The park is probably best known for its spectacular elephant population: 70,000 elephants today, it is actually the highest elephant concentration of Africa. Moreover, most of them are probably part of the largest continuous surviving elephant population on Earth.

The elephant population seems to have solidly built up since 1990, from a few thousand. They have not been affected by the massive illicit exploitation of the 1970s and 1980s.

One thing is a given in Chobe: just a brief drive along any of its roads quickly reveals a torn branch, a trumpeting call, an enormous grey shape ghosting out of the bush ...all the unmistakable signs that this is elephant territory.

At Chobe you can get so close to elephants that you can hear the deep rumblings as they communicate with each other. With an estimated population of around 70 000, Loxodonta africana is both plentiful and, because of tight restrictions on hunting, remarkably tolerant of a traveller's attention.

Elephants living here are Kalahari elephants, the largest in size of all known elephant populations. Yet they are characterized by rather brittle ivory and short tusks, perhaps due to calcium deficiency in the soils.

Damage caused by the high numbers of elephants is rife in some areas. In fact, concentration is so high throughout Chobe that culls have been considered, but are too controversial and have thus far been rejected.

At dry season, these elephants sojourn in Chobe River and the Linyanti River areas. At rain season, they make a 200-km migration to the southeast stretch of the park.

Their distribution zone however outreaches the park and spreads to northwestern Zimbabwe.