Here she is: ‘Last Knysna forest elephant’ caught on film

In a quest to start a social media series about mysterious creatures, a filmmaker from Zululand, Ryan Davy, has discovered what is believed to be the last Knysna forest elephant — and he has photographic evidence to prove it.

After 12 weeks of searching and trekking through an area of 50,000 hectares of jungle vegetation, in an unsafe forest with rolling hills and tall trees making it difficult to track an elephant, the 49-year-old was proud to announce: “I did it!”

There are many myths about the elephant or elephants’ whereabouts — one being that they’re difficult to locate because they’re a refugee population in hiding.

Many people have claimed to see them in the past but had no evidence to back it up.

“After 12 weeks, I made a breakthrough with the tracking of her dung and footprints, broken branches and mud pools, and I was able to isolate her territory,” Davy said.

“This allowed me to move in closer and closer, using a large circle technique that would cross her flight path.

“Once I got close enough and could hear her, it was then about being able to get a visual of her without her knowing I was there.”

The female elephant is estimated to be between 45 and 53 years old (RYAN DAVY)

Davy came to hear about the Knysna elephant during the most fundamental stage of his social media series doing research across Africa.

He said it had intrigued him to think that people knew of a solitary creature that roamed the forest but no-one really knew enough to say for sure there was only one, what gender it was and whether it actually existed.

This spurred the environmentalist and filmmaker to embark on a detour to research this solitary creature, giving birth to the idea to find and film the elusive Knysna elephant.

Though no-one knows how the last female elephant, estimated to be between 45 and 53 years old, ended up alone, Davy surmised a combination of old age, poaching, difficulty in surviving, terrain accidents or the herd migrating to other countries, could be among the reasons.

“The vegetation is impenetrable, the weather is dynamic and the terrain is unforgiving — you could be walking in the thick vegetation and suddenly disappear down a 20m gorge.

“It’s hostile but absolutely beautiful.

“The thicket seems like an easy place to track an elephant, but it’s not.

“It’s very difficult to read the ground because it’s covered in a layer of leaf litter or humus, which is the leftovers of what has fallen from the canopy,” Davy said.