It’s not every day that one is offered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, but when my husband Tim and I were given the chance to study nature’s largest land creature in Africa, we jumped at it. It was a life-changing moment—one that I’ll never regret.
I have been studying elephants for almost twenty years now, and there is never a dull moment, never an experience from which I don’t learn something new about the elephant and about myself (including just how much heat, dust, and sand in the teeth and on my camera lens I can tolerate). I always feel like a privileged insider within the elephant’s world.
I put together this collection of elephant images that Tim and I took over the course of my research at Mushara waterhole in Etosha National Park, Namibia, in the hope of helping you see the elephant and its world from that same insider perspective—to witness those first social steps, or missteps, of the calf, the heart-warming dedication of a matriarch, the stunning displays of ritual, the tribulations of a young male leaving his family, the ways in which dominance plays out, the testosterone-fueled state of musth males looking for a mate, the fierce protection offered by a best buddy, as well as the heart-wrenching reunions of a family.
Some stunning collections of elephant photos have appeared in books in recent years, but most of these collections consist of a series of individual photographs that record disconnected moments in time, with no real sense of an elephant’s life as it progresses from beginning to end. It struck me that a photo book could be an opportunity to do just that—illustrate an elephant’s life, moment by moment. In this book, I demonstrate typical, and sometimes not-so-typical elephant behavior by capturing an event in the moment, through illustrative sequences of dynamic photographs that allow the event to be experienced visually rather than just through words or isolated snapshots.
I also wanted to highlight the fact that elephants and other highly intelligent animals have rituals very similar to our own. Although we can never know for sure the extent of some rituals’ meaning, and in order to avoid approaching anthropomorphism, I simply suggest that elephants might serve as a reminder that we as human beings are not so unique in our social complexity as we sometimes like to think.
An Elephant’s Life proceeds chronologically, from the birth of the calf to the coming-of-age bull to the wounding of the dominant bull (in this case, a bull named Greg) at the height of his reign. I have tried to present the science—what we know, suspect, or still wonder about—in a way that enriches but doesn’t overwhelm the experience of the images. Although this volume is not meant to be a comprehensive treatment, I have picked out some defining moments in an elephant’s life to share with you, up close and personal, with the hope that you enjoy the experience and perhaps gain new insight into the majesty, the joy, and even sometimes the pain of an elephant’s life. 
Between the vantage point of a tower and a bunker, we’ve learned a great deal about elephants through many, many hours of patient observation in sometimes not so comfortable conditions. But as you can see, it’s hard to pass up the opportunity to get so close to the action, despite the occasional bits of dung blown into your face with a sudden gust of wind.
