The Elephant's Secret Sense

Author: Caitlin O'Connell
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416539093
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Book Description
While observing a family group of elephants in the wild, Caitlin O'Connell, a young field scientist, noticed a peculiar listening behavior. A matriarch she had been watching for months turned her massive head and lifted her foot off the ground. As she scanned the horizon, the other elephants followed suit, all facing the same direction. O'Connell soon made a groundbreaking discovery: the elephants were "listening through limbs," feeling the ripples of the earth's surface for approaching friends and enemies. Through their feet, toenails, trunks, and other, subtler modes of communication, these enormous animals were communicating to one another, demonstrating the vital importance of social relationships in their lives. Yet this grand revelation about the intelligence of wild animals is also a story of the relationship between humans and elephants as neighbors, vying for the same resources of an increasingly crowded continent. For when O'Connell was first contracted by the Namibian government to develop new methods to deter elephants from raiding villagers' crops, she was unprepared for what she would encounter -- political upheaval, tribal disputes, inhumane poachers, and a fundamentally ineffective approach to wildlife conservation. Despite these setbacks, she came to know and love each of the fascinating, unique elephants under her watchful eye, while at the same time witnessing a change in attitude and policy, providing hope for the elephant's future. An unforgettable journey of scientific discovery, The Elephant's Secret Sense takes you deep into the wilds of Namibia, from the tops of isolated, desert observation towers to the jaws and claws of ravenous lions to aerial expeditions and dusty highways, where the naturalists do their difficult work in a troubled land threatened by expanding human populations and unstable politics. Resonant with the powerful calls of the mysterious elephant, this is a story about the resilience of nature and the inspiring, astonishing, and often heartbreaking places where humans and wild animals come together.

The Elephant's Secret Sense

Author: Caitlin O'Connell
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226616746
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Book Description
From an internationally renowned field scientist comes this fascinating story of her unexpected discovery of a RsecretS new mode of elephant communication. This unforgettable journey takes readers into the wilds of Africa where naturalists do their difficult work in a troubled land.

Elephantoms

Author: Lyall Watson
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
ISBN: 014352688X
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 250

Book Description
As a child in South Africa, spending summers exploring the wild with his boyhood friends, Lyall Watson came face to face with his first elephant. From that moment on, Watson's fascination grew into a lifelong obsession with understanding the nature and behaviour of this impressive creature. Around the world, the elephant - at once a symbol of spiritual power and physical endurance - has been worshipped as a god and hunted for sport. In this captivating portrait of the elephant, Watson draws from scientific research, anthropological studies, and personal experience to document the animal's wide-ranging capabilities to remember and to mourn; and he reminds us of its rich mythic origins, its evolution, and its devastation in recent history. Part meditation on an elusive animal, part evocation of the power of place, Elephantoms presents an alluring mix of the mysteries of nature and the wonders of childhood.

Elephant Memories

Author: Cynthia Moss
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022614853X
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 401

Book Description
“A style so conversational…that I felt like a privileged visitor riding beside her in her rickety Land-Rover as she showed me around the park." —The New York Times Book Review Cynthia Moss spent many years living in Kenya’s Amboseli National Park and studying the elephants there, and her long-term research has revealed much of what we now know about these complex and intelligent animals. In this book, she shares a more up-close and personal perspective, chronicling the lives of the elephant families led by matriarchs Teresia, Slit Ear, Torn Ear, Tania, and Tuskless, including a rare look at calves and their development. This edition is also updated with a new afterword, catching up on the families, covering current conservation issues, and “celebrating a species from which we could learn some moral as well as zoological lessons” (Chicago Tribune). “One is soon swept away by this ‘Babar’ for adults. By the end, one even begins to feel an aversion for people. One wants to curse human civilization and cry out, ‘Now God stand up for the elephants!’”—The New York Times “Moss speaks to the general reader, with charm as well as scientific authority…[An] elegantly written and ingeniously structured account.”—TheWall Street Journal “Any reader interested in animals will be captivated.”—Publishers Weekly

The Elephant Scientist

Author: Caitlin O'Connell
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547053444
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 85

Book Description
Describes the work and observations of American scientist Caitlin O'Connell during her studies of the African elephant in Etosha National Park in Nambia.

A Baby Elephant in the Wild

Author: Caitlin O'Connell
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0544149440
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 45

Book Description
With in-the-field photographs, this photo essay brings young children to the African scrub desert to witness how a baby elephant survives in the wild.

