A stillborn calf, a grieving-looking elephant and a rare glimpse of desert behaviour
A photograph from Namibia’s desert elephants has drawn attention because it captured something few people ever witness: a female elephant carrying a stillborn calf for hours across a dry riverbed. The image, taken in September 2025 in the Namibian desert, won the grand title prize at the 2026 Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition, and it did more than secure an award. It revealed how much emotional weight can sit inside a single moment in the wild.
Federico Veronesi described the scene as intimate and almost spiritual. The calf was still soft and intact, with its tiny legs wrapped around the elephant’s trunk and its body hanging limp as she moved through the Huab River area. He watched her set the calf down at times to feed or drink, then pick it up again and continue walking.
The first reading of the scene is easy: a mother refusing to let go.
The elephant was not carrying her own calf
The twist emerged later. Christin Winter, conservation programme director at Elephant Human Relations Aid, said the female was not the calf’s mother. She is now 14 years old and lost her own calf two years ago. Since then, she has been seen carrying the stillborn calves of other elephants on four separate occasions. Winter said this is the first time the behaviour has been documented in the area.
For Veronesi, that detail added another layer of meaning to an already devastating image. He saw the moment as even more poignant because the elephant appeared to be acting out a pattern that followed her own loss, as if unresolved grief had resurfaced each time she encountered another dead calf.
Several explanations remain possible. Winter said the behaviour may represent a form of emotional processing, a way of coping with death and a lack of closure after losing her own calf. She also raised a practical explanation: the elephant may have been trying to protect the body from predators. In reality, both forces may coexist. An animal capable of strong social bonds can still behave in ways that are protective, repetitive and difficult to interpret from the outside.
A fragile population shaped by memory as much as habitat
Namibia’s desert elephants are not a separate species, but an ecotype shaped by learned behaviour in an arid environment. About 150 of them live along five riverbeds in the Namib Desert and migrate long distances in search of food and water. They feed on the seedpods of Ana trees or on grass in the floodplains.
Their survival depends on knowledge passed through experience. Winter said that makes them especially vulnerable, because once that knowledge disappears, it cannot be easily replaced. In a population this small, the loss of older animals, routes, or social memory can have consequences that are both ecological and behavioral.
The population has declined steadily over the past 20 years. Drought has played a role, but conflict with humans is a major driver. Water is at the center of that conflict. Elephants enter farms, push over water tanks, pull up pipes and break pumps, and those repeated encounters strain tolerance in surrounding communities. The damage is not abstract; it leaves a long memory on both sides.
Calf loss is severe and the numbers are stark
Winter said newborn calf mortality is a major concern. Between 2014 and 2022, only two calves survived out of 16. The stillborn calves encountered by EHRA are also notably small, usually around 60 to 65kg, compared with a healthy newborn weight of 100 to 120kg. One theory is that the calves are born premature because females are not fit enough to carry them to term.
Chronic stress is one possible reason. Winter linked that stress to the pressures of human-elephant conflict, and research has shown that elephants can suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder in response to conflict with humans. In biological terms, prolonged stress can disrupt reproduction, affect pregnancy maintenance and weaken resilience at a time when energy demands are already high. For a population living at the edge of an arid range, small changes in maternal health can have outsized consequences for calf survival.
One sentence captures the severity of the problem: the youngest elephants are not making it through.
Dung samples, hormones and the search for hidden causes
EHRA is now working with Daniella Chusyd, an elephant expert and assistant professor at Indiana University Bloomington, to examine how environmental factors and chronic stress may be affecting the population. The project runs until 2028 and includes dung sampling to test for heavy metals and forever chemicals such as PFAS. The team is also measuring thyroid and cortisol hormones.
Those tests are not decorative extras. They point to a larger effort to understand whether exposure to pollutants, altered endocrine function or persistent stress is shaping pregnancy outcomes and calf survival. The work also includes assessing the degree of inbreeding in the population and comparing the parental pedigree of calves that survived with those that died. If survival differs by lineage, the population’s vulnerabilities may be even more concentrated than current field observations suggest.
The study sits at the intersection of ecology, physiology and conservation. It is asking whether the pressures visible on the ground are being mirrored in hormones and reproductive outcomes that can be measured in the lab.
Grief, defensiveness and the limits of human interpretation
Joyce Poole, founder of Elephant Voices and a leading expert on African savannah elephants, called the images harrowing. She described a similar case in Kenya in which a mother elephant tried to lift her stillborn infant and then stood guard over it for two days. Poole said elephants are capable of grief and suffering, a view supported by observations of elephants visiting the remains of family members and strangers, touching bones and lingering beside them for long periods.
The behavior captured in Namibia does not resolve the question of what elephants feel in the human sense, and it does not need to. It shows attachment, repeated attention to a dead calf and a social response to loss that is difficult to dismiss as simple instinct. Veronesi said the interaction felt almost human-like. He hopes the image will help people understand that every individual elephant deserves protection, not just the species in the abstract.
For conservationists, that distinction is immediate. Protecting desert elephants means defending the animals, the water they need, the social knowledge they carry and the conditions that allow calves to survive long enough to inherit that knowledge. Without those pieces, the population loses more than numbers; it loses continuity.