Published: October 15, 2009 12:23 pm      

Vicki Gilpin: What do elephants eat?

At our latest meeting of the Wildbunch writers, I asked Pat Kriener what she wanted me to write about.

She said, “What do elephants eat?”

She’s always wondered and because I’ve been to Africa, I guess she thought I would know.

I have travelled to northern Botswana for the last three years and have been privileged to observe elephants in their natural habitat.

Elephants eat a wide variety of plants and plant parts. They eat grasses in the wet season and more woody and herbaceous food during the dry season.

They strip off tree bark, dig for roots and use their front feet to loosen grass clumps and shrubs.

Certain flowers and fruits, such as the marula tree, are liked by lots of animals.

Because of the large quantities of seeds consumed, they are very important dispersers, particularly of certain tree species.

Because there are so many varieties of plants, I am going to focus a couple in this article — the marula tree and the mopane tree.

The marula is a single-stemmed tree with a wide-spreading round crown and gray, mottled bark.

It is a deciduous tree and can grow 15 to 20 meters tall.

The leaves are gray-green and turn pale yellow before shedding.

It is best known for its golfball-sized fruit, which it bears in the summer. The fruit contains four times as much vitamin C as orange juice.

The fruit can be eaten ripe but is more popular when brewed to make beer. A wonderful drink called Amarula, a crème liqueur, is now being exported.

The mopane tree’s most diagnostic feature is the butterfly-shaped leaves. They are bright green and turn to autumn colors later in the season.

They are multistemmed and spread upwards in a “V” formation. The bark is dark gray. It can reach a height of up to 25 meters.

The mopane is an important source of food for lots of animals, birds, insects and people.

The leaves are valued by most browsers. The leaves contain 12.6 percent protein.

The wood is attractive and heavy. It is used for building because it is almost completely termite-resistant and it grows straight when young.

It is ideal for fence posts, parquet flooring and wagon shafts. The ash contains 15.5 percent lime and the bark 5.9 percent tannin. With the lime and a high percentage of phosphorus and calcium, it makes good fertilizer for vegetable gardens.

What do elephants eat? Just about everything.



Sources of information: “Trees & Shrubs of the Okavango Delta” by Veronica Roodt, “Mammals of Africa” by Chris and Tilde Stuart, and my own personal experiences.



Vicki Gilpin is a Johnson County Master Gardener Wildbunch writer from Grandview.