Archive for the ‘Voices of Elephants (Audio)’ Category
Hi all, I am back for another installment of elephant sounds 101 and we are still working our way through how elephants respond to predators. Since humans are the most dangerous predator an elephant has to face, I have been on the sharp end of some of these reactions, though these frightening assaults have almost all been in places other than Amboseli. If you visit the visual tactile database on our website, and search under the word “bunching”, you can read in more detail how after freezing and perhaps “commenting”, the first response to potential danger by members of a family group is to gather together or “bunch”. Once elephants have bunched together, older individuals at the fore and calves occupying the center, one or more larger individuals may charge the predator while emitting the trumpet blasts or roars that I have already described. Throughout a confrontation with a dangerous predator the bunched elephants may continue to vocalize with noisy, throaty, rolling rumbles, their heads raised, ears extended, temporal glands streaming and trunks reaching out to touch one another. These rumbles have a roaring quality and appear to have the effect of both intimidating the predator and calling in support from any more distant family members. I refer to the powerful noisy rumbles given in this context as roaring-rumbles. I recorded a lovely example of roaring rumbles in Amboseli one day when I happened to witness a lion pounce upon a year old elephant calf. The calf screamed, which prompted an immediate response from its mother and other allies, who rushed to the calves side, and confronted the lion with a series of roaring-rumbles. The calls attracted the attention of other family members who responded by calling and arriving at the scene minutes later.
Hi again, I apologize for the long gap in elephants sounds. I got to a point where I was forced to make a whole series of new spectrograms for the work we’re doing toward an online database of elephant calls, in addition to working with a continues flow of issues related to elephant conservation and welfare. The spectrograms of some of the rarer calls had not yet been uploaded to our current offline database and many needed first to be made. I had to make over 200 of them and each one is quite time consuming. The last time I wrote about how elephants use sound to intimidate predators I mentioned what I call a trumpet blast. In addition, they have a couple of other powerful calls in their bag of frightening tricks! The roars elephants produce when they are scaring off lions are deafening! One of the early elephant scientists, Sylvia Sykes commented that these sounds could put “fear in the hearts of men.” Indeed they can! I was out with the EB family one day when Enid came upon a pride of lions resting under a small Acacia. With one incredible roar from her the lions ran off. When you listen to the sound she made notice how Enid begins to rumble and then takes a deep breath before roaring at the lions. Notice, too, that after she inhales she starts with a short rumble, then roars and then ends again with a rumble. We call this type of concantenated call a rumble-roar-rumble. Can you hear the difference between the trumpet blast and the roar? Enid roars at a group of lions resting under an Acacia: Thank you, Michelle P and Anna M, for your continued support! And thank you Nathalia! Your support is very much appreciated. Petter and I wish you all a great weekend!
If an elephant or group of elephants decides to intimidate a predator they may do so by producing a range of terrifyingly powerful vocalizations. One of these calls is a particularly loud blasting trumpet, which sounds very different from the trumpets elephants make when they are playful or excited. Elephants typically give this blasting trumpet as they are charging at their adversary, or as they come to a dramatic stop meters away, flinging their trunk toward, throwing debris at and/or kicking dust at the object of their fury. If you go to our visual and tactile signals database on our website ElephantVoices you can find some photographs of these behaviors by searching for the words “Charge”, “Mock-Charge”, “Throw-Debris” and “Kick-Dust.” The primary function of the blasting trumpet appears to be to attempt to frighten. It usually works! Listen to how an elephant sounds when it is trumpeting at a predator or an animal that it is trying to scare away. An adult male elephants trumpets at lions: z0403622.mp3 An eight year old elephants trumpets at a Maasai dog: z1701525.mp3 An adolescent female, Ebony, trumpets when bravely “seeing off” a hyena: c2000625.mp3
Elephants use a variety of techniques when they are confronted by predators. They may try intimidation tactics, including highly effective (and noisy) mobbing, or they may bunch together and take evasive action. Although much has been said about the complex defensive behaviour of elephants, very little has been written about the variety of sounds they produce in these situations, which may include a variety of rumbles, snorts, trumpets, and roars. Our observations indicate that their particular response to predators is communicated, in part, via fine-tuned signaling.When a family group is exposed to an unusual or disturbing situation, the elephants usually freeze (hold stock-still) and listen to first assess how dangerous the situation is. This behavior may follow a sharp snort or snort-rumble followed by soft, medium length rumbles by one or more individuals. As the elephants call they continue to stand alert, listening and looking. Anthing that alarms an elephant may elicit this kind of behavior and calling pattern. For instance, elephants may call after being frightened by an unintended noise in the research vehicle, a helicopter passing overhead, the discovery of Maasai herdsmen in the area, or the roaring sounds of lions. Elephants may also give similar sounding calling in the context of a new situation, such as the arrival of a known research vehicle. And this form of soft rumbling may also be heard when a disturbing event occurs in the family, such as aggression directed at a family member. It seems as if the elephants use these calls to draw attention to, or comment upon, an unusual or disturbing event. Here are two examples: B2802022 C3002923 Have a great weekend!
