Season 5: Episode 12

Trailblazers

Elephants communicate through a variety of calls, trumpets, and rumbles. But despite being some of the largest land animals on Earth, they can also be incredibly quiet. In this episode, we open our ears to  elephants and discover how listening may play a key role in saving them.

Guests

DANIELA HEDWIG

Daniela Hedwig became the director of the Elephant Listening Project in 2021. She is a behavioral and conservation biologist with more than 15 years of experience in field-based bioacoustic research and conservation efforts in Central Africa.

DR. JOYCE POOLE

Joyce Poole is the Co-Founder and Co-Director of ElephantVoices. She has a Ph.D. in elephant behavior from Cambridge University, and has studied the social behavior and communication of elephants for over 40 years, dedicating her life to their conservation and welfare. 

Katie Rowe

Katie Rowe is the founder and manager of the Reteti Elephant Sanctuary in Northern Kenya, the first community-owned and run elephant sanctuary.

Credits

Transcript

[00:00] INTRODUCTION

AMY: I’m in northern Kenya, sitting on a big slab of rock above a wildlife watering hole. The frogs and birds are slowly building up toward their evening chorus as I talk with Katie Rowe.

KATIE: We all have a vision for the future, protecting this landscape for the future and for the next generation.

AMY: Katie’s one of the driving forces behind the Reteti Elephant Sanctuary, where we spent our last episode. We’re watching the last rays of the sun light up the tops of the mountains across the valley, when our conversation suddenly gets interrupted in the best possible way.

KATIE: I think also, you know, this idea – oh! Here come the elephants!

AMY: OK, here come the elephants!

AMY: A small group of wild elephants has suddenly arrived at the watering hole.

AMY: Oh there's babies! Oh my gosh!

AMY: One minute there were just trees and bushes below us, and the next, five adults and six juvenile elephants, including one adorable newborn.

AMY: How old do you think that baby is?

KATIE: It's probably two weeks old.

AMY: Oh my gosh so little!

AMY: The baby elephant shelters under the tent of its mother’s belly, but all the elephants in the group are clearly keeping an eye on it, and sometimes reach out to touch it with their trunks.

KATIE: It's staying so close to mummy's legs.

AMY: Yeah, right under her legs.

KATIE: Oh, that's a good mama.

AMY: The elephants dip their trunks into the watering hole and take long, slurpy drinks. They slowly flap their giant ears and swing their tails, happily rehydrating as the heat of the day rises away.

ELEPHANTS drinKING AND SPLASHING AROUND

AMY: Welcome to Threshold, I'm Amy Martin, and these are wild, free-roaming African savanna elephants. It is such a privilege to witness them just being themselves in this landscape.

AMY: What are we—50 meters away?

KATIE: Yeah.

AMY: So close!

KATIE: Yeah.

KATIE: Oh my goodness, that is the tiniest little baby.

AMY: It is so sweet!

AMY: Over the half an hour that Katie and I got to hang out with this family group, l heard some rumbles…

ELEPHANT: rumble (let's go, probably)

AMY: ...a few trumpets...

ELEPHANT: trumpet

AMY: ...and many more sounds. But what I was most struck by in this encounter was not what the elephants said, but rather, what they didn’t say.

MUSIC

AMY: A group of the biggest land animals on Earth more or less snuck up on Katie and me—many tons of elephant flesh emerged out of the bush, and barely made a sound. There was such a dramatic contrast between how much space they took up physically versus sonically.

AMY: So we're 50 meters away from like 12 elephants, and the birds are louder than they are. Yeah.

AMY: The frogs were even louder. And all of the sounds of this place—the many creatures, the nearby river—were getting imprinted into the memory of this newborn elephant, which will help her navigate intelligently through this territory as she grows. Over the years to come, she’ll learn how to make her own rumbles and calls, and express love, danger, grief, delight. But even more importantly, she'll learn how to listen. 

RUMBLE

JOYCE: You know, they're complex, intelligent, highly social animals, and so their communication is all about holding those relationships together.

AMY: Joyce Poole is one of the world's leading experts in elephant communication, and after decades of research, she says we’re really just beginning to be able to decode what these animals are saying. But one thing is very clear: they’ve survived for millions of years by listening to each other—and now their future may depend on how well we can listen to them.

THEME MUSIC

[04:43] A SEGMENT

JOYCE: Within a family, when one elephant approaches another. They give a special...awwrrrrr, awwrrrrrrr. And they lift their heads up and lift their ears up.