Vibrational Communication in Animals

Author: Peggy S. M. Hill
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674027985
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 282

Book Description
In creatures as different as crickets and scorpions, mole rats and elephants, there exists an overlooked channel of communication: signals transmitted as vibrations through a solid substrate. Peggy Hill summarizes a generation of groundbreaking work by scientists around the world on this long understudied form of animal communication. Beginning in the 1970s, Hill explains, powerful computers and listening devices allowed scientists to record and interpret vibrational signals. Whether the medium is the sunbaked savannah or the stem of a plant, vibrations can be passed along from an animal to a potential mate, or intercepted by a predator on the prowl. Vibration appears to be an ancient means of communication, widespread in both invertebrate and vertebrate taxa. Hill synthesizes in this book a flowering of research, field studies documenting vibrational signals in the wild, and the laboratory experiments that answered such questions as what adaptations allowed animals to send and receive signals, how they use signals in different contexts, and how vibration as a channel might have evolved. Vibrational Communication in Animals promises to become a foundational text for the next generation of researchers putting an ear to the ground.

Elephant Don

Author: Caitlin O'Connell
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022610611X
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Book Description
Elephant male are often portrayed as aggressive loners, who shape the world around them by brute force. But they can also be gentle and playful giants, even empathic. "Uncertain Throne "brings Entourage from LA to Mushara, showing how the lives of male elephants is really one of time with a posse, entourages of mixed ages, with all of the social dynamics groups of men in other species experience. The story follows that of Greg, and a band of his friends, with days at the water hole, evenings spent defending turf, and searching out mates. "Uncertain Throne "is Greg's story, but it is every bit as much a story about O'Connell, who, like Jane Goodall and others who inspire her, has dedicated herself to learning about elephants, and in turn sharing what she has learned with those of us who aren't enamored of sleeping on elevated wooden platforms in Namibia that keep lions out of reach but are scalable by a wide array of other visitors--snakes included. "An Uncertain Throne "tracks Greg and his group of males for a decade, starting in 2004. In a series of short chapters, starting in the present but winding back through previous field seasons, O Connell narrates and aims to understand the vicissitudes of male friendship, power struggles, and play. She captures for readers the incredible repertoire of elephant behavior, communication included. Greg it at times a tyrant, and at others a benevolent dictator. And he possesses what it takes to stay at the top, even as the environment and landscape morph around him with the dynamics of wet and dry years. Life for male elephants is uncertain, and full of tragedy and triumph alike. And this gives us all a sense of what it's like to walk in their company."

Elephant's Life

Author: Caitlin O'connell
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0762775610
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Book Description
An Elephant’s Life provides a unique and fascinating immersion into the world of the African elephant, told by a leading field biologist who has been researching and photographing these animals in their natural habitat for nearly two decades. Here, for the first time, readers get a fuller picture of elephant society cast in a broader context, including the life of the male elephant in all its high drama.

An Immense World

Author: Ed Yong
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0593133242
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 485

Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A “thrilling” (The New York Times), “dazzling” (The Wall Street Journal) tour of the radically different ways that animals perceive the world that will fill you with wonder and forever alter your perspective, by Pulitzer Prize–winning science journalist Ed Yong “One of this year’s finest works of narrative nonfiction.”—Oprah Daily ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Time, People, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Slate, Reader’s Digest, Chicago Public Library, Outside, Publishers Weekly, BookPage ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Oprah Daily, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Economist, Smithsonian Magazine, Prospect (UK), Globe & Mail, Esquire, Mental Floss, Marginalian, She Reads, Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every kind of animal, including humans, is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of our immense world. In An Immense World, Ed Yong coaxes us beyond the confines of our own senses, allowing us to perceive the skeins of scent, waves of electromagnetism, and pulses of pressure that surround us. We encounter beetles that are drawn to fires, turtles that can track the Earth’s magnetic fields, fish that fill rivers with electrical messages, and even humans who wield sonar like bats. We discover that a crocodile’s scaly face is as sensitive as a lover’s fingertips, that the eyes of a giant squid evolved to see sparkling whales, that plants thrum with the inaudible songs of courting bugs, and that even simple scallops have complex vision. We learn what bees see in flowers, what songbirds hear in their tunes, and what dogs smell on the street. We listen to stories of pivotal discoveries in the field, while looking ahead at the many mysteries that remain unsolved. Funny, rigorous, and suffused with the joy of discovery, An Immense World takes us on what Marcel Proust called “the only true voyage . . . not to visit strange lands, but to possess other eyes.” WINNER OF THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL • FINALIST FOR THE KIRKUS PRIZE • FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD • LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/E.O. WILSON AWARD