Pachyderm puzzle for forest walkers
We've all heard about the proverbial elephant in the room, but this was a little different...
ON an outing to Empisini, an almost forgotten little reserve near Umkomaas, local environmentalist Paddy Norman and his companions did a double take when they thought they’d stumbled upon a relative of the famous Knysna elephants.
Mystery and legends surround these elephants and for many years there was doubt about whether they even still existed. It has now been established that a small population, the remnants of a much larger herd, still roams the forests of Knysna. So little is known about these shy, secretive creatures that, for a moment, it seemed to Paddy that it was not absolutely impossible to find one of the herd hiding out in the Empisini forests.
As chairman of the Southern KwaZulu-Natal branch of the Wildlife and Environmental Society of South Africa (Wessa), he’d organised to Empisisni outing for members on Tuesday this week. Despite the forecast it did not rain and the weather was ideal for a walk through the cool forest. They saw lots of interesting trees, a fair number of birds, a pleasant stream with a waterfall, tracks of bushbuck and duiker. And then the baby elephant.
Well, almost. They crept closer and closer and eventually discovered that it was a tree doing a very good imitation of a pachyderm, as the photograph Paddy submitted shows. “Well the trunk was real,” Paddy quipped. As he pointed out you never know what you will find when you go for a walk in a game reserve.
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