Ask anyone who has spent real time in Amboseli and they will tell you the elephants there are not anonymous. Since 1972, the Amboseli Elephant Research Project has tracked this population one individual at a time, every family lettered, every calf eventually named for the letter of its mother’s line. It is the longest continuous study of wild elephants anywhere in the world, and it means that the bull who wanders past your vehicle beneath Kilimanjaro very likely has a name, a family, and a history researchers have followed for decades.
We’ve started building a living register of these individuals on our site: the bulls still walking the plains, the matriarchs holding their families together through drought and dispersal, and the giants who came before them; including Craig, whose ivory swept almost to the ground and who died only this January at fifty-four, the most photographed elephant in Africa. It’s a work in progress, filled in with our own photographs and licensed images as we get them, rather than all at once.
One of the first full portraits we’ve added is Wikstrom, a big tusker of the WA family and son of the matriarch Willa. He doesn’t have Craig’s fame, and his ivory is unusually symmetrical even among Amboseli’s giants, exactly the kind of bull this register exists for: well known to researchers and guides, rarely introduced to travellers before now.
Have a look at the full register before your next trip to Amboseli, you may find yourself hoping to meet one of them in person.
