Pachyderm Communication: Eavesdropping on Elephants by Patricia Newman

The air vibrates with deep rumbles that thunder like a bass drum.

In a tropical forest, families of forest elephants flap their ears. High-pitched screams and trumpet blasts accompany deep roars. Many overlapping voices--some high, some low--broadcast the news. Grandmothers, aunts, cousins, and even complete strangers twirl in circles to show their excitement.

Other families enter the clearing. The clearing echoes with overlapping harmonies....

Do you wonder what they're saying to one another?

Katy Payne did. Having already worked recording and interpreting whale vocalizations, she suspected that elephants, too, communicate in infrasonic tones too low be heard by humans without speeding them up, and from 1982 she and her team of scientist spent years recording thousands of elephant vocalizations in the forest of the Central African Republic. The scientists discovered that although they can't be translated like human words, much about elephant habits and social life can be interpreted from these vocalizations.

This collection of elephant communications has continued over several decades under several teams of animal behaviorists, with three initial goals:

Could acoustic eavesdropping uncover more about forest elephants' habits? Could it help protect them? And could the combination of sound and behavior help scientists decode what elephants are saying to each other?

With "mountains of data," the team decided that threats to elephant survival had to be the first priority, and current efforts are focused on using recorded sound data to locate and estimate the size, viability, and composition of elephant groups to protect them from losing numbers.

Said one researcher, "Figuring out the language of elephants is interesting from an academic perspective. But if we lose the elephants altogether, there's no point in figuring out their language."

And being the intelligent animals that they are, some small herds have learned to sleep in the day and actively socialize and feed at night when loggers and poachers are less of a threat--information gained by the many high-tech listening stations (and soon to be drones) collecting sonic data on elephant behavior.

Everybody loves elephants, especially kids, but visiting zoo elephants placidly shoveling up hay doesn't reveal the genuine problems that threaten the very survival of both African and Asian elephants. Endangered by ivory poachers, loss of habitat to farming and logging, and climate change, elephant populations are shrinking fast, and researchers of all sorts are cooperating to learn ways to preserve them for the future. In Patricia Newman's Eavesdropping on Elephants: How Listening Helps Conservation (Millbrook Press, 2018), there are fascinating details in how various forms of science are converging upon saving the existence of these animals who share our human traits of large brains, life-long family loyalties, and long lives and memories. Author Newman adds an strong appendix for student researchers--sources, a bibliography, glossary, coda, and index, all to add to the purpose of saving the forest for elephants and its people.

Writes School Library Journal, "A great pick for middle school nonfiction collections."

Pair this one with Caitlin O'Connell's Sibert Award-winning The Elephant Scientist (Scientists in the Field Series) (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).