Elephant Vocalization - The Secret Language of Elephants on 60 Minutes

If you weren't fortunate enough to see The Secret Language of Elephants on its initial Air on 60 Minutes tonight, here's a link to the transcript of the story along with additional videos that didn't make the original airing.

Photo of a bull elephant
©Bill Given

The story chronicles Andrea Turkalo's research on elephants in the Central African Republic along the Sangha river. Andrea studies elephant vocalizations as part of the Elephant Listening Project. The long term goal is to compile an elephant dictionary of sorts in an attempt to classify the vocalizations.

Forest Elephant Vocalizations

The vocalizations themselves are challenging for the researchers to break down and differentiate. For one thing, most of the forest elephant vocalizations are at a frequency below the hearing threshhold of the human ear. Therefore, much of the analysis is done in a lab, using spectrograms to analyze the low frequency sounds. The researchers match the elephant sounds to the elephant behavior in an attempt to "translate" the intent of the vocalizations. The research is done in a large clearing with an elaborate setup of listening devices in order to triangulate the exact location of the elephant who is making a particular vocalization. The audio is then matched up against video to match elephant body language and vocalization.

Progress Has Been Made Deciphering Elephant Communication

Already, Andrea and the other scientists have been learned quite a bit about the forest elephants and their vocalizations.

Andrea can fairly easily identify the following elephant vocalizations:

• Protest Calls
• Cries
• Greetings
• Annoyance
• Bulls in a State of Musth

Perhaps most incredible were the vocalizations of mourning after the death of a baby elephant.

I strongly encourage you to check out the 60 minutes piece. It provides a very interesting look at both conservation and field research.

Elephant Birth and Zebra birth

As a side note, Andrea mentions that she witnessed her first birth in 19 years while doing her research. I have mentioned on the blog that witnessing a birth in the wild is a rare event. I recently posted a blog entry from one of my clients who was on safari of a very eventful day for a baby zebra. If you haven't read this blog post yet, I encourage you to check it out - Zebra Birth and High Drama at Mapula Lodge.

My Own Wildlife Research

I should also mention my own lion research in Botswana. For more information about my conditioned taste aversion research please click here.