The Elephant's Secret Sense: The Hidden Life of the Wild Herds of Africa

Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Naturalist O'Connell's memoir of her 14 years researching the complexities of elephant behavior is a successful combination of science and soulfulness, explaining her groundbreaking theory of how elephants use seismic communication; she also sympathetically illuminates current social and ecological conditions in Africa. O'Connell's original goal in 1992 was to spend a year driving from South Africa to Kenya, but then she was hired for a three-year study of elephants in an area of northeastern Namibia, "where violent death is as much a part of the landscape as the capricious nature of rain." Fascinated by the "particular way that elephants seemed to be listening with their feet," she soon realized that the elephants were communicating with sound waves "that travel within the surface of the ground as opposed to the air." Her efforts over the next decade to prove this "unexpected and controversial" hypothesis took her "to the bayous of Texas, the Nevada desert, southern India, northern Zimbabwe, the Oakland Zoo, and then back to the scrub desert" of Namibia. Her account is studded with sympathetic insights and well-turned phrases, such as her delight when "100 tons of pachyderm pass by, almost tiptoeing, heads bobbing in their Groucho Marx gait." (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist
The largest land animal is the African elephant, a creature so vast that it is impossible to ignore. And yet, what do we really know about elephants? Field biologist O'Connell was in Namibia working on nonlethal methods for deterring elephants from raiding local people's crops. One night she was observing a young elephant sneaking past her house and inadvertently dropped her book. The startled elephant ran off literally on her tiptoes. On another location, while observing elephants at a waterhole, the author saw the matriarch suddenly turn, flatten her ears, and lift one leg off the ground. Several other females then faced the same direction, and soon another elephant appeared. Could elephants feel vibrations through the ground, literally "listening" with their feet? In a riveting account of scientific discovery both in the field and in the laboratory, O'Connell tells of how she and her colleagues studied seismic communication in elephants. O'Connell's love for her research subjects and her quest for understanding them is integral to her story, making for an addictive narrative. Nancy Bent
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review
"I was transported by the author's superbly sensuous descriptions of her years spent studying the animals. . . . Conjure[s] a high-class nature documentary film in prose."-Steven Poole, Guardian (Steven Poole Guardian )

"A ride as rough and astonishing as the roads of the African floodplain."-Joan Keener, Entertainment Weekly (Joan Keener Entertainment Weekly )

"A successful combination of science and soulfulness, explaining her groundbreaking theory of how elephants use seismic communication. . . . [O'Connell's] account is studded with sympathetic insights and well-turned phrases."-Publishers Weekly (Publishers Weekly )

"This fascinating book reads like a fast-paced detective story of a scientific discovery and adventure set in contemporary Africa. . . . By the end, [O'Connell] takes her rightful place among the leading biographers of the African elephant."-Iain Douglas-Hamilton, author of Among the Elephants (Ian Douglas-Hamilton )

"Our author sleeps in blinds, pores through elephant dung, darts and collars elephant matriarchs, puts zoo elephants on force plates to send vibrations to their feet, even cuts up a frozen elephant to search for vibration-sensitive cells in its toes and heels. . . . A compelling memoir of how a small but fascinating biological discovery is made, from a momentary observation to a fully presented theory."-Anthony Doerr, Boston Globe (Anthony Doerr Boston Globe )

Product Description
While observing a family of elephants in the wild, Caitlin O’Connell noticed a peculiar listening behavior—the matriarch lifted her foot and scanned the horizon, causing the other elephants to follow suit, as if they could “hear” the ground. The Elephant’s Secret Sense is O’Connell’s account of her groundbreaking research into seismic listening and communication, chronicling the extraordinary social lives of elephants over the course of fourteen years in the Namibian wilderness.
This compelling odyssey of scientific discovery is also a frank account of fieldwork in a poverty-stricken, war-ravaged country. In her attempts to study an elephant community, O’Connell encounters corrupt government bureaucrats, deadly lions and rhinos, poachers, farmers fighting for arable land, and profoundly ineffective approaches to wildlife conservation. The Elephant’s Secret Sense is ultimately a story of intellectual courage in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles.