AMY: I'm sitting with Joyce Poole outside of her home overlooking the Great Rift Valley, not too far from Nairobi, Kenya. She’s the co-founder and scientific director of ElephantVoices, a nonprofit organization devoted to understanding and advocating for elephants.

JOYCE: And I've studied elephants for goodness, I don't know, something like 48 years.

AMY: Talking with Joyce Poole about elephants is like talking with Jane Goodall about chimps. There aren’t many people alive today who’ve spent as much time watching and listening to wild elephants as she has. 

JOYCE: They're very long-lived animals. They live up to 70 years old. Mothers and daughters stay together pretty much for life. And yet, like us, they are not always together, but they have to find ways to get together. They're empathetic. They make plans. So they have to communicate.

MUSIC

AMY: Joyce says her connection with elephants started early. Her father worked for the Peace Corps when she was young, and she spent a lot of her childhood in Malawi and Kenya. Her very first elephant meeting was when she was just six years old, when her family was visiting Amboseli National Park in southern Kenya, not too far from Mount Kilimanjaro.

JOYCE: My father was a very keen naturalist and he was a very good photographer. And so we had pulled up to this large adult male and I said to him, “Daddy, what will happen if that elephant charges the car?” And he said, “well, Joyce, it will squish the car to the size of a peapod.” And as I was thinking about that, this elephant charged, and my father stalled the car. And I scrambled under the seat of the Land Rover and then you know crawled back up and there he was just this huge elephant and this cloud of dust settling around him. Yeah my younger brother and sister were at that time asleep in the back of the Land Rovers so they missed the whole thing but that was my first experience.

AMY: A few years later, when she was 11, Joyce attended an event at the national museum in Nairobi which ended up shaping the course of her life.

JOYCE: I went to a lecture by Jane Goodall, and I just was glued to everything she said, just totally. And I told my mother then that that's what I wanted to do with my life. So from that, you know, that early age I had this idea of studying animals.

AMY: In 1975, Joyce returned to Amboseli National Park to be part of a project led by another renowned elephant researcher, Cynthia Moss.

JOYCE: And Cynthia gave me the task of getting to know the males.

AMY: At that time, scientists knew that female calves often stay with their mothers for life. But the males were mysterious. They eventually leave their families of origin, and little was known about them after that point. Joyce’s job was to drive around in her family's VW van observing these enormous beasts. She was 19 years old.

JOYCE: I was supposed to get to know them all, like draw their ears, take photographs of them, identify them to build up this whole recognition file. Oh I remember one day I pulled off near to these bulls and they came over to the car and I was absolutely terrified, four males surrounded the car. But I went back to camp and I told Cynthia about this, and she says, “they were just being friendly.” You know, one learns, you know.

AMY: Joyce learned a lot, actually. She spent countless hours in the field, making drawings, taking pictures, and listening to the elephants. And observing them listening to each other. 

JOYCE: For instance, you could just see a male elephant just standing and you think okay he's not doing anything. But if you look at his ear, if you look at what he's doing with his trunk, what he's doing with the fingers on his trunk, which direction that trunk is pointed, you know, you can see that's where his attention is. And you know this is something we could expect to happen next.

MUSIC

AMY: In her undergraduate thesis, Joyce described her observations of male African elephants going through cycles of heightened sexual arousal, called musth. At that time, it was thought that only Asian elephants experienced musth. But her work proved otherwise. So by the time she had finished college, Joyce had already made a major contribution to elephant research. And she had done it as a woman—one of several trailblazing women who started studying elephants around this time, and went on to become leaders in the field.

JOYCE: I came into this study at just the right time. Very many years earlier and, you know, a young woman wouldn't be out there in the field.

AMY: Joyce continued her study of elephants for her PhD, and over time, she began to assemble an elephant communication library. 

JOYCE: I've always been interested in behavior, like why are these animals doing what they're doing. I wanted to know what what are they feeling, what are they saying. And why.

AMY: And she knew that the first step was to create a catalog of all of their different sounds, and the contexts in which the elephants make them.

JOYCE: When you study an animal, you're not only watching their behavior, but you're listening to them. So I knew, for instance, that there was certain sound when a calf wanted to suckle, there were these certain sounds that elephants made when they came together, that if a female was in estrus and was mated, that she made a certain sound and the whole family joined in, in what we call a mating pandemonium. I knew that there were let's go calls, so I had all these names for all the calls.