Hi all, I apologize that we have been so quiet for so long. We are working on a major update for our website as well as on several other projects with deadlines, and these activities have limited our ability to focus on our blog. In addition we have had family visiting from around the world. The update on our website will include a long awaited database of elephant calls and we have much to do to prepare the sounds and text for the database. I thought that I could bring you along with me as I work – sharing examples of the calls as I prepare the files. Elephant rumbles are very low frequency calls and I originally saved individual calls at a low sample rate. While this is perfect for analysis, to make the MP3 files necessary for the database and for sharing with you I need to go back the original recordings. This is quite a time consuming job – but it must be done! On WildlifeDirect I am restricted for the time being to a maximum file size of 300 KB – and that really limits what we can share with you – but I will do my best. Let me start by introducing you to some different overall call types before I get into the calls African elephants produce in specific behavioral contexts. Listen to the different call types. Notice that elephants sometimes combine call types - as for instance a bark and a rumble, or a rumble and a roar: Then there are learned calls which I will come back to later.
Hi all, We apologise for the silence. It has been a very busy time for us. There has been so much to follow up on with the improvements we are planning on our website and I have been working on a couple of papers on elephant cognitive behavior among other tasks. Before moving on to another topic I had wanted to come back to a comment that I made in one of our recent postings about there being subtle and not so subtle differences in Asian and African elephant behavior. I want to mention one of the “not so subtle” differences in this posting. Both species display extraordinary teamwork, especially when defending their families, but the specific tactics may be different. I have been charged by African elephants many times and I have even had my car tusked by an African elephant or two. I have had elephants explore my car with their feet (once even stepping on the front bumper so that the car was shaking) but I have never had an African elephant kick the car with its front feet! When Petter and I were taken around Sri Lanka by Lalith Seneviratne we had the good fortune to visit Minneriya N.P., which was a highlight from many perspectives. While we were there we met a very kali (fierce in Kiswahili) adult female who just wanted to get rid of everyone. To be honest, the other elephants she was with didn’t pay her too much attention, but the tourists did. She had cars fleeing in all directions! We weren’t so easily frightened by her, though. So she threatened us repeatedly, rumbling, flapping her ears vigourously, and thumping the ground with her trunk. And finally she proceeded to kick Lalith’s car a couple of times - breaking the side light. Only then did the other adult female in her group come to join her. I had the feeling at the time that she was unusually disturbed and wondered what experiences with people had led her to behave in this way.
Ester of Sweetwaters, whom Paula will remember, had tusks…… We have had some problems with our media files since WD had a serious hick-up some time ago - hopefully the link above works for you. And because of changes on WD our previous sound-links are not working. We will look into this as soon as possible.
To study elephant communication it is crucial to understand the body language of elephants - for these are clues to what might happen next. Petter and I are pretty good at anticipating what elephants are about to do and have built up a database on our website ElephantVoices, where you can learn all about the signals, postures and gestures of elephants. We are currently updating this database so you may want to keep an eye out for new additions. One of many important cues we use is watching for listening behavior. Since elephants can communicate over long distances, and since some of their communication is inaudible to us (but audible to the elephants), this behavior is a cue that the listening elephant has heard something, or someone, and might call in answer. So what are the cues we use to tell that an elephant is listening? An elephant rarely stands stock still except when listening or resting; usually some part of the body, ears, trunk, tail is in motion. A resting elephant relaxes it’s head and ears allowing its head to hang below its shoulders and its ears to flop forward. A listening elephant, on the other hand, stands with its head raised and its ears lifted and slightly extended. The body and extremities of a listening elephant suddenly stop moving, and it simultaneously raises its head and stiffens its ears. Sometimes an elephant may turn its head from side to side in an attempt to localize a sound. Have a look at these photographs of listening elephants.
Three-Holes listens.
A juvenile female and two calves raise their heads suddenly as they hear a sound of interest.
Beckwith listens after calling to her family.
An adult female listens, and turns her head from side to side attempting to localize a distant call. Put on your headphones and listen to the sound linked below. You will hear a distant elephant calling, followed by an answer from the listening female. Play sound. Hopefully it works for you - we are currently having some problems setting up media files on the blog. Musth male, Solonga, listens in for the sounds of distant females in his search for mates.
