Wild Life

Joyce Poole ’79 picks up the phone, and the words tumble out of her mouth: “We’ve had three days of insanity because hunters across the border in Tanzania are shooting the big males. It’s been almost nonstop trying to figure out what to do. It’s a very, very politically delicate situation, and so far we don’t know a way forward.”

Poole and her mentor and fellow elephant researcher Cynthia Moss ’62 know all about crisis and controversy. As two of the world’s most prominent elephant researchers, they have spent more than five decades studying—and trying to save—the endangered African savanna elephants, the world’s largest land mammals.

For 53 years in Kenya’s Amboseli National Park, Moss has led the longest-running study of elephants, the Amboseli Elephant Research Project. Three years into her work, in 1975, she took on Poole—then a rising sophomore at Smith—as an intern. Poole went on to cofound ElephantVoices, a nonprofit organization that has done groundbreaking work in elephant behavior and communication.

Together and separately, Moss and Poole have spent thousands of hours observing elephants’ complex matriarchal social system, mating habits, intelligence, emotional lives, and communication skills. But they’ve never been content to simply expand scientific knowledge; they’ve played decisive roles in shaping international public policy. They helped ban the ivory trade and have worked to end the imprisonment and exploitation of elephants in circuses and zoos.

Their books, interviews, and documentaries—notably the 2010 PBS film Echo: An Elephant to Remember—have entertained and educated adults and children around the world. Moss gained national attention in 1995 when she denounced on 60 Minutes the trophy hunters who killed four elephants familiar to her and her team. “That was about as sporting as shooting your neighbor’s poodle,” she told correspondent Lesley Stahl.

The breadth and impact of their accomplishments earned both women the Smith College Medal—Moss in 1985 and Poole in 1996. “Cynthia and Joyce are to elephants what Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey are to the great apes,” neuroscientist Bob Jacobs says. A professor emeritus of psychology at Colorado College, Jacobs helped Poole expose the “neural cruelty” of keeping animals as intelligent and highly social as elephants in captivity.

“Their combined contribution to understanding elephants is unparalleled,” says Phyllis Lee, a professor emerita at the University of Stirling in Scotland who has been the Amboseli Elephant Research Project’s director of science for the past 20 years. “They have changed the way humans view elephants.”

Rock upon rock. That’s the meaning in Chippewa of Ossining, the New York town where Moss was born. As a child, she was drawn to wilderness and adventure. She studied philosophy at Smith, and after graduating took a professional detour as a theater reporter for Newsweek magazine. But deep down she knew she was destined to do something in the sciences; she just didn’t know what it was. “I was always interested in logic and careful reasoning,” she told Laurence Pringle, author of the 1997 book Elephant Woman. “I was drawn to philosophy courses that called for rigorous analysis. Inside me was a scientist who wanted to get out and didn’t know it.”

A letter from her friend Penelope Naylor ’62 describing Africa’s spectacular landscapes inspired Moss to visit. While there, she spent three weeks volunteering with zoologist Iain Douglas-Hamilton, the first person to confirm that elephants live in families led by the oldest female, or matriarch.

“I felt like I’d come home,” Moss says of the experience. “There’s something about Africa. Maybe the primordial savanna landscapes are somewhere deep down in our brains.”

In 1968 she packed two suitcases and headed back to assist Douglas-Hamilton in his pioneering study of elephant “fingerprints”—the distinctive marks and patterns on their ears that identify them to humans—which helped him analyze the animals’ complex social life by making it easier to recognize individuals. Moss’ big break came in 1972, when she started the Amboseli Elephant Research Project in the 150-square-mile home of one of Africa’s last undisturbed elephant herds. There she embarked on a mission to get to know all 700 elephants as individuals and members of families.

To say Moss was roughing it is an understatement. For years, she—and later Poole—lived in a tent. The nearest phone was a crank-operated gizmo down the road at the park’s headquarters. Until the camp got solar panels in 2003, there was no electricity to speak of. Firewood heated water for showers. To read at night, Moss lit a candle or used a paraffin lamp or one hooked to a car battery.

But being out in nature among the elephants fulfilled her childhood love of the outdoors and also brought moments of sublime pleasure. Every morning, Moss, Poole, and a handful of other researchers rose to see the snow-capped peak and sloping flanks of Mount Kilimanjaro in the distance across the border in Tanzania. The camp was located near a swamp, so elephants often moseyed through, feeding on grass and the fronds and fruits of palm trees. Sometimes they spent the night. Ecologist Cynthia Jensen ’79 spent two years after graduation doing vegetation research in Amboseli. “I slept on the ground in a tent,” Jensen says. “I’ll always remember waking one morning at first light, and there was an elephant lying down next to my tent sleeping and snoring.”