“I was transported by the author’s superbly sensuous descriptions of her years spent studying the animals. . . . Conjures a high-class nature documentary film in prose.”—Steven Poole, Guardian

“A ride as rough and astonishing as the roads of the African floodplain.”—Joan Keener, Entertainment Weekly

“A successful combination of science and soulfulness, explaining her groundbreaking theory of how elephants use seismic communication. . . . O’Connell’s account is studded with sympathetic insights and well-turned phrases.”—Publishers Weekly

“This fascinating book reads like a fast-paced detective story of a scientific discovery and adventure set in contemporary Africa. . . . By the end, O’Connell takes her rightful place among the leading biographers of the African elephant.”—Iain Douglas-Hamilton, author of Among the Elephants




About the Author
Caitlin O’Connell is an assistant professor in the Department of Otolaryngology, Head, and Neck Surgery at Stanford University. Her discoveries have been published in various periodicals, including Science, Science News, Natural History, National Geographic, the Economist, and Discover.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1

LISTENING THROUGH LIMBS

Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

-- RALPH WALDO EMERSON

I always hate to leave Etosha, but it was early August and the winds were picking up. It was time to pack up the site and head north. Sitting in the back of my truck, I looked through my binoculars at the scrubby horizon dappled with giraffe necks, trying to work up the energy to get my equipment organized when I heard a thick, leathery, swishing sound right next to me. I looked up to see 100 tons of pachyderm pass by, almost tiptoeing, heads bobbing in their Nordic Track-style gait. It was Broken Ear and her family, a group of twenty elephants, headed purposefully toward the water.

I noted when Broken Ear arrived and watched as her family assembled around the water. Being the matriarch, Broken Ear occupied the outflow of the artesian well, which was controlled in the dry season to sustain the large number of animals that depended on it to get through this difficult period. The dominant elephant always got the best water.

Broken Ear took a few long draws, rolling up her trunk and placing the water far back in her mouth, head tipped up. A few splashes escaped back into the pool. The howling gusts of wind had stopped, so I could hear the intermittent trickling of water escaping thirsty mouths. They were returning to the waterhole after their visit had been cut short the day before by the arrival of another family group led by a very intolerant matriarch that I called Collar.

Once the little ones had had their fill, they started to play. Young elephants are just as mischievous as lion cubs, always testing their boundaries with adults and jockeying for rank with siblings and other relatives. They stood at the pan's edge, knee-high in water, and tipped over onto their sides to make as much contact with the mud as possible. Then they began to wallow, swatting at each other with their wet-noodle trunks. Their mouths were turned up in what seemed to me like smiles as they wailed and cavorted in the water. The mothers merely looked on and continued drinking.

Reluctant to break camp, I savored the moment. I jealously guarded my visits to this splendid waterhole that the Owambo people called Mushara, after a tree common to this sandy forested habitat, or sandveld, a large terminalia with papery magenta pods (Terminalia prunoides). Mushara is located in the eastern corner of Etosha National Park, Namibia, one of a few waterholes restricted to the public, with the added benefit of having a protected cement lookout, which provided me with a great vantage for my elephant studies. I had a few other favorite waterholes where I would sleep, either in the back of my truck or in a hide. But I had developed a special bond with Mushara because of its remoteness and the number of elephants visiting on a daily basis. As much as I enjoyed the isolation, I was conscious of its potentially negative effect on my preception of reality. I was looking forward to being clean again, having not been able to shower for more than a week, but I was also dragging my feet about leaving the tranquility.

I was not looking forward to returning to my life in the north of the country, the Caprivi, where, despite its remote location, an exhausted community game guard might knock at my door at any minute, having bicycled 12 miles in the heat to assuage the anger of his fellow villagers to report another incident of a crop-raiding elephant. I would miss the elephants of Mushara, which were more isolated from the threats of war and civilization, and head to a place where they were different animals altogether. Many elephants in the Caprivi were still reeling from a war-torn past, exposed to land mines, automatic weapons, and poaching, partly to feed the hungry Angolan soldiers for the last twenty years. And at Mushara, I, too, could be a different person.

I first came to Etosha National Park in 1992, contracted by the Namibian Ministry of Environment and Tourism to study elephant movements, demography, ecology, behavior, and interactions with humans. My partner, Tim, and I were stationed in the Caprivi region of Namibia. This "day job" allowed us to spend our winters in Etosha, where Tim would analyze the movement data he collected from nine elephants fitted with satellite and radio collars while I would have the luxury of focusing solely on elephant communication and behavior. I hoped to use that research to help farmers in the Caprivi to prevent elephants from raiding their crops, which sometimes amounted to a whole year's worth of food consumed in one fell swoop.

