Capturing Behaviour: Social Drinking

Capturing Behaviour: Social Drinking

Wildlife Photographic Magazine

The sixth instalment of “Capturing Behaviour” explores the social drinking behaviour of African elephants.

My article series, “Capturing Behaviour” for Wildlife Photographic Magazine explores the importance of being able to identify and anticipate a variety of common animal behaviour to achieve better and more captivating results with readers’ wildlife photography.

This article series helps readers to understand why wildlife behaviour is important to wildlife photography. My writing is illustrated with my wildlife photographs.

With such an intelligent animal there is a lot of complexity to unravel. The challenge as a photographer is to capture the moment and try to predict when something will happen. 

The longer I spent watching the elephants gather and drink together the more I understood their behaviour. Elephants are highly intelligent animals and I began to notice subtleties around the interactions between individuals. At close range you can see just how adaptable their trunks are. They use their trunk to communicate with other family members as part of a greeting ceremony where a lower ranking elephant inserts its trunk tip into the mouth of the other. This ritual enables elephants to come closer together amicably.