Elephants Grazing

In Kenya's National Park Masai Mara, famous for its abundance of wildlive, we encountered a herd of elephants that just appeared in a bush and slowly approached our car while they peacefully grazed and ate. There was a very small baby elephant with the herd - according to our guide not more than 2 or 3 days old - and it is known that elephants can react aggressive when they feel disturbed with their offspring. That’s why there lays a certain kind of tension over this recording of the grazing elephants, one of the bulls finally just stood aside of our car only a meter away and even our guide got a bit nervous… Check the baby elephant trying to suck milk from the mother sometime later in the recording. There is also a growl sound which is part of the acoustic repertoire of elephants.

To learn more about the fascinating world of elephants acoustic communication there are some highly interesting ressources on the net. First, Katy Payne, who together with Roger Payne, recorded humpback whales in the late 60s and put them on a record that turned out to be one of the most successful field recordings ever, has changed her attention to the vocalization of elephants for the past 30 years or so. On this site, one can hear, next to her old whale recordings, great cuts of mating elephants, found under the link “communication in the wild”. Fantastic sound quality, a lot of detail and depth, highly recommended! In 1984 she and other researchers discovered that elephants make infrasonic calls to one another at distances as high as ten kilometers. She is also the founder of the Elephant Listening Project.

Katy Payne works frequently with Joyce Poole of Elephant Voices, which is another site with plenty of information about elephant sounds. Joyce and Petter of Elephant Voices were also part of discovering elephants ability to imitate sounds. At about the same time Angela Steoger-Horwath of the Vienese Zoo Schönbrunn made recordings of a captive male African elephant who had been raised with Asian females and was making Asian elephant chirping sounds, meaning that this orphaned elephant was capable of learning another dialect. The results of this research were published in Nature and led to many following articles.