AMY: This is one of Joyce’s recordings of a mating pandemonium.

MATING PANDEMONIUM

AMY: Mating is a family affair with elephants, with mom, grandma, siblings, and calves circling around the coupling pair, flapping their ears and making big, dramatic sounds, like roars and trumpets.

ELEPHANT TRUMPET

AMY: But Joyce learned that the majority of the sounds elephants make are actually the much more subtle rumbles. She has documented and defined a whole menu of rumble types, like the Greeting Rumble…

GREETING RUMBLE

AMY: Elephants make this sound when they come together after being separated for a while.

GREETING RUMBLE

AMY: It's distinct from the Little Greeting rumble. That’s the one Joyce demonstrated earlier, she says it’s one of her favorite elephant sounds. It’s a less intense, cozier sort of acknowledgement of a reunion, after just a short period of wandering away from each other. 

JOYCE: It's when they've been in the same group but they've been separated by a bush or you know maybe 20, 30 meters away. It's especially between those who have a close bond.

LITTLE GREETING RUMBLE

AMY: There's the Separated Rumble, a sort of hum that young elephants make when they're separated and looking for their families.

SEPARATED RUMBLE

AMY: A group of females will make a series of overlapping rumbles when a breeding male arrives in their group. Joyce calls that the Female Chorus Rumble, and it can include some snorts and roars.

FEMALE CHORUS RUMBLE

AMY: And then there's the Let's Go Rumble, which an elephant makes as a sort of proposal to the group to head off in a new direction.

LET'S GO RUMBLE (JOYCE)

AMY: Actually, that was Joyce, not an elephant.

AMY: Whoa!

JOYCE: That would be my “Let’s Go.”

AMY: That was impressive!

JOYCE: Yeah, but of course it just sounds like a buzzy bee or something to them, because it’s much higher frequency.

LET'S GO RUMBLE (ELEPHANT)

JOYCE: Someone stands on the edge of the group, and faces the way they want to go, and gives all these intention movements and looks back to see if anyone's coming.

AMY: And that's the way a lot of these calls work—sounds are accompanied by body movements that together communicate something. But sometimes there is no clear physical signal that goes with a sound, which makes it especially hard to guess what it might mean.

CADENCED RUMBLE

AMY: That’s the case with these sounds, which Joyce calls Cadenced Rumbles. Adult females make them while doing a variety of other things. She thinks they might be discussing a plan of action, like where to go and when to leave. But because there’s no particular behavior associated with them, all she can say for sure is that there is some sort of conversation happening.

JOYCE: They just keep doing what they are doing and there's kind of sing song back and forth, back and forth between them.

AMY: These exchanges can last anywhere from a few minutes to an hour. A group of gals, chatting on the savannah. 

JOYCE: I think we're just on the cusp of understanding how complex their vocal communication is. For instance, these Cadenced Rumbles, I think have to do with planning and negotiation. But what precisely are they saying? Are they saying, well, I want to go to Old Kaya Rock? No, well I want go to the swamp. Well, no, I don't want to do either of those things. You know, how, what kind of level of detail are they able to communicate to one another? And that's what we don't know.

CADENCED RUMBLE

AMY: There’s so much we still don’t know. 

MUSIC

AMY: Although people have marvelled over elephants for millennia, it’s only in the last 50 years or so that we’ve begun to piece together the basic facts of how they communicate. In the mid-1980s, Joyce collaborated with Katy Payne, another iconic elephant researcher, and proved that savannah elephants communicate using infrasound—very low-pitched vibrations beyond our human hearing range. Later, Caitlin O'Connell proved that elephants can detect sound vibrations through their feet. So just like the leafhoppers we met several episodes ago—those little insects that communicate by shaking their bellies against plants—elephants might not experience a sharp distinction between airborne sound and vibrations moving through the soil. It could be that for them, listening almost always happens via their ears and legs simultaneously. And when conditions are right, they can tune into each others’ voices across remarkable distances—up to 10 kilometers, or more than six miles, depending on the temperature and weather. All of these things add up to a picture of an animal that relies heavily on acoustic communication for survival. Which leads to the obvious question: what are they saying? Trying to answer that has been the defining quest of Joyce’s life.

JOYCE: And of course it is so much about listening and watching and sitting quietly.

