Narrator: Tarangire National Park is home to the largest population of elephant in Northern Tanzania. According to the Wild Life Conservation Society who has been studying elephants here, there are about twenty five hundred elephants in the park; thirty-two distinct family groups with approximately two hundred fifty full.

Stanford Milinga: So in the park, this I’ve got this short scale migrations, so sometimes the animals are moving from the outside depending on the season of the year, so if the food is available almost everywhere, the animals no need to stay here at the park. They can move outside looking for the water and because the water is available and also the grasses are green everywhere, so no need for them to concentrate on the one place, but when you’re arriving at the Tarangire National Park along July all the way up to November.

It’s a very good while you’re driving along the Tarangire Rivers which get the name form the local peoples here which means that “tara” is a river and “ingire” is the name for the languages which means a water. So that is a water river or it’s a Tarangiri in that local language. So around those rivers are very good for the game viewing because most of the animals during the daytime, especially in the morning and the late evening sometimes even on the daytime around noon like we are now. And then they just going to close to that river for drinking before they are going back for grazing and this is a very opportunistic for the cats especially lions just waiting just nearby the rivers, waiting for these guys to come and drink and then they also can get their meals around there.

Narrator: The elephants of course don’t spend their entire time within park boundaries which causes some angst with the local villages when the elephants get into their crops, though good progress is being made to find any expensive ways to protect the farmers land. Increase settlement near the parks boundaries is also encouraging on traditional migration routes, which is another cause for concern for these magnificent beast, but here too a great deal of thought, effort and research is conducted to solve decisions.