Volunteers witness an incredible elephant encounter!

The Elephant and Wildlife Conservation project in Sri Lanka researches over 300+ elephants and other wildlife, including sloth bears, leopards and jungle cats. This results in an increase in the understanding and knowledge of these animals, and helps the local team put in place initiatives to help the community and wild elephants to peacefully live alongside each other. 

For elephant lovers, this project offers an incredible opportunity for volunteers to watch them in the wild, knowing that their observations will directly benefit the local elephant populations.

One group of volunteers were recently lucky enough to witness a fascinating encounter of a solitary bull greeting a herd of female elephants and have shared their experience:

“It was like any other afternoon. The volunteers were all up in the two tree huts situated in the elephant corridor, waiting patiently for elephants to show up. Deciding that elephants weren’t going to show up we headed out.

As we slowly crawled along the road a solitary bull was feeding a short distance from the track. Stopping the vehicles we were observing the bull when we heard roaring and trumpeting emanating from deep within the forest in the distant. We decided to head in the direction where the elephants were calling from. The three Land Rovers in convoy headed off the track into unknown territory.

We were soon in a vast wooded grassland. And then suddenly there were three large herds of elephants spread out in the wooded glade. There were easily close to or over 50 elephants. Some really large females were in these herds. One herd seeing the vehicles bunched together to stare and then retreated a short distance and fed. Soon a massive bull strolled into view and started moving from one herd to another obviously checking for oestrous females. He was massive and easily towered over the largest female by a meter and half.

A young immature bull took it upon himself to intimidate us with displacement behaviours that were quite amusing to watch. Gradually the herds and the bull faded into the woodlands and we decided to head back, since dusk was setting fast and it would be difficult in the waning light to find our tyre tracks back to the dirt road that we had left behind about a mile away.”

We wish we had witnessed this spectacle too!  Volunteers are an important asset to the team in Sri Lanka and provide additional support in monitoring, research and data collection of the wildlife in the area. If you would like to assist the team in their award-winning work, you can find out more here.