AMY: Joyce and her husband and collaborator Petter Granli have made her catalog of elephant behaviors and sounds freely available online. It’s called the Elephant Ethogram, and along with the sound recordings, there are videos, and some of Joyce's field notes to help make sense of it all. You can find it at elephant voices dot org, and I have to warn you: once you start playing the clips there, be prepared to lose a few hours. It's just fascinating and fun to watch calves romping and playing together, or two adults intertwining their trunks, or just standing still very close together.

COO RUMBLE

AMY: This is what Joyce calls a Coo Rumble, a sound mothers and other caretakers give to very young calves, to comfort them or just to coo over them the way we coo over our babies.

JOYCE: They're very tender and they're very tactile with one another. I mean, elephants, they're such big animals, you wouldn't think that they would be all cozyed up with one other, that they'd need a little bit of, you know, space, but they really like being close. And very, very, tender with one another.

COO RUMBLE

AMY: Over her decades of immersion in the lives of these animals, Joyce has felt that tenderness too.

JOYCE: I have always been, really passionate about the work I do, you know, and really passionate, about the animals I study. So for me, I couldn't just be a cold scientist. I care, I care so much about these animals, and so that has always played a role in how I do my work.

AMY: And at times, she says, she was scolded for that. Especially when she was getting started.

JOYCE: Yeah, we were basically told that, you know emotion or your passion played no role in elephant conservation. And I, you know, I always felt that was very wrong. I feel that we can make so much more progress in terms of our relationship to animals if we are able to share the way we feel about them.

AMY: I'm curious about this whole notion that emotion is somehow in the way, when your work has shown, like, these are very emotional animals. Do you feel like it's helped you be a better listener to have access to your emotional world?

JOYCE: Yeah, I certainly think so. You know, just understanding, for instance, that, you know, elephants have culture, and what we do to them impacts that culture.

MUSIC

JOYCE: You know, when elephants are defending a member of their family, or fending off lions, or humans that they don't like, I mean, it's incredible watching how they work together. It's extraordinary. But again, it's all coordinated through vocal communication and, you know, gestures, body language and gestures.

AMY: The deep bonds these animals form with each other makes the story of our impact on them all the more heartbreaking. As she describes in her book, Coming of Age with Elephants, Joyce's development as a researcher coincided with the exploding poaching crisis, and she bore up-close, painful witness to it. She found strong, healthy elephants she knew well lying dead with their tusks hacked off, and watched as their relatives gathered to mourn them. But often there were no relatives—entire family groups were frequently wiped out. So many holes torn into the web of elephant relationships, and so many traumatized animals left behind.

JOYCE: What we do to them has consequences, and we have to be aware of that. I'm thinking of a population that I have had a lot of experience with and that's Gorongosa in Mozambique where during the civil war 90% of the population was killed. And there are survivors alive today who still hate vehicles, and, you know, track you down. I mean, it's changing, but imagine the war ended almost 30 years ago. So their emotions impact what they do. Just like us.

AMY: Joyce's work helped to call attention to the poaching crisis, and finally, in 1989, over one hundred countries agreed to ban commercial sales of ivory. Poaching continues to be an issue, but habitat loss is the bigger threat now. Elephant territory is increasingly fragmented by roads, farms, cities, and industry, and being impacted by the droughts, floods, and other extreme weather events that come with climate change. But despite all of these dangers, some subpopulations of savanna elephants are growing. These animals are determined to survive, if we let them.

We’ll have more after this short break.

Break

[23:22] B SEGMENT

AMY: Welcome back to Threshold, I’m Amy Martin, and if I say: picture an elephant moving through its habitat, I’m guessing that the image that pops up in your mind is an open landscape. Wide horizons, long sightlines. Maybe some bushes and trees, but also a lot of grass. If so, that’s pretty accurate… if we’re talking African savanna elephants.

AMY: But their cousins, the African forest elephants, live in a totally different reality. They move through a shadowy, wet world—the second largest rainforest on the planet. Instead of posing picturesquely under bright, blue skies, forest elephants easily disappear among the vines and leaves in the jungle. It’s hard for us to see them—or see how quickly we’re losing them. Forest elephants are critically endangered. But they can still be heard. 

SOUNDS FROM CENTRAL AFRICAN RAINFOREST

DANIELA: Well, the Central African rainforest is, to me, it's this absolutely magical place. 

DANIELA: You know, you're walking through a dense rainforest. It's dark.

DANIELA: You have the trees. You have all the large mammals, you have all the insects.