Moss’ research expanded Douglas-Hamilton’s early findings. She learned that elephants don’t just live in female-only families but also form bond groups, clans, and subpopulations—a multitiered social structure. Males, upon reaching puberty, leave their families and join the world of independent males where they form friendships. At around 30 years old they begin a cycle of musth, a rutting period when they seek out females. A typical female, Moss discovered, may know as many as 100 other elephants. The matriarch, thanks to her hard-won knowledge, acts as the decision-maker in times of danger and in daily life.

Eventually, it became clear to Moss and Poole that elephants have a complex array of communication skills that include signaling via body language and vocalizations, both supported by their profound sense of smell. (An elephant’s trunk has more scent receptors than a dog’s nose.) Moss found that when a matriarch wants to relocate the family to, say, graze elsewhere, she signals her intention with an audible slap of her ear; more often than not, the other family members trust her leadership. To confirm this, Moss used a stopwatch to measure how much time elapsed before any elephants took action. She found that family members listen to matriarchs while suggestions made by younger females are ignored. Later, Poole learned that elephants also point with the axis of their bodies and give distinctive “Let’s go” rumbles to propose moving on. Most commands are made by older females. While some are successful, others result in long vocal “discussions” in which elephants appear to negotiate a plan of action. Sometimes they agree to disagree and go their separate ways.

Moss also studied mother-calf relationships, observing 300 calves and following them for an astonishing 40 years. She discovered that not only do calves make distinctive sounds to get their mothers’ attention, but that it takes a family to raise a baby elephant.

“They have babysitters,” Moss told the International Fund for Animal Welfare. “The mother will be perfectly aware her younger sister is taking care of the baby. If the baby suddenly screams bloody murder, and he’s a little ways away from the mother, she knows whether that was a serious scream or not, just as you do with your own children. They know which calls are serious and which aren’t, and they’ll discipline other females’ calves if they get too rough with their own calf. They’re very good mothers.”

Early on, Moss started keeping records of every birth and death. What’s more, she gave names to the elephants—not just to a few of them but to thousands—by assigning a letter of the alphabet to each family. Then each member of the family got his or her own name starting with that letter. The first family photographed was assigned the letter A. The adult females were named Annabelle, Alyce, Amy, and Alison. Calves under 4 years old were given codes based on their mother’s name and their year of birth. When Moss got to the 27th family, she started over with AB, BB, CB, and so on. When she ran out of common names, she used the names of African rivers, plants, trees, presidents, pop stars, and soccer players. To date, she and her team have used this system to achieve the unparalleled feat of naming and keeping detailed records on more than 4,000 elephants.

“Elephants are the ultimate social networkers. They know everybody else. They can contact everybody else through low-frequency calls they make. It’s like an elephant Facebook—and they can say where they are and more or less what they’re doing,” Moss says. “This network and its social complexity are totally fascinating. Combined with their intelligence and the importance of the older members of their families, over and over we see how complex elephants are and how tragic it would be if we lost them.”

Since Moss began her research, Kenya’s elephant population has collapsed due to poaching. By 1989, their ranks had plummeted from 167,000 to 16,000. Thirty years later, the population had rebounded to about 36,000—a number Moss thinks will be difficult to sustain.

“Joyce and Cynthia did heroic work going to meetings of CITES [the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora] and making people understand that when you kill an elephant, it’s like killing a human,” says Princeton professor Andrew Dobson, who has known Poole for 40 years. “It’s a highly sentient being that you’re killing.”

Today, thanks to the international ivory ban that Moss and Poole helped enact, the threat of poaching has waned. But Kenya’s human population has exploded from 14 million to 53 million in 50 years. Now the biggest threat to elephants is human encroachment.

Moss has no plans to retire. She still occasionally fires up her 39-year-old Land Rover to go out and observe nearby families. Though she has turned over daily field expeditions to younger researchers, she keeps up with the IDs, edits a quarterly newsletter, and does fundraising. “Cynthia is a goddess,” says Jensen, who serves on the board of directors of Poole’s nonprofit, ElephantVoices. After a long career in international conservation and development, Jensen knows how hard it is for researchers to run multiyear field projects. “It’s the hardest science to get funding for, whether it’s plants, climate, or animals. By hook or by crook, Cynthia has kept her long-term monitoring project going since the 1970s.”

Even during the worst times—the droughts when many elephants, particularly calves, died and when poachers used AK-47s to slaughter families—Moss always wanted to stay. “I’ve always said that watching elephants is like reading an engrossing, convoluted novel that I cannot put down but I also do not want to end,” she wrote in her 1988 memoir, Elephant Memories. “My priority, my love, my life are the Amboseli elephants.”

