I recent visited the amazing Howlett’s Wild Animal Park in Kent run by the Aspinal Foundation. I was there for six hours practicing my photography skills ahead of my trip to Africa next month to Samburu where I’ll be doing a photographic internship with Save The Elephants.

While Howletts isn’t exactly the plains of Africa, it still gave me great insight into how elephants move and interact with each other especially the comical youngsters who rushed around with ears flapping and trunks flailing as only baby elephants do.

I especially enjoyed watching some of the elephants stretching as far as they could until their legs were nearly folded in on each other to steal leaves from the hedge outside their enclosure. One adorable baby spent almost an hour exploring how its own limbs worked by waving its trunk madly around or lifting one leg to try and climb into the enclosure next door.

The elephants seemed very happy – there was lots of rumbling and trumpeting and at one stage two of the youngsters started pushing each other down a hill. Afterwards, one of them flopped  its trunk down on the grass as though exhausted by the weight of the thing

A really brilliant day ….

 Here are some more of the images I took of those magnificent creatures …