nubbsgalore:when michael nichols first photographed elephants in the lowland forests of the central
nubbsgalore:when michael nichols first photographed elephants in the lowland forests of the central african republic in 1991 (1,6,8), he only caught fleeting moments of them, and at great peril. these sensitive giants were so afraid of ivory poachers hunting them down, they thundered off at the slightest hint of human activity.it took him 16 years to encounter a heard of 600 elephants who were not fearful of humans. he would end up living with for two years on the savannah of kenya’s samburu national reserve, where he came to understand the depth of their complex relationships, intelligence and compassion (click pics for more).he recounts, for example, how when one family mourns the death of a female, other matriarchs approach and surround the corpse, touching it with their trunks and swaying back and forth. “they go to the corpse and they won’t leave it,” nichols said. “even when it’s just bones. once a year they’ll visit the bones and hold them with their trunk. i would call that mourning” (sixth photo).“these are the most caring and sentient creatures on earth, yet they suffer so horribly at the hand of man,” he adds. while in chad, nichols witnessed the massacre of forest elephants - the smaller and more elusive cousins of the better known savanna elephants - whose numbers have declined by two thirds in the last decade due to poaching. ivory poachers are now killing 22,000 african elephants a year. says nichols, elephants “cannot be terrorized and massacred by a world that calls itself civilized. we have to forget about the absurd indulgence of ivory and put our focus and resources into the far more complex problem of how elephants and humans can share land in an overtaxed continent.” -- source link