Joyce Poole has a keen eye. During the year she spent in Amboseli between her time as a first-year at Connecticut College and her transfer to Smith as a sophomore, Poole noticed something odd about adult male elephants: During certain periods, secretions oozed from temporal glands on the sides of their faces. They dribbled strong-smelling urine, leaving a scent trail. They were ill-tempered. She and Moss labeled the malady green penis disease (GPD), thinking it was sexually transmitted and caused discolored genitalia. But Poole observed that the same males displayed no such characteristics at other times. Later, she and Moss agreed that GPD wasn’t a physical malady but a behavioral syndrome, and they renamed it green penis syndrome (GPS).

Poole mulled over the puzzle as a sophomore at Smith and continued doing so the next summer in Amboseli. Eventually, she began to piece together an answer: The males were experiencing a heightened reproductive period, or rut, known as musth.

Poole collected musth males’ urine with a syringe before it soaked into the soil and discovered it contained high levels of testosterone. The ill-tempered unpredictability of the males made this task nerve-racking—and dangerous. She found that the strong scent of the urine trails and facial secretions attracted females and repelled non-musth males.

At the time, other scientists, typically male, argued that only Asian male elephants experienced musth, a Hindu word meaning intoxicated. Poole, a mere undergraduate, proved them wrong. She did her Smith senior thesis and University of Cambridge doctorate on the subject. “There I was, 21 years old, and I said, ‘Yes, it does exist in male African elephants,’” Poole recalls. “It was quite a big discovery.”

It would be the first of many for Poole. Returning to Amboseli after Cambridge, she rapidly proved herself, like Moss, to be a scientist of the first order.

The sounds elephants make—trumpets, roars, cries, snorts, and deep rumbling vocalizations—fascinated her. She devoted herself in the 1980s to deciphering them. Males in musth make a nearly inaudible sound like water murmuring in a deep tunnel. She also noticed that elephants often seemed to react to things she could not hear.

Together with bioacoustics researcher Katy Payne, she discovered that their rumble vocalizations include infrasound—wavelengths below the level of human hearing. Some rumbles are so powerful that elephants can hear other elephants more than a mile away.

She wanted to know whether males in musth and females receptive to mating in estrus (heat) respond to sounds that signal sexual availability. With the help of camp workers, she loaded the back of a Land Rover with a 200-pound speaker outfitted with two 18-inch motor-driven woofers and four 18-inch cones to project recorded elephant calls.

When she played a male’s distinctive musth-rumble to females, her suspicions were confirmed. After listening, the females answered with a chorus of rumbles and trumpets reserved for males in musth. Playbacks of a female’s estrus call made males in musth wheel about and move rapidly toward the car.

“It was quite wonderful going with Joyce then,” Lee, Amboseli’s science director, recalls. “Watching elephants respond to the sounds of other elephants in a controlled way was a fabulous thing. It was one of the most amazing things that ever happened at Amboseli.”

Today, Poole’s research into elephant language both in Amboseli and at Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique has advanced light years. For example, her latest paper, written in partnership with behavioral ecologist Mickey Pardo, used machine learning to show that elephants have names for each other, something she and other researchers had long suspected. “The differences are not something we can hear or measure using traditional means,” Poole says, “but, through the use of artificial intelligence (AI), we were able to differentiate who a specific elephant was directing her calls to.” Since elephants are not born knowing the names of others, this means they are creating new sounds to refer to them. The work offers an explanation for an exciting earlier finding: In 2005, Poole discovered that elephants imitate the sounds of other species and even machines, and she had wondered how they might use their vocal learning ability to communicate with their own kind.

Her masterwork is The Elephant Ethogram: A Library of African Elephant Behaviour, which was posted in 2021. This publicly available online database was produced by ElephantVoices, which Poole and her husband, the economist Petter Granli, cofounded and run. An ethogram is a library of all the behaviors of a species. This one contains almost 3,000 media files, including audio and video clips, and written descriptions of hundreds of behaviors and sounds. For example, elephants trumpet in many ways. One long type of trumpet blast indicates an elephant is chasing a predator. Elephants also pulsate trumpets in short repeated bursts, typically only when running and playing. And they make many rumbling sounds; an undulating, whining grumble-rumble means an elephant is complaining about something. When an elephant spreads its ears, it could be a warning; raised ears could be a hello. With subtle differences, a trunk curled in the up-periscope position could be sniffing for danger, pointing, initiating a game, or, if done by a calf, indicating it wants to suckle.

