National Geographic: Coming of Age with Elephants Page #3

---

a complete enigma.

Sometimes elephants are

incredibly vocal.

Other times they seem to communicate

in silence-freezing

as if on command

or suddenly racing off together

with no apparent cue.

Even a charging musth male

barely made a sound.

I kept hearing a sound like, you know,

if you take a thick piece of cardboard

and you go

"whop, whop, whop" with it;

and they were flapping their ears

in a certain way,

so I thought the sound was the ear

flapping and it was a threat to me.

And then I realized afterwards that,

in fact,

it was vocalization

that was being made

and the ear flapping was just

in association with it.

In the mid1980s,

Joyce collaborated with

Katherine Payne,

and expert on whale songs.

Together they were determined

to uncover the secrets of

elephant communication.

We began making take recordings of

the elephants.

It turned out that we were only

hearing part of what they said.

The rest was at a frequency

too low for us to hear.

Sonograms revealed that humans miss

two-thirds of elephant conversation

like whales, elephants were using

a language

that was mostly below the range

of human hearing.

Joyce slowly learned to decipher

the sounds she could hear.

She came to understand 33 different

vocalizations,

calls that meant,

"lets go," or "attack"

or baby saying,

"help, I'm scared."

Females comforted their young

with rumbles

that were as specific as saying,

"It's okay, we're here."

It was a radically new way

to think about elephants.

What people used to believe was

just stomach rumbling

was actually a complex language.

These were intelligent creatures.

Now that she knew

what the elephants were saying,

Joyce knew when to be afraid,

and when it was just play,

even when to talk back.

Anyone who's watched elephants

would say,

you know, what is it that makes

elephants so much?"

Why do you like elephants so much?"

They're so funny.

Why are they funny?

Well, they're not just funny to look at,

they're funny acting,

they're clowns; not all of them,

I mean, they've got different

personalities,

but some are real clowns.

Joyce believed that elephants

had emotions,

a whole range of feelings,

from joy to grief.

She was moved to witness one family

come across the bones of

their own matriarch.

And it was very different from the way

elephants usually approach bones.

They gathered around her bones

in a defensive circle facing outwards

and gave a very loud rumble

that went on and on,

and they really were standing

over them

as if it was a member of their family.

And this whole, just turning the bones

over, ever so slowly and gently

and, you know,

feeling every little crevice,

Rate this script:0.0 / 0 votes