Every 12 August, World Elephant Day rolls around and the usual numbers get repeated: how many elephants are left, how fast that number is falling, how much habitat has been lost. This year we wanted to look at a different angle — not a park, but the land between parks.
An elephant can eat 150 kg of vegetation a day, so no single reserve — however large — has enough food and water to support one year-round. Elephants deal with this the way they always have: they walk, following the same routes generation after generation, moving between areas as the seasons change. A “corridor” is simply one of these routes — and when roads, farms or fences cut across one, elephants can end up boxed into a park that looks protected on a map but is actually too small for them.
Northern Botswana is one of the last places where this still works properly. It’s built from three connected regions: the Okavango Delta, a wetland that floods every year and turns part of the Kalahari into one of the richest habitats on the continent; the Mababe Depression, a wide seasonal floodplain to its east; and the Linyanti, a river and marsh system further northeast that links the Delta to Chobe National Park. Elephants move between all three depending on the season, rather than staying put in any one of them.
This whole area sits inside KAZA — the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area, a conservation zone spanning five countries (Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe) that manage this land together rather than splitting it up at their borders. KAZA is now home to the largest population of savanna elephants anywhere on Earth: the first proper coordinated count, in 2022, put the number at roughly 227,900. Not “more than half of all African elephants” — a comparison that gets repeated but mixes up different species and survey years — but still, by a wide margin, the largest connected elephant population left.
Part of this system has an odd history. The Savuti Channel, which feeds into the Linyanti, ran completely dry in 1982 and stayed that way for over 25 years — long enough that a whole generation of elephants never saw it flow. Water started returning in 2008–09, reaching Savuti Marsh by January 2010, and elephants picked the route back up almost immediately. It’s fluctuated since rather than flowing steadily, and nobody can point to one single cause — the land here is very flat, and small shifts in the terrain, flood volume and sediment all play a part.
This is the area where Wilderness runs five of its Botswana camps, including King’s Pool and DumaTau. During the dry season, herds pass through daily, sometimes right along camp — herds of more than a hundred aren’t unusual. At DumaTau, two established elephant paths were reportedly left open on either side of the camp when it was built, so the animals could keep using them undisturbed, as stated by Wilderness.
Knowing a corridor exists is one thing; knowing exactly where it runs is another. Since 2019, Wilderness has partnered with Ecoexist, a Botswana research group that fits elephants with GPS collars and tracks their movement over time to map the specific paths they use most. That data then feeds into local land-use planning, so new farms or fences don’t end up built across a route elephants have no intention of giving up.
The community side of the work is genuinely inventive. Farmers near these paths are encouraged to grow millet instead of maize, since it’s far less appealing to a hungry elephant. A local brewery buys the surplus and turns it into beer served in Wilderness’s camps, giving farmers a real reason to plant the elephant-friendly crop. Some have also lined their fields with beehives — elephants have a well-documented dislike of bees, and a nine-year study in Kenya found beehive fences deter them at rates above 80% in good conditions, though drought and poor bee health can bring that down considerably.
Wilderness has also mentioned a longer-term initiative, Project Loeto, aimed at securing corridors across the wider KAZA region — worth knowing it’s still described as being in development, with details yet to be published.
Botswana isn’t unique here, just an unusually intact example of a pattern playing out across Africa. In Kenya and Tanzania, elephants move between Amboseli National Park and the Chyulu Hills and Tsavo across Maasai community land — protected not by park boundaries but by conservation leases that pay landowners to keep it open. Over a thousand Maasai families signed onto one such agreement in 2024. In Namibia and Zambia, a much narrower squeeze point called the Sobbe corridor has been officially signposted since 2016 — and a field was still cleared inside it in early 2024, a reminder that recognising a corridor on paper doesn’t automatically protect it. And in Kenya, near Lewa, elephants moving toward Mount Kenya now use a purpose-built underpass beneath a busy highway — a rare case of a corridor problem with an engineered fix. Lewa’s own elephant population has grown from around 350 in 2014 to more than 450 by 2024.
None of this holds together as lines on a map alone. A corridor can be mapped, signposted and still get built over within a few years if the people living alongside it see no benefit in leaving it be. The examples that seem to be working — Botswana’s millet-and-honey farming, Kenya’s conservation leases, an underpass that actually gets used — share one thing: they give local communities a reason to keep the route clear, not just a rule telling them to.
For an elephant, survival was never really about the size of one park. It’s about whether the path to the next one is still there when it needs it.
Wilderness was founded more than 40 years ago in Botswana by two safari guides, with the goal of protecting and growing the continent’s remaining wild land. Today it operates over 55 camps and lodges across eight African countries — Botswana, Kenya, Namibia, Rwanda, Tanzania, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Zambia — on roughly 2.2 million hectares of land, alongside its own non-profit conservation arm, research and monitoring programmes, and community partnerships including the coexistence work described above. Photos in this article are courtesy of Wilderness. Find out more at wildernessdestinations.com.
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