Poole has compared notes with whale communication researchers who use robotic devices attached to the cetaceans to record thousands of hours of whale codas—combinations of clicks used to communicate—and then employ AI to try to reveal their meanings. Poole imagines a day when robots in the form of egrets, which follow herds of elephants and ride on their backs, might do the same thing.

Like Moss, she has a deep awareness of elephants’ capacity for joy, love, and grief. When elephants come across the bones of a dead elephant, they examine them with their trunks as if trying to identify a fallen cousin. If a calf dies, a mother hovers over its carcass for days in grief and mourning. When Poole witnessed this on one occasion, she waited in her car and watched. Finally, after a day, she put a pan of water near the anguished mother. Soon the mother drank. Then she ambled to the open car window. As if to thank Poole, she reached in and touched her with her trunk.

Elephants produce a cacophony of trumpets, roars, and rumbles in greeting. In 1993, when Poole’s daughter, Selengei, was a few weeks old, Poole took her to meet Amboseli’s largest family, the group with “V” names. Poole turned off the engine. She wanted elephants to completely surround her. Vee, Victoria, and Virginia came near. Then Vee let out a hearty rumble. Her sisters came closer. Crowding the car window, they reached their trunks toward Selengei and let out rumbles and roars so thunderous they made Poole’s body tremble. “Who knows what goes on in the hearts and minds of elephants but the elephants themselves?” she asks in her memoir.

As for the hunters in Tanzania who recently infuriated Poole, she and Moss and their teams pulled out all the stops, raising the alarm with scores of journalists and spearheading a petition that garnered 500,000 signatures and was delivered to that nation’s president. One of the elephants killed was Gilgil, the son of Golda, the matriarch of the GB family. Thanks to Amboseli’s records, Poole and Moss knew he was 35 years old and only just entering his prime reproductive years. Poole had even witnessed the mating between Dionysus, one of Amboseli’s most magnificent males, and Golda that led to his conception. The hunters burned his carcass and burned or buried the carcasses of four other elephants they shot to prevent them from being identified.

Much has changed in the elephant scientific community in 50 years. “Scientists were almost all male,” Poole recalls. “They were very focused on how many elephants there were and whether there were enough to harvest ivory. It just drove me insane. I thought, ‘Wait a second! What do the elephants think about this? Have you asked them?’ They flat-out told me and Cynthia there was no place for emotions in elephant conservation. Oh, my goodness, they were ignoring the science!” Today, according to her, a “very healthy mix” of Kenyans decide their nation’s conservation policies.

While studying elephant families, Moss and Poole have, in a sense, created their own scientific family. “The way they work together and do everything as a unit—that’s the lesson,” says behavioral ecologist Lucy Bates of the University of Portsmouth. “They always know they’re ultimately on the same team. They might disagree at times, but they always come back together, just as elephants do.”

A bigger yet less dramatic challenge than hunting now faces Poole and Moss: helping elephants coexist with the Maasai people of Kenya, who are increasingly trading their seminomadic pastoral ways for farming—a more sedentary life with fences and crops that is more likely to bring them into conflict with elephants’ need for space.

Moss and Poole partnered on a project to help the Maasai understand the elephants’ perspective. Poole recalls thinking, “Can we appeal to the Maasai and ask them to wonder how the elephants might think about this? How could we bring the elephants into the conversation about policies that will affect them?” In the end, however, Moss’ team found that the Maasai lacked the resources to contribute effectively to such an effort, and human-elephant tensions continue to trouble rural Kenya.

Today, Poole continues to run ElephantVoices with her husband while their daughter manages the nonprofit’s social media. The family’s interest in nonhuman communication extends to their border collie, Binti, who knows the names of 150 toys and is part of a University of Budapest study on gifted word-learning dogs. Moss, now 84, plans to continue working with elephants, supported by a team she says is “exceptional.” She divides her time between Amboseli and nearby Nairobi. Never married, she has a Kenyan daughter, Awino, whom she unofficially adopted after the death of Awino’s mother. Moss and Poole remain good friends and continue to occasionally collaborate. They spent this past Christmas together in Amboseli. Moss was present at Poole’s daughter’s birth and plans to attend her upcoming wedding.

Moss has always remembered the advice Smith President Thomas Mendenhall gave at convocation in the fall of 1958 at the beginning of her first year. “I’ve never forgotten his words because they were such an important lesson and a good way to look at life. He said, ‘Your education here is not to get a job or make money. Your education is to make you more interesting to yourself.’”

“I love that,” Moss says. “That helped me be able to spend a lot of time alone out with elephants. It’s important to not just look for glory and money. Being interesting to yourself is a goal in and of itself.”

Freelance writer George Spencer lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina. He recently profiled Titanic survivor Madeline Newell 1903 for the Quarterly.