The Hindu Business Line : The forests are abuzz with gossip

ELEPHANTS talk to each other over long distances at sound levels that humans cannot hear. When one passed the information to Rama she thought it was a joke. Having seen quite a bit of the animal at temple festivals in Allappuzah, Rama did not easily take to Katy Payne's book Silent Thunder. In 1972, naturalist M. Krishnan guessed it right when he described elephant chat as "a throbbing purr" and Katy Payne refers to Krishnan in her book, which anecdotes the capture on computers of the low-pitched gossip of the animal in Africa's forests. While listening to their family chat, the writer develops a regard and respect for the biggest mammal on land.

In an essay on elephants, R. Sukumar mentions the work of Katy Payne, an acoustic biologist who first intercepted elephant chatter at the Washington Park Zoo in Portland, Oregon. In the seas, whales keep in touch through infrasonic calls; on land it is the elephants. Before elephants Katy had worked on whales. Around the same time, Judith Berg working on African elephants at the San Diego Zoo reported infrasound frequencies in their calls.

Katy explains the science of infrasound in a few words to keep the reader interested in her book while editing technical details. The distance a sound travels depends on the medium it passes through, the strength of the sound and its frequency. High sounds travel in short waves losing energy fast being deflected by forest flora and dissipated as heat. Low sounds travel in long waves with less loss. The strength of a low-frequency sound has an effect on its range. If one doubles the strength of a sound whose initial range is 20 metres, the range goes up to 40 metres, and "if we wanted to know the range of elephants' communication, we'd have to measure the strength as well as the frequencies of their calls in the field," writes Katy.

The book is easy to read. Books on wildlife are hard to come by in Mumbai and one was lucky to spot the book at Strand. One spent a long time over the 288-page book as Katy does mix her private dreams of elephants with happenings in the forests, apart from trying to understand the African tribes she worked with in Zimbabwe. Initially she worked at Amboseli Park, Kenya, with Cynthia Moss, who has spent more than a decade there and knew the personal details of 650 elephants in the Park.

As the research gained strength, it became clear elephants heard and responded to each other's calls over distances of four km. Two meteorologists, David Larom and Michael Garstang, joined the research troupe to come across "a dramatic temperature inversion within 300 hundred metres of the ground on most evenings, which usually persisted through the night until dawn. They made a model predicting that the layer so formed would deflect low-frequency sound back down to the earth instead of allowing it to dissipate in the sky and greatly increase the distances the sound would travel." At dusk, a loud elephant's call might be heard by another 9.8 km away and would be heard by elephant herds within 300 sq. km. At mid-day, the calling area could shrink to one-tenth the size.

The same acoustic rule applies for lions in Africa and Katy thinks female elephants do most of their calling in the late afternoon, when sound transmission is good and the lions are asleep. Perhaps, Katy enjoyed her work most at the Sengwa Research Area in Zimbabwe where for some time Rowan Martin, studying the movement patterns of these beasts by radio collaring, had noticed that certain pairs kept in touch on their long forest walks for weeks. It was as if the beasts had their own mobiles. He had no answer for the behaviour till Katy joined Rowan to affirm her finding that elephants indulge in infrasound talk unknown to humans.

Then comes the news of the culling in Sengwa to contain "pockets of abundance." Katy is devastated. "In brilliant sunlight the grass was green and fresh, the day was high with autumn energy, but I threw myself down and sobbed out loud in grief and rage for wasted blood, aborted lives, and desecrated holiness — pounded and kicked the ground and cried out loud," Katy writes. There was no need for the slaughter of 250 elephants at one go. Jabula, Friday the Thirteenth, Munyama, Miss Piggy, Runyanga, Crooked Tusk were some who were no more. They were shot down by guns from helicopters.

Katy returns to Sengwa after the cull and the first person she meets is Timothy Chifamba Dube, a forest scout who says, "No. No. Crooked Tusk was wonderful. We liked her. We are not at all glad that she is gone, no, not at all. No — we are sorry. She was a great elephant."

There is a Shona greeting which goes, "I am well if you are well." The elephants with their cache of ivory are unwell.

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