Joseph Soltis

Disney Researcher

Hello everyone, this is my third dispatch from Kenya, February 11, 2011

Needless to say, it is still as dry as a bone around here. But we are making slow but steady progress, managing one playback experiment per 5 hours of searching. The picture below is of an elephant family called the Mountain Ranges. I took this picture after we played this family the “normal” rumbles in our playback experiments. As expected, they took notice of the calls but did not react very strongly. Nothing unusual about those rumbles. Other elephant families are scattered about along this dried up river, so there is no surprise in hearing a rumble or two from another family. Not so for the alarm call playbacks, as I mentioned in the first dispatch. To those calls, elephants react quite strongly, and you would not see them relaxing like this afterward.

You may have noticed that in this picture there is a cute baby elephant with a tiny little tusk. Despite years of drought and other threats, I notice that the elephant population is productive. There are always elephants of every age class, from newborns, to infants like the one shown in the picture, juveniles, young adults, prime adults, and even some old- timers like myself.

Joseph

Samburu, Kenya