NOTE - THIS SECTION IS A WORK IN PROGRESS

After photographing the great tuskers of Eastern Africa for many years, and after publishing my book dedicated to them, Walk the Earth, I decided to dedicate a section of my website to them. Great tuskers are rare and charismatic individual elephants with very long and heavy tusks sometimes reaching to the ground. By convention, tuskers are considered elephants with tusks weighing at least forty-five kilograms, but the tusks of the greatest tuskers may also reach sixty or more kilograms each. Elephants’ tusks keep growing throughout their lives, particularly after reaching 35-40 years of age. But not all elephants become tuskers with age, as there is a strong genetic component in the shape and size of the tusks. Unfortunately, elephants have been hunted for their ivory for hundreds of years and the ones carrying the largest tusks have been specifically targeted both by trophy hunters and poachers. This has progressively reduced the average length of tusks in most populations and the distribution of the gene associated with long tusks

East Africa is one of Africa’s last strongholds for these extraordinary creatures, thanks mainly to the 1977 ban on trophy hunting and the great anti-poaching work carried out by the Kenya Wildlife Service in Kenya, supported by extraordinary organizations such as Amboseli Trust for Elephants, Big Life Foundation, Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, Tsavo Trust, Save the Elephants, IFAW. In Tanzania, trophy hunting is still allowed and poaching has been rampant in the ten years between 2008 and 2017. Despite this, some heavily protected areas still host a few of these great individuals.

In these pages I wanted to gather all the tuskers I have seen and photographed and group them by parks. It’s a visual journey and hopefully a reference for people to recognize tuskers if they see them in the field. I am considering expanding the section to the tuskers that I haven’t personally seen to try to come up with a comprehensive list of current tuskers in East Africa. For security reasons, I cannot include more detailed information on where these elephants roam or where have I seen them.

At the end I included the tuskers that I have seen who are unfortunately not with us anymore. Some of Kenya’s biggest tuskers ever are here, including Lugard, Tim, Tolstoy and Craig.

I’ll regularly update this section with my sightings and new pictures as I keep on searching for these incredible elephants. Thanks for visiting.