DANIELA: But then you have all of those tiny little, almost invisible creatures that you see only if you turn around a leaf or, you know, you dig in the soil. So it's an incredibly complex and intricate ecosystem. 

AMY: This is Daniela Hedwig. She leads the Elephant Listening Project at Cornell University.

DANIELA: So you must imagine you're walking through this dark, damp forest, you know, it's very humid, lots of smells, and then you hear these kind of roars. 

ELEPHANT

DANIELA: So you have no idea what's going on there. There's like some massive animal you know, out there.

ELEPHANT

DANIELA: And then the forest opens up and you’re stepping out into this open habitat, and it's bright. And then as your eyes are kind of adjusting to the light, you all of a sudden realize there are a hundred elephants in front of you.

DANIELA: It's a smaller species because they're living in a dense environment that makes their bodies be a little smaller, to be able to maneuver through the dense vegetation. We don't know much about them because they are so elusive and so, so difficult to observe in the dense rainforest. 

AMY: But in this clearing, the elephants show themselves. It’s in the Central African Republic at a place called Dzanga Bai. 

DANIELA: A bai is the local name for forest clearing. And, we think that the clearing was actually formed and shaped by the forest elephants.

DANIELA: They go into the clearing to access mineral rich water that runs under the surface. So they go in the clearing and they dig little holes that are just the size of the trunk. There are like, hundreds of elephants coming there, and they're heavy. So they're just keeping the vegetation down, keeping it open. And they're making this resource also available for other species.

AMY: Daniela actually started out as a primatologist. She grew up in Germany, and came to central Africa to study gorillas and chimps. But then, she encountered the forest elephants at Dzanga Bai, and she changed course.

ELEPHANTS

DANIELA: So as I sit at the clearing, I try to first of all observe who is there and identify as many elephants as possible, figure out their relationship constellations, who was related to who? Who is the kid of whom? And then things are beginning to make a little more sense. 

DANIELA: Sometimes you see, oh, there is a kid, rumbling and roaring and running around, and then you realize, oh, that's, that's Agave's son. And Agave is over here. And he wandered up, and now he wants to go back to his mom, and then you can hear her rumbling, too. And then they try to get back together. So it's a lot of these, often dyadic interactions that are all happening at the same time, and everyone is vocalizing and doing stuff. So it's it takes a lot of patience, you know, you just have to sit and watch. 

There’s just a symphony of rumbles happening.

And it's bit like a soap opera to me. It never gets boring. I can spend every single day out there at the clearing watching those elephants, because every time you go, it's a little easier to recognize them. You recognize more elephants, and everything makes more sense. And then you really get an insight into their lives and their social interaction, their relationships, and what matters to them. And, you know, it's, it's just, it's like a big saga going on up there.

AMY: That saga has been carefully documented since 1990. That’s when a researcher named Andrea Turkalo first started observing the elephants at Dzanga Bai.

DANIELA: And she started identifying each and every elephant that she was observing at the clearing. So thanks to her, we are building up on this amazing database of thousands of individually identified elephants. 

AMY: Drawing on Turkalo’s work, the Elephant Listening Project was officially founded in 1999 by Katy Payne. Katy is the researcher I mentioned earlier who collaborated with Joyce Poole. She was the first person to document the use of infrasound in captive Asian elephants, and then proved that African elephants exchange messages at these very low frequencies too. Now, the Elephant Listening Project has more than 25 years of in-depth data on forest elephants—it’s kind of like the elephant equivalent of the work Sephanie King is doing in Australia with dolphins.

DANIELA: We know how they are related to each other, we know how old they are, we know when they have been at the clearing the last time, so we have all this amazing, you know, information about their life histories and their social relationships.

AMY: Since Dzanga Bai is one of the rare places in the forest where the elephants can be both seen and heard, it has been an incredibly useful place for us visually-dominant humans to begin to understand them. But the clearing is still just a place they come to visit. Studying them there would be sort of like studying groups of humans on vacation at a resort—we can learn some things, for sure, but our picture is very incomplete. For these elephants, ordinary life happens out among the thicket of the deep jungle. And that presents a problem for researchers.

DANIELA: They live in this really really dense forest. How are we going to find out what they are doing? Because we cannot follow them. You know, in the savannah, you can drive around in a Jeep and follow these individuals and find out what their lives are all about, where they spend their days. We can’t really do that in the rainforest. So it's this enigmatic species that we are trying to better understand and better protect by using acoustic monitoring as a key window, you know, into their lives.

