The amazing world of elephants
Elephants are as unique as people. In this extract from her new book, elephant expert Hannah Mumby shares some fascinating insights into the lives of these wonderful creatures
‘ICAN’T hear anything.” “Nothing at all?” “Honestly, just feedback. Wasn’t his last point here?”
“Oh, but that point was very early this morning. Let’s look for him.”
I sighed and took the radio receiver from my ear. I was tracking a male elephant named Bulumko up in the very north-eastern corner of South Africa with Ronny Makukule and Jess Wilmot, two experienced field workers. I’d expected to hear a clear and firm “bleep, bleep” from the tracking collar which Bulumko had been wearing for several years now.
The collar communicated with a satellite, so we could know his movements from afar. But not today. Instead, there was no trace of him, just a tantalisingly close GPS point we’d received several hours ago when he was foraging nearby. I felt mildly exasperated that the technology had let me down.
Ronny was already scanning the horizon from the canvas roof of our pickup truck, nicknamed Shrek by employees of the non-profit Elephants Alive. It was almost autumn, but the daytime temperatures could still soar up to 34ºC, and Shrek was the best place to be if you couldn’t make it to a swimming pool.
Suddenly, Ronny smiled.
“There he is! In that big block of trees!” I held up the binoculars. Of course, Ronny was right: Bulumko. He was a towering and impressive bull in his prime, old enough to have distinctive notches in his ears. He probably caught them on branches or thorns, and elephants tend to have more ragged ears the older they get.
He’d also grown a pair of jutting tusks – by no means the biggest I’d seen, but each over a metre long.
Bulumko’s name meant wisdom, but what always struck me was the way he
moved. He ambled, feeling the trees with his trunk and taking time to determine his route. He favoured travelling along the dirt roads that we drove along in our vehicle, and he occasionally lingered by water sources longer than the other bulls.
Like every elephant I’d ever known, Bulumko had his quirks and unique features. But he was a little different even beyond that. He was blind.
In many species, a blind individual just wouldn’t survive. But sight isn’t as important for elephants as it is for other animals. Hearing and smell are much more critical. Bulumko hasn’t just found a way to navigate the world without his sight, he’d also found a way to navigate social life. He could displace other males for access to the freshest water or a prime shady spot to rest in.
Even if he wasn’t receiving direct care from other animals, he was certainly accepted and even dominant because of his stature, age and tusks.
Our relationship with Bulumko was singular. While the other elephants we watched became accustomed to our presence, Bulumko accepted us as friends and co-travellers. We could stay with him for hours by a waterhole as he bathed. When he moved off, he rumbled – a short but low and sonorous sound indicating to us to follow. Let’s go!
I often wondered whether Bulumko communicated with us in this way precisely because of his blindness. With him, we were beyond being observers, we were almost another elephant. Perhaps not seeing us made it easier for him to interact with us as companions, and our car was like another big animal.
Excited to “talk” to Bulumko again,
I clambered down off the roof, ready to drive to a spot where we could get a better sighting of him. I smiled at Ronny and Jess. “This is the life!”
Jess laughed and shook her head at me. But it really was what I wanted: to be treated like an elephant by an elephant. Then Jess revved Shrek’s heavy engine and we drove to Bulumko, leaving a trail of dust in our wake.
IT WASN’T inevitable that my life would end up this way: defined by elephants, their lives, movements and habits. I didn’t grow up in the bush like Ronny. I’m not South African like him and Jess. If you’d asked me when I was seven what I wanted to be when I grew up, I’d have said Indiana Jones or David Attenborough. But these early dreams drifted away when as a student at King’s College, Cambridge, I decided I wanted to study a living organism by getting to the nuts and bolts of how it’s born, grows, reproduces (or not) and dies.
I started with primates but later decided it would be more interesting to study a creature with an even slower life history pattern. I started a list and wrote down “whales”. Grimacing at the thought of seasickness, I crossed it out. Then I wrote down “elephants” and with it, changed the direction of my life.
What is an elephant? A favourite character in a childhood book, a weapon of war, a religious icon, a draught animal, a pest, a conservation flagship, a source of income, a drain on income, a hunting prize, a tourist trap, a terrifying beast, a gentle giant, a source of ivory, or a source of power. It’s been all of this, and the diversity of responses illustrates the complexity and history of our relationship with our biggest land mammals.
Few animals evoke such heartfelt passion and division in opinion. It often strikes me that these enormous animals carry with them so much meaning, symbolism and sometimes baggage – but at least they have the strength for it.
When I say that I work with elephants, most people already have a firm image in their mind which can be hard for me to compete with. But the way I see elephants is as personal as everyone else. For me, elephants are the biggest, most complex and endlessly fascinating puzzle I’ve ever faced.
How elephants can make evolutionary sense with their long lives, inefficient guts and slow reproduction in a world where being small, reproducing fast and multiplying is an option continues to intrigue me. How do we have giants in this world? And how do we live with them?
To answer some of these questions, you’ll need to be willing to get your hands dirty. Next time you’re on safari and it’s safe, ask your guide to pick up an elephant dung ball for you. You can measure all the way around, the circumference or just measure one of the ends and take the longer and shorter measurements and average them to get the diameter.
If that diameter is less than 12cm, it’s likely to be a young elephant, aged under 15 years or so, while 10cm would be
(From previous page) a calf around the age of 10.
