Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #406134 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03-20
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .1 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Naturalist O'Connell's memoir of her 14 years researching the complexities of elephant behavior is a successful combination of science and soulfulness, explaining her groundbreaking theory of how elephants use seismic communication; she also sympathetically illuminates current social and ecological conditions in Africa. O'Connell's original goal in 1992 was to spend a year driving from South Africa to Kenya, but then she was hired for a three-year study of elephants in an area of northeastern Namibia, "where violent death is as much a part of the landscape as the capricious nature of rain." Fascinated by the "particular way that elephants seemed to be listening with their feet," she soon realized that the elephants were communicating with sound waves "that travel within the surface of the ground as opposed to the air." Her efforts over the next decade to prove this "unexpected and controversial" hypothesis took her "to the bayous of Texas, the Nevada desert, southern India, northern Zimbabwe, the Oakland Zoo, and then back to the scrub desert" of Namibia. Her account is studded with sympathetic insights and well-turned phrases, such as her delight when "100 tons of pachyderm pass by, almost tiptoeing, heads bobbing in their Groucho Marx gait." (Mar.)
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From Booklist
The largest land animal is the African elephant, a creature so vast that it is impossible to ignore. And yet, what do we really know about elephants? Field biologist O'Connell was in Namibia working on nonlethal methods for deterring elephants from raiding local people's crops. One night she was observing a young elephant sneaking past her house and inadvertently dropped her book. The startled elephant ran off literally on her tiptoes. On another location, while observing elephants at a waterhole, the author saw the matriarch suddenly turn, flatten her ears, and lift one leg off the ground. Several other females then faced the same direction, and soon another elephant appeared. Could elephants feel vibrations through the ground, literally "listening" with their feet? In a riveting account of scientific discovery both in the field and in the laboratory, O'Connell tells of how she and her colleagues studied seismic communication in elephants. O'Connell's love for her research subjects and her quest for understanding them is integral to her story, making for an addictive narrative. Nancy Bent
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About the Author
Caitlin O'Connell is a research associate at Stanford University, in the Department of Otolaryngology, Head and Neck Surgery. Her discoveries have been published and reported in various periodicals, including Science, Science News, Natural History, National Geographic, The Economist, and Discover. She has appeared on National Geographic, the BBC, PBS/Nature, and the Discovery Channel. O'Connell lives in San Diego, where she and her husband direct the nonprofit organization Utopia Scientific, which promotes elephant conservation and scientific understanding around the world.