The comment we received from Anna in response to Meeting Mr. Nick prompts me to write this post. She mentions a male named Edo, who originally came from Amboseli’s EB family, and is now living in Tsavo National Park. Back in September 1989 Emily, one of the adult female members of the EB family, died after feeding on garbage at Amboseli Lodge. The incident provoked an outcry, and we published a story in the Daily Nation exposing all of the items we found in her stomach (though this prompted a clean up by the lodge then, Amboseli Lodge and its surrounds are still a disgrace 18 years later). Emily died leaving her adult daughter, Eudora, and a six-month-old son. Her infant was too young to survive without his mother’s milk and we decided to ask the The Sheldrick Orphanage to take him in. At the time of Emily’s death I was working with a Japanese film crew (remember elephants and the ivory trade were a big issue for the Japanese) and the capture of her male calf became an integral part of the story. The crew gave him a Japanese name, Edo, which is the term for the ancient city of Tokyo. Capturing Edo was no simple task and I made the mistaken judgment that a six month old elephant could fit into the back of an Izuzu Trooper. Well, when he tried to escape over the front seats he popped out one of the back windows, dented the roof of the car and pushed me onto the gear shift and I had pain sitting for the next 18 months! When I worked in Tsavo in 1998 I had a chance to see and even record him. He was a big boy then and not permitted to stay with Malaika and the younger calves at night. He obviously missed their companionship though, because as he walked off for his night alone, he repeatedly called out to them with “Let’s go”rumbles, some of which were answered by Malaika, Ewaso and the others. It is lovely to see his photo on the link that Anna sent because he looks so like his mother, Emily, and sister, Eudora! Note that his tusks are what we call “asymmetrical left higher” - and so were his mother’s and his sister, Eudora. Put on your headphones to hear (low frequency sounds, difficult to hear through lousy computer speakers…)
Spectrograms that show time/frequency of the calls mentioned above. (Click to see larger)
Amboseli is one of Kenya’s highest revenue earning parks. Its popularity stems from the picturesque backdrop of towering, snow-capped Kilimanjaro and Amboseli’s elephants - made famous through long-term study, popular books and numerous documentary films. The fees paid by the hundreds of thousands of visiting tourists visiting Amboseli each year helps to cover the cost of running other lesser-known national parks, whose protection is equally essential to biodiversity conservation.
In December, as we were trying to accomplish our playback experiments, we had to take several hundred tourists into consideration. In the evening aggregations of elephants crossed the main road traveling from the swamp to the woodland in a spectacular moving display. Here elephants and people intersected. Tour buses can be very annoying, driving too fast, crowding the animals and leaving their car engines’ running – disturbing the elephants and destroying any opportunity for recordings! The tourist boom the last few years has encouraged the alarming mushrooming of tourist facilities on the boundary of Amboseli, blocking migration routes and threatening to destroy the small park. Powerful individuals have blocked bringing a halt to these developments. As the election violence escalated we watched as the number of minibuses declined, until by the time we departed there were almost no visitors left in the park. Tortilis, Amboseli’s high-end camp, was deserted during peak season, its manager left wondering what to do with the smoked salmon and the champagne. With violence continuing unabated, Kenya’s tourism sector won’t be bouncing back any time soon.
A substantial percentage of Kenya’s population survives on the tourism industry. Many camps and lodges will fold and with them the livelihoods of thousands, even millions of Kenyans. With very little income for the parks, one can only hope that Kenya Wildlife Service will be able to continue to do the important job of protecting our already threatened wildlife in the face of the increasing poverty and desperation in the communities surrounding the parks. While we hope that the people controlling Kenya’s future will talk their way out of the deadlock – we will continue to work for the best for elephants, knowing that the future of Kenya and the planet will be poorer if these amazing animals are not to be seen. Thank you for your continued support! Greetings, Joyce & Petter Greeting
A week ago Anita asked whether we had worked with the elephant orphans at the Sheldrick Trust and whether being raised by humans affected their communication. Petter already answered that we have worked with them. Since that work resulted in a paper in Nature, and since it has some bearing on Anita’s question I will tell you a bit about what we found. In 1998 Daphne Sheldrick’s daughter, Jill, mentioned to me that one of the orphan’s in Tsavo (where they go once they are over two years old) was making a very strange sound. So I went down to Tsavo with my recording equipment and once the orphans were settled down in their “boma” (enclosure) for the night I began recording. Almost immediately I heard a very weird sound and asked the keeper what it was. “That’s it!” he responded. It sounded like a fog horn - nothing like an elephant! I soon realised that when I had my earphones on I couldn’t tell whether I was hearing the elephant, Malaika, making the strange noise or whether I was hearing the distant trucks on the Nairobi-Mombasa road, 3 kilometers away - and had to remove my earphones to localize the sound and differentiate them. I began thinking that perhaps Malaika (and some of the other orphans it turned out) was imitating truck sounds! But I didn’t think anyone would believe me. Here is the sound Malaika made: Malaika imitating truck Some years later I contacted Peter Tyack and Stephanie Watwood who study vocal learning (imitation) in dolphins about the recordings I had. At about that time Angela Steoger-Horwath got in touch with me, saying that she had recordings of a captive male African elephant who had been raised with Asian females and was making Asian elephant chirping sounds! So the four if us teamed up and wrote a paper documenting vocal learning in elephants. Elephants are highly social and intelligent animals and they also happen to have a very flexible vocal tract. This means that they have the ability to learn to produce sounds other than those that fall in the normal repertoire of the species. In a natural social setting we may find that elephants use this ability to imitate their close associates in order to cement these bonds (a bit like our daughter’s English accent changes from Norwegian English to Kenyan English depending upon which of her friends she is with). This ability was demonstrated by the African elephant raised with Asians. In captivity elephants also seem to use their vocal learning ability in less useful ways - by imitating trucks and lawnmowers or people whistling, or just making weird sounds. Perhaps this activity relieves the boredom that captivity often presents. |
|
