Friday, March 23, 2007
Elephant Birth In The Wild
This amazing video is filmed by Deborah and Jonathan Smith. I'll quote here their words:
"We filmed the video when we were on honeymoon at Ulusaba private game reserve in the Kruger national park in South Africa on 11th February 2006.
It's very rare for humans to see an elephant birth in the wild - they will normally do this out of sight. We searched the net and found a researcher spent many months following a herd of elephant in a reserve north of Ulusaba and saw a birth through night vision goggles from a distance of many hundreds of yards. This elephant herd didn't seem to mind us being just a few feet away in our Land Rover. We thought we would share this amazing experience with all of you.
Baby elephants stay in the womb for around 22 months and are quite large when they are born. They are able to walk within an hour from birth - necessary with so many predators in the bush. We didn't capture his first steps as the elephants started getting agitated and we felt they didn't want us there any more; but we did go back in the morning and see him trotting behind his mother.
The whole sequence actually took a bit more than half an hour from the herd greeting to a new baby elephant arriving in the world. These are just the edited highlights of the amazing experience we had."
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