About the African Elephant Drawing
As a child, I knew elephants mainly from zoos and circuses, where their surroundings could never convey their true scale, intelligence, or social presence. Seeing African Elephants (Loxodonta africana) living and interacting freely in Kenya, Tanzania, and South Africa transformed my understanding of these remarkable animals and deepened a fascination that has remained with me ever since.
A wild elephant does not seem simply like a very large zoo animal placed into a larger enclosure. It belongs to the landscape. A family moving across open country can appear calm and almost unhurried, yet each individual remains aware of the others, of distant sounds and scents, and of everything changing around them.
One of my most memorable encounters occurred in Kruger National Park in 2012 while I was traveling with Whit Gibbons. We came upon a mixed gathering of males and females in an extraordinary state of excitement. Elephants were running in different directions, trumpeting, rumbling, roaring, and knocking over small trees. Several of the males appeared to be in musth, the period of heightened sexual activity and dominance associated with mature bulls.
The scene was chaotic enough to be frightening. The males seemed completely wired, and their enormous size made every sudden movement feel consequential. Then the animal at the center of it all came into view: an immense adult bull so large that the others seemed to reorganize themselves around his presence.
At first glance, he appeared to have five legs because his fully extended penis was almost reaching the ground – talk about making you feel inadequate. The other males scattered, continuing to run, vocalize, and batter the vegetation as the dominant bull approached the largest female in the group and mounted her. What had initially appeared to be general chaos was an intense episode of elephant courtship, competition, and mating.
It was one of those wildlife encounters in which scientific understanding and simple awe overlap. Musth bulls become more active, travel farther in search of receptive females, and communicate their condition through scent, posture, vocalizations, temporal-gland secretions, and urine dribbling. A large, experienced male in musth can dominate younger rivals without needing an extended fight. His arrival alone may be enough to send them out of his path.
The episode also revealed how misleading the familiar image of elephants as uniformly gentle, placid giants can be. They are deeply social animals capable of tenderness and cooperation, but they also possess immense physical power, intense reproductive competition, and the ability to transform a quiet woodland into a scene of noise, motion, broken vegetation, and very sensible human apprehension.
Elephant society is built around long-term relationships. Females commonly remain with their families throughout life, and related females help protect, guide, and care for calves. The oldest female, or matriarch, may carry decades of accumulated knowledge about seasonal movements, distant water sources, dangerous places, other elephant families, and people.
That experience can become critical during drought. Research in Tanzania found that families led by older matriarchs were better able to respond during an exceptionally severe dry period, apparently because those females remembered resources or routes encountered during an earlier drought decades before. In an elephant society, old age is therefore not simply something an individual survives.
Elephants also pay extraordinarily close attention to people. Experiments in Kenya showed that they could distinguish recorded human voices according to language or ethnic group, sex, and age—and respond most strongly to the voices associated with the greatest danger. They were not merely reacting to the sound of a person. They were classifying what kind of person they might be hearing and adjusting their behavior accordingly.
That ability reflects the complicated relationship elephants now have with humans. They may encounter tourists who watch from vehicles, farmers protecting crops, herders sharing water and grazing land, conservationists, rangers, and poachers. A long-lived elephant can accumulate very different experiences with each, and those experiences shape how it responds when people appear again.
Their response to death is equally compelling. Elephants have repeatedly been observed approaching the bodies of dead elephants, touching them with the trunk or feet, attempting to lift or support a dying companion, and returning later to investigate scattered bones. Researchers have also found that they show greater interest in elephant skulls and ivory than in the remains of other animals.
It is tempting to describe these behaviors simply as mourning, and in some situations that word may capture part of what we are witnessing. Science cannot know exactly what an elephant experiences internally, but the behaviors clearly extend beyond casual curiosity. Death appears to matter to them.
The familiar idea of an “elephant graveyard,” however, is a myth. There is no evidence that old elephants deliberately travel to a traditional burial place to die. Concentrations of bones may form around shrinking water sources, drought refuges, or other places where weakened animals gather. The legend probably grew partly from the very real interest living elephants show in the remains of their own kind.
An elephant’s skin carries another remarkable story. The deep wrinkles and fine cracks are not simply signs of age or decorative texture. African Elephants lack the sweat glands that many mammals use to cool themselves. The intricate channels across their skin spread and retain water and mud, holding several times more moisture than a smooth surface would.
That trapped moisture continues cooling the body after the elephant leaves the water, while mud also helps protect the skin from sunlight, insects, and parasites. The weathered surface that makes an old elephant look so ancient is therefore also part of a highly effective system for surviving heat.
Their ears contribute as well. The broad surfaces contain extensive networks of blood vessels. By moving the ears and exposing warm blood to the air, an elephant can release heat from the body. The ears also communicate mood and intention, changing the animal’s apparent size and posture during social interactions or confrontations.
In Long Years, I focused closely on the elephant’s face and broad ears, allowing the animal to fill the entire composition. The unusually wide format emphasizes its imposing presence, while the direct gaze creates a quiet sense of connection between the elephant and the viewer.
I was especially drawn to the deeply wrinkled and cracked skin. Every fold and line seems to record years spent beneath the African sun—years of movement across the landscape, changing seasons, droughts, reproductive competition, social bonds, losses, encounters with people, and accumulated experience.
Through the detailed graphite work, I wanted to portray not only age and endurance, but the dignity of an animal whose long life appears written across its face. Those years are not merely behind the elephant. They remain present in what it remembers, whom it recognizes, the routes it knows, the dangers it understands, and the younger animals that still depend on its experience.
The title Long Years refers both to the life already lived and to the knowledge carried forward. In an elephant, age can become memory, leadership, reproductive power, and continuity – the history of a family and a landscape held within one living individual.
Long Years is a graphite-pencil wildlife drawing of an African Elephant (Loxodonta africana) by Michael E. Dorcas for Tantilla Art.