National Geographic: Coming of Age with Elephants Page #2

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the side of the car.

He's very sensual.

The old stories of aggressive behavior

by "rogue" elephants

suddenly made sense.

Males in musth can be hostile,

but mainly to each other.

These fights captured by Joyce

in videotape

could end injury or even death.

Who wins? Size is no longer decisive.

The male who is closer to the pea

of musth has the advantage.

What they are fighting for

is the right to mate with a female

at the height of her cycle.

The dominant male stays close

to the female.

Hormones in her urine tell him

whether she's ready.

When the time is right,

they mate frequently,

while her family surrounds them.

Joyce was intrigued

not just by what she saw,

but by what she heard.

She dubbed it

"the mating pandemonium,"

a sound heard at no other time.

Joyce's discoveries about musth

made it possible,

for the first time, to understand

the complexities

of elephant mating behavior.

But now the focus of her research

was shifting.

Joyce was about to unlock the secret

language of the elephants.

The language of elephants was

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,

paying particular attention

to the jaw and the skull,

and then, you know, backing around

and touching with the hind feet.

Joyce witnessed the death of

many elephants,

but the loss of one of her favorites

was especially painful.

It was the elderly matriarch Jezebel.

By the time Joyce arrived,

Jezebel's tusks had been stolen

and the corpse had been mutilated.

Feet have been taken!

She had been ill for a number of weeks

and I think when she fell,

she was tracked and her tusks

were taken.

The 1980s were ominous times

for elephants.

Amboseli had always been a sanctuary

for them

but throughout the rest of Africa,

elephants were being slaughtered

for their ivory.

I just found it devastating that

the more I was learning about

these incredible animals,

the faster they were being

slaughtered.

I just found that I had to

try and get out there

and do something about it.

The world was at war with elephants.

For Joyce Poole, it was time

to join the battle to save them.

In the late 1980s,

poachers were killing

thousands of elephants

to meet the demand for

ivory trinkets.

They targeted the males

for heavier tusks

and hacked the ivories

from their faces with machetes.

When the Amboseli elephants project

started,

there were 167,000 elephants

in Kenya,

now there were just 25,000.

In the vast area where the elephants

once roamed,

all that remained were

gleaming white skulls of the dead.

The social structure of the elephants

was on the brink of collapse.

Almost all the breeding males

were gone,

and many families unit

consisted entirely of orphans.

If the killing continued,

experts predicted,

Kenya's elephants would go instinct.

To save the country's wild life, the

government turned to Richard Leakey,

a third-generation Kenyan who

was already famous as paleontologist.

I am going to do my level best to

eliminate the elephant poachers...

In 1989, Leakey took over

Kenya's Wildlife Service

and immediately declare war

on the poachers.

He got off to a bold and

controversial start.

...and it would be my hope that

in the coming weeks

the press will not ask for permission

to film dead elephants,

but will have an opportunities

to film dead poachers.

Leakey turned Kenya's

Wildlife rangers

into a crack antipoachering army.

Now when poachers fire on them,

they have orders to shoot back.

The first year the rangers killed

...they unearthed huge caches of ivory

from butchered elephants.

Then Kenya did something

that shocked the world.

At Leakey's urging

President Daniel Arap Moi

burned three million dollars worth

of ivory.

It was Leakey's way to wake up

the world to the horror of poaching.

It was a very emotional moment

watching the tusks of 1800 elephants

to go up in flames and smoke.

But at the same time,

I felt a great sense of relief

because I believed that the elephants

were going to have a reprieve.

A few months later,

the nations of the world

banned all trade in Ivory

with dramatic results.

The next year, instead of losing

Kenya lost fewer than 50.

But like any war ravaged society, the

elephants would need decades to recover.

They weren't going to get that time.

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