caitlin’s new book, Elephant Don, now available for preorder on Amazon, explores the complexity of these tricky male elephant relationships and describes how she studies these subtle giants without getting in the middle of the smashing heads.

Over the next few months leading up to release of the book, we will post a series of photos and short pieces about the science of Elephant Don and how the book came to be.

Make a Stand for Pachyderms

May pachyderms roam the earth for as long (or longer!) than we do.