The extensive vocabulary of African elephants
Katy Payne. Read or listen: Researchers listen to African elephants (Melissa Groo)
Katy Payne said that the lives of elephants are more acoustic than visual. “To dip into their world,” she said, “we need to become acoustic too.”
Imster: Before working with elephants, you worked with whales. What got you interested in working with some of Earth’s biggest mammals?
Payne: Well, actually, I was just interested in animals and life. I was kind of a “kid observer” all of my life. I married Roger Payne back in 1960, and we just were kind of exploring the world together, and he took it into his head that he would like to study whales.
We made our first trip to Bermuda, where there was a man who would take us out on a Navy vessel to see whales. We didn’t know they made these sounds, nobody really did except Frank Watlington, our host. He introduced us to the sounds of the whales.
We immediately thought, this is just incredibly beautiful and interesting and powerful, and maybe even a powerful conservation tool, because it was something we could present to other people and they could listen and hear the animals firsthand. So, it was a case of one thing leading to another. It wasn’t a life plan, “now I will go and be a biologist and do this.” It was a piece of luck. I’d been studying music, actually. I love sound.
Imster: So you approached it not so much from the animal point of view but more from the sound? Or they came together?
Payne: Well, if you cut up your behavior and analyze it in pieces, you’re going wrong. It’s all of a whole. I love sound. I love animals. People know very little about what animals do with sound. Since we are so visual, we know an awful lot about what is seen. But there are lots of animals whose lives are more acoustic than visual, whales are among them, elephants may be also. To dip into their world, we need to become acoustic too. This was just a wide–open field at the time when we began, and we
didn’t think of ourselves as creating a field, we thought of ourselves as learning about the animals.
Imster: Why did you move from whales to elephants?
Payne: I moved from whales to elephants quite accidentally. I had gone out to the west coast to talk with folks about learned behavior in animals that changes over time. In this case, it was the singing behavior of the humpback whale. While I was out there, I took advantage of a piece of news. I’d heard that four baby elephants had simultaneously been born in the Portland Oregon Zoo, and got permission to sit in the zoo for a week, for reasons I can’t fully reconstruct anymore. But I was fascinated. It’s another large, social, intelligent, marvelous animal.
While I was there, I had an experience of noticing a throbbing in the air that I couldn’t attribute to anything around me, but I was always near the elephant cages when I was feeling this throbbing. It occurred to me, it’s the same sort of thing you feel when you’re in the presence of a powerful, very low–pitched sound. I thought, well, human ears don’t hear all the sounds there are. We can’t hear infrasound and we can’t hear ultrasound. But for some reason, biologists hadn’t studied the possibility of land animals making sounds below the frequencies people can hear. I thought maybe the elephants were generating that throbbing by making really powerful calls that were infrasonic – so low–pitched that people couldn’t hear them. To make a long story short, two colleagues, Dr. Bill Langbauer and Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, and I went back out to the zoo and established that was exactly the case.
Elephants have really an extensive vocabulary, including lots of sounds that are very rich in infrasound. That was exciting because low frequency sound travels much, much better than sounds we’re ordinarily listening to. Maybe it was the basis for a long–distance communication system, and that would explain all kinds of things about mysterious behaviors observed in elephants that people hadn’t explained. So, I got to investigate that and we’re still investigating it.
Imster: Can you think of any big setbacks in your work?
Payne: Oh absolutely! For me, the biggest setback was an emotional one. In 1990, we had a very interesting field expedition in Zimbabwe, where I was part of a research team led by Bill Langbauer. We studied elephants’ calling behavior using radio collars with voice–activated transmitters in them. We collared sixteen elephants in different families.
Following this study, I came back to Cornell with my buddies and lots of data, and the government of Zimbabwe held a standard government cull and destroyed a quarter of the elephants population, including many of the animals I had known and had become very, very interested in. It was devastating to me that people would do that, even my Zimbabwean colleagues, whom I liked very much.
I withdrew from the work for a couple of years and wrote a book, which is called Silent Thunder: In the Presence of Elephants. It was as honest a presentation as I could make of what it is to try to do objective scientific work, and yet at the same time, to feel very dedicated to the survival of these animals as individuals. Suddenly, I was plunged into a desire to do work that was not only scientific but also would serve the purposes of conservation. It was a real life change.
Imster: I bet in all these years working closely with wild elephants you’ve had some exciting encounters…
Payne: Yes, in fact, just in this last field season in the Central African Republic. For some reason, the elephants didn’t like us to put our equipment out where we needed to put it in order to listen to them. And so, we had a lot of confrontations and had to climb up into trees and wait while angry elephants threatened us from below. I don’t like that. My primary goal is to study animals without disturbing them at all. But we needed to put these listening devices up into the area.
There have been lots of that sort of thing. In my book, I wrote about two very exciting encounters, one with a whale and one with an elephant. In both cases, I was intruding into the animal’s way of life in an unacceptable way, and the animal warned me very carefully and clearly, showing forbearance, and, I felt, evidence of conscious judgment.
Imster: What do you think people can learn by understanding more about elephants?
Payne: I think that people can learn that there’s not a great difference between the compassionate behavior that human beings show for one another, and the kinds of care and compassion that elephants show for one another. There’s a tremendously strong social bonding that occurs within and between elephant families. Those animals make sacrifices for one another. They teach one another all their lives. They keep in touch. If one is in distress, others rush to help it. There is no fine line between these very lovable, communal behaviors in very social animals, including elephants, and the things that we love about ourselves in our finest moments. Of course, they and we have our cruel and blind moments too? And I think that everyone who’s come close to these things knows they’re true. So, part of my work is to present what we’ve seen in as honest a way as I possibly can.
The other thing that I think is very important that we’re learning is that elephants are individually extremely different from one another, different enough so that, again, in comparison with humans, we can say, “we’re a compassionate species” and “we’re this species that makes war”? There’s this huge distribution of different kinds of human interaction and reactions to circumstances. Of course, we’ve only documented a tiny fragment of elephant behavior, but it turns out that different individuals really have different personalities. And it’s not safe to generalize about a whole species. Male elephants are by and large far less social and far less communal than females, yet there was a circumstance when a baby elephant had died, and a sub–adult male, just the age when you’d expect him to be most ruthless, attempted to lift the little body to its feet fifty–seven times. For some reason he was terribly concerned and he wasn’t even related. We’re learning how huge the arena is. We have thousands of books about people. We have dozens of books about elephants.
A thousand books could be written about elephants and we wouldn’t run out of what is interesting. And I think the same is true for many other animals too. I just happen to have studied this one closely and intensively.
Imster: Who do you admire most in science or the world at large?
Payne: Goodness! I’d have to give you a few! I admire the Dalai Lama. I admire a Ndebele elder whom I was lucky enough to have as a field assistant in Zimbabwe, but he was really also a mentor in terms of looking at life the way it really is. His name is Zaccheus Mahlangu. I admire my mother. I think Ed Wilson [Edward O. Wilson] has given a great gift to the world. Oh, and JS Bach.
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