Today marks the last day of fieldwork with Graeme Shannon and Karen McComb on the elephant cognition project, which has involved using playback experiments to study social and ecological knowledge among elephant family groups. Back in May 2007 at the beginning of the project, one of the first groups that Graeme and I spotted were the JBs, and Jemima the matriarch had a new female calf that was less than a week old - named Julep. Now, 4.5 years later, we saw the JB family once again, and this time with two new calves.

Early this morning Graeme and I were looking for family groups in the East of the park for our playback experiments. We sighted the LB family moving quickly towards a small group 250 m distant. We drove to the family (which turned out to be the HB group) and I immediately noticed that they were bunched together in a distinctive formation, which is a good indication that there may have been a recent birth.