Also take a look at the composition of the dung – you’ll notice it doesn’t look very processed. That’s normal, as elephants are hind-gut digesters, not ruminant like a cow, so there’s plenty of visible plant content still there.
But even that varies, depending on the age of the animal.
If you ever have to tell apart an African and Asian elephant by their teeth, you can forget about the tusks because molars could help you more. Lay the two teeth side by side and take a look at those ridges and ripples.
The African elephant’s tooth will have ridges like diamonds, whereas the Asian elephant’s would look more like parallel lines, maybe just meeting.
Elephants have up to six of these molar sets in a lifetime, and as the last set wears down, they can’t grind up their food as well before swallowing it. They do things like carefully knocking the dust off the grass they eat and choosing softer foods as their last set of molars wears down.
So in some of those big dung balls, you might find sticks and a lot of undigested material – a sign of age and a reminder of the circle of elephant life. You might also find a frog and that’s a reminder that frogs sometimes live in dung balls.
I’ve never seen it on African elephants, but as they age, Asian elephants start to have pale skin with freckles of darker pigmentation. It’s undeniably beautiful, unique like a fingerprint.
But those irregularities in pigmentation don’t make them a white elephant. There are critical criteria to achieve that label. I didn’t need those the first time I saw a white elephant. I just knew! They were pinkish, not white, but I never could’ve mistaken it.
White elephants have long been a symbol of prestige and political power in the majority Buddhist countries of southeast Asia. In Nay Pyi Taw, the modern capital of Myanmar, the symbolic sway of the elephants hasn’t faded.
When I last visited, there was an adult female and two young white elephants – the youngest was her calf who’d been born in captivity. The first time I met the white calf, he played with a tyre and a ball, charming and delightful. The next time, just a year later, he’d grown enormously and was now powerful as well as playful. Banana treats had fuelled his growth, and I hoped he and his keepers would be safe and able to contain his youthful enthusiasm.
All three white elephants reminded me of mammoths, their hair thick and falling in unruly blonde strands. I put my hand on the side of the oldest female, the mother. Her skin was pinkish in tone, just like me, but a little harder. Her eyes were bluer than mine, pearly and almost iridescent. They changed in colour and opaqueness with the light.
I didn’t know her name, so I whispered to her, Sin phyu daw – which means royal white elephant. I didn’t know what to make of her. I think it was beyond me.
FOR most people the most distinctive things about elephants is their size. There’s a reason that the name of one ill-fated elephant, Jumbo, became the byword for anything big. His was a life in which humans transported him from Sudan to Paris to London and then to North America.
He was an exhibition in an age of discovery, a symbol of the scramble for the African continent, a pillar of strength in the industrial age, and a star making it in the New World. He walked over Brooklyn Bridge to demonstrate its safety, attracted crowds in Paris and London and then in Times Square.
But it ended tragically in 1885 when Jumbo was hit by a locomotive – another powerful engine of the industrial age – cutting short his life at the age of just 24. His death in Ontario, Canada, was miles from the range of his species, but his mythology was bigger and had more longevity than his physical presence. And that’s saying something because he was huge, measuring 3,2m at the shoulder.
Perhaps if his life hadn’t ended abruptly, he might have reached the 4m the showman and circus owner PT Barnum claimed he towered at.
There’s something terribly sad about a huge elephant showing weakness and I can only imagine what his long-time handler, Matthew Scott, felt as Jumbo lay dying. We still have his skeleton, the end of his tail, and the glimmer of his stardom, echoes of an elephant trumpet.
The biggest elephant I measured in Myanmar was a tall and beautiful male
with thick tusks called Thaung Sein Win. We’re not meant to have favourites, but I know one or more researchers had a soft spot for him, which resulted in him scoring mentions in thesis acknowledgements and social media. Although less of a star than Jumbo, he was a local celebrity for sure.
He had sort of amber eyes that some elephants have that I find quite piercing and he was a very olfactory elephant, always sniffing with his trunk and holding it to the roof of his mouth, where elephants have a sensory organ to process scents.
He was undoubtedly grand and incredibly strong. He was our giant: 3,61m and weighing in at four tons, with a speckled face and beautiful thick, white tusks.
Thaung Sein Win was already about 50 when I met him. Like Jumbo, he started his life wild, living with his mother and a herd. When he was only about four years old, they were driven into a stockade and the group became timber elephants.
It must have been quite a spectacle, however difficult it is to contemplate now because handling and welfare practices have changed so much. Men on specially trained elephants and people beating drums, herding the elephants into a cleared area. The area would then be fenced in and fire, drums and a general din used to funnel the elephants into an enclosure.
The process by which Thaung Sein Win was captured is no longer used, forming just part of the history of elephants and humans in Myanmar. In fact, elephants are now recognised as endangered and therefore not routinely captured to become logging elephants at all.
Thaung Sein Win grew to leave his mother and the elephants he was caught with, to be moved to Kawlin, a town on the railway line that snakes north of Mandalay. It’s pretty unexceptional, but the place will always have the transient beauty of a summer romance for me.
When I first went to Kawlin in November 2012 it was bathed in golden sunshine and home to some incredible people working with elephants. There are few places I’ve been happier. And the most special thing is that you can work all day under a green plastic shade, processing your faecal samples and photographs and measurements.
Then, in the softer early-evening light, if you look up, you can see Thaung Sein Win standing tall and majestic. In that moment, you can believe there really are giants in this world.