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Elephants Talk to Her

In 1984, biologist Katy Payne went to a zoo in Portland, Oregon, to listen to elephants. All she heard was the boom of giant feet hitting the ground, and a few deep grunts. Still Payne had a feeling that the elephants were talking to one another. Then she remembered standing near the organ during choir practice as a kid. When the organ played low notes, recalls Payne, "you could feel it much better than you could hear it." Payne felt a similar vibration when she stood near the elephants. "It occurred to me that they might be making very powerful, very low-pitched sounds."

Payne used a tape recorder to capture the elephants' sounds. Then she played the tapes at fast speeds so that the sounds would be high enough for humans to hear. There they were: elephants' voices! She spent the next seven years in Africa listening to elephants in the wild.

Payne, 61, is an acoustic (uh-coo-stick) biologist, or a scientist who studies the sounds that animals make. She grew up on a farm in northern New York. "I was surrounded by animals," she recalls. "I just listened."

She began studying whale communication as soon as she graduated from college. Like elephants, whales use sounds with different meanings to communicate over long distances. But whales string sounds together to make a pattern. Elephants use each sound separately.

What are the elephants saying? "Most of their calls are group calls," she says. "I think they mean, 'We're here.'"

But elephants can no longer say "We're here" in many parts of Africa. They've been hunted for their ivory tusks and crowded out of their habitats. Payne believes that if more people opened their ears to the language of elephants, more would want to protect them: "Elephants will speak for themselves, if you give them a chance."

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