LONG RUMBLE EXCHANGE

AMY: That’s where passive acoustic monitoring comes in. Setting up audio recorders and letting them run, just like I did in the beginning of this season when I put that microphone into the frozen lake, to try to listen in to the lives of the fish there. The Elephant Listening Project has installed an array of microphones in different areas of the forest, which is allowing them to get a much better idea of how the elephants move through their habitat, and how they relate to each other.

DANIELA: They are able to keep very, very close social bonds with their relatives, the females. They stay in touch with their sisters and with their mothers, and they form these lifelong bonds as a family.

AMY: But those recorders also catch the sounds of one of the greatest threats to these animals: gunshots. Forest elephant tusks have become especially prized in the illegal ivory market. Highly organized, well-funded criminal networks have periodically raided the forest and gunned down elephants en masse, including at Dzanga Bai. 

DANIELA: There is, there is no other method, really, that gives you this, and the systematic and unbiased, information on where and when the poaching takes place. 

AMY: Daniela says anti-poaching patrols are active in the region, but catching illegal hunters in the act is very, very difficult in the rainforest.

DANIELA: It’s literally like searching for a needle in the haystack. You know, if they are trying to, bring in poachers and catch them in the act. But with the acoustics, we can create these maps, that we hand over to the park management and the anti-poaching patrols so that they get a better understanding of where, where, like poaching hotspots in the park, especially in the areas that are really far away and really hard to get to. And then they can use the, the acoustic data on the illegal gun hunting also to evaluate the impact of their anti-poaching patrols. So is gun hunting actually going down if I increase my anti-poaching patrol effort?

AMY: And does it bring the poaching down?

DANIELA: Yeah, in our northern Congo project, we certainly saw when the national park management implemented big training efforts and really amping up the anti-poaching efforts, the poaching did go down, yeah. So that is really, really valuable and encouraging and motivating as well for them to know, okay, we're not just doing this hard work for nothing. It actually really, brings that poaching down, you know, whether or not we're doing a good job.

AMY: The violence that forest elephants are living with is just the latest manifestation of an old and ugly reality: both people and animals have been brutalized in the rainforest of Central Africa for centuries. European colonization here was particularly greedy and cruel, and left a legacy of poverty and political instability in the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and other countries in this region. All of this makes it much harder to study or protect forest elephants—or even to get a firm handle on basic information, like population size.

AMY: How many forest elephants exist and how many are killed each year by poaching? Do we know?

DANIELA: Uhh, well, we don't know. There are estimates between 30,000 and 100,000 forest elephants. It's really, really hard to know how many there are as, you know, a solid number. But we know that the populations are decreasing. We are always seeing fewer and fewer and fewer elephants.

AMY: As with the savannah elephants, habitat loss and climate change are also huge threats here. New roads are being built to accommodate logging and mining companies, and vast quantities of ancient trees are being chopped down. And often, these issues get braided together. For example, the new logging roads make it easier for poachers to quickly get in and out. Like Daniela said, solid numbers are hard to come by, but one recent study estimated that in many places where they live, forest elephant populations have declined by 90% since the 1960s. 

DANIELA: So we do need to act now if we want to save the forest elephants from extinction. 

AMY: For an animal as universally beloved as the elephant, it's tempting to tell ourselves that somehow, someone else will figure this out, and prevent their total destruction. But the reality is, it’s up to us, right now. The entire species could be snuffed out very soon, on our watch. 

AMY: Whether it's 30,000 or 100,000, that's not very much. That's like a mid-sized to small city…that's the entire species. How do you take care of your own emotional well-being while you're doing this work?

DANIELA: I don't know. I mean, of course, it's incredibly sad because you know, their personalities. You know, they have characters, they have emotions. They feel really intensively, you can see that by observing them, you know. So yeah, of course it touches you, but it only makes me more and more determined to make a difference.

AMY: One possible way to help unlock this problem is to flip the narrative. We tend to think of ourselves as the conservationists working to protect the elephants. But maybe it’s the other way around.

DANIELA: We need the elephants to conserve the tropical forest.

DANIELA: The central African rainforest is a large carbon sink. And the forest elephant is a keystone species in that habitat that is responsible for dispersing the seeds of many, many, tree species that make up the tropical rainforest there. Those trees, they sequester huge amounts of carbon. And without the forest elephants, these trees, they wouldn't be there, and we would lose this amazing place where we can sequester carbon and prevent global warming from accelerating.

