This clip shows a beautiful bull elephant named Ely. A young Amboseli male elephant, Ely gained international notoriety in the early 1990′s when he was born crippled to his even more famous mother, Echo, heroine of three BBC TV films and a recent Animal Planet series. He overcame his affliction, grew to a healthy young pre-teen, but then in 2001 he disappeared. Had he succumbed to a Maasai spear or a poacher’s bullet? Or had he just ‘gone independent’ earlier than his fellow bulls? This January, some nine years later, overjoyed researchers learned the truth when the prodigal returned to the heart of Amboseli National Park. The clip, taken by Cynthia Moss with co-workers Soila Sayialel and Norah Njiraini, shows him wandering casually through a post-rains elephant congregation, testing young females and hanging around as though he’d never left.
Story from Elephantopia.
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