Tembe Elephant Park 2012

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  • Tembe elephant with frayed ears from living in dense thickets
  • For visitors Tembe Elephant Park offers game drives along sand tracks that in ancient times formed part of an ocean bed and now wind their way through tangled sand forest. The park (30 000 hectares) is situated in the sand forests of Maputaland on the boundary with Mozambique. It comprises unique sand forest, woodland, grassland and swampland.

    Tembe was proclaimed to protect the last remaining herds of free-ranging elephants in SA and the elusive suni antelope. Great tuskers, or hundred-pounders, can still be found at Tembe.

    Elephants are the marquee of African wildlife and there are very few places in Africa today where one can be rewarded to see a hundred-pounder. Tembe features as one of the top reserves in Africa when it comes to conservation of elephants with large ivory. Several bulls in the park carry medium-sized ivory.

    Isilo, one of the largest big tuskers in southern Africa, is a shy bull, despite the fact that he frequently destroys the electric fence to gain entrance to Tembe Lodge. Among his escapades, Isilo has also cracked the swimming pool at the lodge in an effort to drink from the pool. During our visit, he gave a couple of British visitors a great story to recount, by coming right up to their tent in the darkest African night. “You should have seen the size of him!” they kept exclaiming at breakfast the next morning. Of course, everyone else was so envious… We only saw Isilo’s footprints around the safari tents in the morning and had to be satisfied with sightings of numerous other Tembe elephants in the thorny thickets of Maputaland.

    Great tuskers like Isilo are monuments to the success of the elephant conservation begun by Chief Tembe and carried through by his successor Chief Israel Tembe, his indunas and Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife. The park has been managed really well and the fact that no hunting or poaching has been permitted has allowed the elephant population to develop a fair number of great tuskers – more than Kruger currently. In Kwazulu-Natal conservation is geared towards protecting these old, magnificent lords of the bush so that their genes may live on in the young bulls of the African savannah and forests.