DANIELA: And I think over the last years, we've really starting to see the impact that has with the fires, the storms, and the crazy rains that we are getting. And we we hope that, you know, that people understanding the connections on a global scale a bit better, perhaps, that we can turn this around for the forest elephants and the forest. 

DANIELA: You know, if we lose the elephants, we are losing the forest.

AMY: I really hope to get to go to Dzanga Bai someday and meet these animals in person. I want to watch them, and listen to them. And I want to have the experience of moving through the forest as they have shaped it.

DANIELA: One thing that is really impressive, when you enter the rainforest, you always end up on a trail. And, when I first started working in central Africa, my instinct was that, oh, these are trails that humans made. But then, I was told like, no, those are elephant trails. So you have this absolutely intricate network of elephant trails across the entire forest, this spiderweb of trails that the elephants create. There are small trails that are narrow. Then there are like little networks of trails around the forest clearing. And then you even have what we call boulevards that are like several meters wide, avenues that are going through the forest. And the interesting thing is, whenever these trails split up, you have a big fruit tree right at the intersection. So as the elephants are traveling through the forest on these trails they are defecating. So they are planting their own orchards basically as they are moving through the forest. It's absolutely fascinating. We know there are studies that have demonstrated that these important tree species, they grow at the trails. So it's the elephants that are shaping this. Isn't that, like, absolutely fascinating? All you need to do is stick to a trail and you'll get to a good tree. You know, you will get to something to eat. You can live on, you know, your cultural knowledge, you know that is within the elephant society to to survive and find food. 

DANIELA: We as humans, we're so used to living in an environment that's so shaped by us and our own activity and ourselves. But in that case, it's just completely shaped by the elephants. You're sitting in this system that's made by, created and shaped and maintained by another species, you know? It's life changing. It is.

AMY: How do you think listening to elephants has changed you?

JOYCE: Gosh, I've been doing it for so long. 

AMY: This is Joyce Poole again.

JOYCE: You know, I'm a pretty type A, I guess, sort of person. But I'm not when I'm with elephants. I really slow down. It's really like meditation. I can really be patient with them, and just sit and listen and listen, and I'm so tuned in to their sounds, and what they're doing, and ah….I wish it had rubbed off on the rest of my life (laughter).

AMY: It's almost like a practice of quiet attunement it sounds like.

JOYCE: Absolutely it is. In a way, they are so like us and yet they're so different, they so mysterious, they can hear things we can't hear, they can communicate with sounds we can hear, and they can pick up scents that we have idea about. So their whole sort of sensory way of being is so different. So in order to understand them or try to understand them, you have to just have your eyes and ears totally, everything, attuned to them. So picking up on my new little tiny cues to what they're thinking about or what they might do next.

JOYCE: If you can really follow their behavior and learn what different postures gestures and vocalizations mean then you really can get closer at least to what the essence is and what their concerns are what do they want.

AMY: What do the elephants want? What are their opinions, their needs, their choices? These kinds of questions may sound kind of fantastical, but not so long ago, Europeans that it was strange to ask these same questions about the people they encountered in Africa and the Americas. There are no fixed rules about whose voices matter. Only choices.

JOYCE: It's that next step, isn't it? Because why should humans be the ones who decide?

JOYCE: I think the elephants have an idea about what they would like, too.

AMY: Why should people listen to elephants?

JOYCE: I think, well I think elephants have a lot to tell us, and to teach us. If we're going to survive and our own species persist, we have to ensure that we bring everything else along with us.

AMY: In a future episode, we'll meet experts in artificial intelligence who are working with Joyce to process her decades of recordings, with the hope of cracking the code of elephant communication. If they’re successful, we might be able to understand what elephants are saying at a whole new level of depth and complexity. I hope we’ll be ready to listen.

Credits

AMY: This episode of Threshold was written, reported, and produced by me, Amy Martin, with help from Erika Janik and Sam Moore. Music by Todd Sickafoose. Post-production by Alan Douches. Fact checking by Sam Moore and Erika Janik. Special thanks to Joyce Poole of ElephantVoices and Daniela Hedwig of the Elephant Listening Project for the use of their recordings in this episode. Threshold is made by Auricle Productions, a non-profit organization powered by listener donations. You can find out more about our show and support our work at thresholdpodcast.org.

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