It was during these off-seasons of my initial three-year contract that I was able to spend countless hours by myself watching elephants at Mushara waterhole. I spent most of my time in the hide, a 10-foot-square cement bunker 33 feet from the water, with about 7 feet of its height buried in the ground and a pillbox slit facing the waterhole. It afforded a splendid view of elephants at close range but was very limited in terms of an overall picture of the negotiations made around the perimeter as to which herd was going to enter the clearing and when. But it allowed me to be closer to the action, and it was safe from lions or even a curious bull wanting to investigate the back of the truck. Once inside, however, I was committed for the night. It was me and my empty peanut butter jar, a makeshift but highly valued chamber pot in the bush.

I stayed in the dank bunker for as long as physically possible, usually about a week at a time. The isolation allowed me to reflect on the elephants' natural rhythms and to notice many behavioral patterns that had never been previously documented. These patterns formed the basis of my thinking for the next fifteen years of my career as a scientist. Eventually, once I learned to slow my own sense of time, adapting it to the deliberate, meditative pace of an elephant, I started to understand the patterns I had been observing.

Occasionally, Broken Ear would turn herself in a particular direction and freeze, sometimes with ears flat against her head and sometimes with ears held out, looking like a satellite dish, scanning the horizon. As she scanned, she seemed to cue the other adults to follow her lead. When she alerted the others to pay attention, they all oriented in the same direction, froze again, sometimes with ears flat, leaning forward, one front foot propped up on the toenails. Other times, they extended their ears, sometimes keeping toenail contact with the ground, sometimes lifting one front foot completely off the ground, swinging it front to back. It's not surprising that the matriarch would be wary at the waterhole and that she would be using her ears to try to detect any unusual sound, but what were these elephants doing with their feet?

I scanned the horizon and saw a large bull heading in on the southwest elephant trail, about a half mile away, ears fanning as he lumbered along. The vigilant cows shifted positions, several of them facing in the direction of the incoming bull. But their ears were not outstretched in a listening position. Could they have sensed his approach through the ground?

I became very familiar with this particular way that elephants seemed to be listening with their feet. My curiosity grew as I watched an elephant assume a position with its ears flat against its head, occasionally accompanied by leaning, with a foot lift or toenail contact. It was known that these animals used their ears like a parabola, scanning back and forth while remaining still to listen to low-frequency sounds from other distant elephants, but I had never read any studies describing an elephant's ears positioned flat against its head while freezing and listening.

Other scientists had thought that the leaning behavior was a resting position and foot swinging an act of indecisiveness. This is probably the case some of the time, but there were also some times where it appeared as if the elephants were actually using their feet to sense something in the ground. After seeing these behaviors, I would notice the arrival of a new herd or a lone bull or an approaching vehicle. When more than one elephant engaged in this freezing/leaning/shifting at the same time, it seemed as if the whole herd were using their feet to detect a signal.

I knew about the process of listening through limbs, which is found elsewhere in the natural world. Before signing on with the Namibian government, I had studied this phenomenon -- known scientifically as seismic communication -- in insects. In a sense, I was only going from the very small to the very large, having spent endless hours in a small soundproof chamber recording the seismic love songs of a unique group of Hawaiian planthoppers. It may be hard to understand my fascination, but I observed some extraordinary behaviors occurring on a little koa twig rigged to a gramophone stylus -- behaviors that seemed very similar to those of these elephants.

When I would play the female planthopper's seismic call through the twig, the male would immediately press its weight down and would sometimes even lift up a leg or two, then inch forward, responding with its own seismic call, then freeze again, "listening" and perhaps attempting to locate the dummy female. I never could have imagined it sitting in that booth, but these little planthoppers and their extraordinary songs handed me a hypothesis for elephants that was so unexpected and controversial, I found myself occupied with the challenge of proving it over the course of the next decade.

Since many other species are known to transmit their vocalizations either through the ground or some surface such as a plant, it was not a completely ridiculous proposition that elephants might do the same. Many scholars have described how insects and other arthropods communicate by striking the ground or by coupling their vocalizations with a substrate. Other more complex animals such a... --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.