African Bush Elephant: Facts, Size, Diet and Habitat

What does an African bush elephant look like?

The African bush elephant has thick gray skin with only scattered hairs, crossed by a network of deep cracks and wrinkles. The cracks hold water and mud, which helps the animal stay cool. After a dust bath, an elephant often takes on the color of the local soil, so elephants can look reddish, brown or almost white.

Its ears are the largest of any elephant: they cover the shoulders and can reach about 2 m (6.6 ft) long and 1.5 m (4.9 ft) wide. They are roughly triangular and pointed at the lower tip. The back dips in the middle like a saddle, and the highest point of the body is the shoulder. The forehead is smooth and rounded rather than split into two domes.

The trunk is a fusion of the nose and upper lip with no bones and tens of thousands of muscle bundles. It ends in two finger-like tips that can pick up a single fruit. Both males and females usually carry tusks, which are elongated upper incisor teeth that curve outward and forward. Learn more in How do elephants use their trunks?

How big is an African bush elephant?

African bush elephants keep growing for much of their lives, and bulls reach their full size only at around 40 years of age. Males are far larger than females, a difference that is greater than in Asian elephants.

These figures are for fully grown animals in good conditions; many wild elephants are smaller. The largest well-measured bull, shot in Angola in 1974, is estimated to have stood about 3.96 m (13 ft) at the shoulder and weighed about 10.4 tonnes (11.5 short tons). The longest recorded tusk measured 3.51 m (11.5 ft). For details on scales, calves and records, see How much does an elephant weigh?

Where do African bush elephants live?

The species lives in sub-Saharan Africa, in many separate populations. The largest numbers are in southern and eastern Africa, in countries such as Botswana, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Kenya, Zambia, Namibia and South Africa. Smaller, scattered groups survive in West and Central Africa, often in isolated reserves.

Bush elephants are adaptable. They use open savanna, grassland, woodland, swamps, river valleys, forest edges and mountain slopes. Small groups even live in the deserts of Namibia’s Kunene region and the Gourma region of Mali, where they travel long distances between scarce water sources. Elephants need to drink regularly, so in the dry season they stay within reach of rivers and waterholes.

Today more than half of the species’ range lies outside protected areas, which brings elephants into frequent contact with farms and villages.

What do African bush elephants eat?

African bush elephants are herbivores and mixed feeders. They graze on grasses, especially in the rainy season, and browse on leaves, twigs, bark, roots and fruit, especially in the dry season. The balance between grass and woody plants varies greatly from place to place.

An adult can eat up to about 150 kg (330 lb) of plant food a day and drink roughly 150–230 liters (40–60 US gal) of water. Because they digest less than half of what they eat, elephants spend most of the day and part of the night feeding. They also visit mineral licks and dig in salty soils to get sodium.

Feeding elephants shape whole landscapes. By pushing over trees and stripping bark they can turn woodland into open grassland, they dig water holes in dry riverbeds that other animals use, and they spread the seeds of many plants in their dung. More detail is in What do elephants eat?

Behavior and social life

African bush elephants live in a layered society. The core is the family unit: several related adult females, their daughters and their young sons, led by an older female called the matriarch. In Amboseli National Park, Kenya, family units average about 10 animals. Families with close ties form larger “bond groups” and clans, and hundreds of elephants may gather where food and water are plentiful.

The matriarch’s knowledge matters. Older matriarchs are better at judging threats such as lions and at finding water in droughts. Family members help each other defend calves, and young females help look after their relatives’ babies, a behavior called allomothering.

Young males leave their families between about 10 and 19 years of age. Adult bulls live alone or in loose bachelor groups, and older bulls appear to calm the behavior of younger ones. From their mid-20s, bulls enter musth, a period of high testosterone, aggression and secretion from the temporal glands on the side of the head.

Elephants communicate with deep rumbles, many of them below the range of human hearing, as well as trumpets, touch, scent and vibrations through the ground. See How do elephants communicate?

Reproduction and life cycle

Females can conceive from about 11 years of age, though many have their first calf in their early to mid teens. Most mating takes place in the rainy season, when bulls in musth search widely for females in heat. Pregnancy lasts about 22 months, the longest of any land mammal.

A single calf is born weighing roughly 90–120 kg (200–265 lb) and can stand within about 30 minutes. It drinks only milk for the first three months, then gradually adds plants, but may keep suckling for several years. Females usually give birth every 4–5 years.

Calves grow up surrounded by older relatives. Females stay in their family for life, while males drift away in their teens and become fully mature later than females.

How long do African bush elephants live?

In the wild, African bush elephants can live 60–70 years, and the maximum lifespan is about 70–75 years. Many die much younger because of drought, disease, poaching and conflict with people.

Teeth set the natural limit. An elephant grows six sets of molars during its life, each pushing forward to replace a worn one. The last set appears in the 40s; once it wears down, an old elephant can no longer chew enough food.

Intelligence and relationship with people

Elephants have the largest brain of any land animal, weighing about 4.5–5.5 kg (10–12 lb), and a large, complex cerebral cortex. African bush elephants remember water sources and travel routes over huge areas, recognize the calls of dozens of relatives and acquaintances, and pay close attention to the bones of dead elephants. A 2024 study of wild elephants in Kenya found that they use individual, name-like calls to address one another.

People and elephants have a long and complicated history in Africa. Elephants appear in prehistoric rock art across the continent, and they remain central to many local cultures and to the tourism income of countries such as Kenya, Tanzania, Botswana and South Africa. At the same time, a single elephant can destroy a family’s crop in one night, and both people and elephants die in these conflicts. Community programs, wildlife corridors and early-warning systems aim to help people and elephants share the land.

Predators and threats

Adult bush elephants have no natural predators, but lions and spotted hyenas sometimes kill calves. In Botswana’s Chobe region, large lion prides have been recorded hunting juvenile and even subadult elephants during dry seasons.

The main threats come from people. Habitat loss and fragmentation, as land is converted for farming, settlements and infrastructure, push elephants into small areas and lead to crop raiding and conflict with farmers. Poaching for ivory, and in some places for meat, has caused severe losses. Between 2003 and 2015, rangers reported more than 14,600 illegally killed bush elephants across 29 countries.

Conservation status

The IUCN Red List assessed the African elephant as a single species until 2021, when bush and forest elephants were listed separately. The African bush elephant is now Endangered, after its numbers fell by at least 60% over about 50 years. The forest elephant is Critically Endangered.

The 2016 African Elephant Status Report estimated about 415,000 elephants of both species across Africa. Trends differ sharply by region: numbers have grown in parts of southern Africa, including Botswana and Kruger National Park, but have collapsed in parts of East, West and Central Africa. International commercial trade in ivory has been banned under CITES since 1990. For the full picture, read Are elephants endangered?

How is it different from the African forest elephant?

Genetic studies show that the bush elephant and the forest elephant (Loxodonta cyclotis) separated at least 1.9 million years ago, so they are now treated as two species. The forest elephant is smaller, with rounder ears and straighter, downward-pointing tusks, and lives in the rainforests of West Africa and the Congo Basin. The two species can still interbreed where their ranges meet.

The bush elephant is also easy to tell from the Asian elephant by its bigger ears, saddle-shaped back and two-fingered trunk tip. Our African vs Asian elephant guide explains every difference.