A remarkable account of elephant communication, though difficult in spots.
Entomologist O’Connell’s memoir tracks the work that led her to uncover a previously unknown means of elephant communication.
The author and her biologist husband, Tim, arrived in Namibia’s Etosha National Park in 1992. He was to conduct an aerial census of the local elephant population, while she would focus on their behavior, working with local farmers to come up with solutions to the animals’ extensive crop-raiding. For two months each year, the couple would set aside their community-development tasks to observe the elephants. By 1992, researchers had established that elephants produced low-frequency sounds; O’Connell hoped to place these vocalizations in context and analyze their meanings. Her work soon paid off. After recording a matriarch’s panicked response to nearby lions, O’Connell designed a trip alarm that would play back the recording when the herd approached the farmers’ fields. The crop-raiding soon slowed. In the midst of her study, O’Connell noticed that the elephants appeared to be using their forefeet to sense vibrations; using her previous research on the seismic songs of the plant-hopper, a tiny Hawaiian insect, as a guide, she was able to prove that elephants pick up vibrations through their feet, vibrations that travel through toe bone, legs, shoulders and, finally, into the middle ear cavity. Using bone conduction, elephants can communicate seismically, sensing the approach of friends or foes. While O’Connell’s scientific conclusions, gathered over 14 years, make for good reading, her account of life in Namibia is distressing. Frustrating encounters with suspicious villagers gave way to meetings with cynical foreign-development workers, and the devastating AIDS epidemic overshadowed all. “God’s country is full of broken dreams!” one USAID employee aptly intoned.
A remarkable account of elephant communication, though difficult in spots.Pub Date: March 20, 2007
ISBN: 0-7432-8441-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
The book is not entirely negative; final chapters indicate roads of reversal, before it is too late!
It should come as no surprise that the gifted author of The Sea Around Usand its successors can take another branch of science—that phase of biology indicated by the term ecology—and bring it so sharply into focus that any intelligent layman can understand what she is talking about.
Understand, yes, and shudder, for she has drawn a living portrait of what is happening to this balance nature has decreed in the science of life—and what man is doing (and has done) to destroy it and create a science of death. Death to our birds, to fish, to wild creatures of the woods—and, to a degree as yet undetermined, to man himself. World War II hastened the program by releasing lethal chemicals for destruction of insects that threatened man’s health and comfort, vegetation that needed quick disposal. The war against insects had been under way before, but the methods were relatively harmless to other than the insects under attack; the products non-chemical, sometimes even introduction of other insects, enemies of the ones under attack. But with chemicals—increasingly stronger, more potent, more varied, more dangerous—new chain reactions have set in. And ironically, the insects are winning the war, setting up immunities, and re-emerging, their natural enemies destroyed. The peril does not stop here. Waters, even to the underground water tables, are contaminated; soils are poisoned. The birds consume the poisons in their insect and earthworm diet; the cattle, in their fodder; the fish, in the waters and the food those waters provide. And humans? They drink the milk, eat the vegetables, the fish, the poultry. There is enough evidence to point to the far-reaching effects; but this is only the beginning,—in cancer, in liver disorders, in radiation perils…This is the horrifying story. It needed to be told—and by a scientist with a rare gift of communication and an overwhelming sense of responsibility. Already the articles taken from the book for publication in The New Yorkerare being widely discussed. Book-of-the-Month distribution in October will spread the message yet more widely.
The book is not entirely negative; final chapters indicate roads of reversal, before it is too late!Pub Date: Sept. 27, 1962
ISBN: 061825305X
Page Count: 378
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1962
APPRECIATIONS
Ackerman writes with a light but assured touch, her prose rich in fact but economical in delivering it. Fans of birds in all...
Science writer Ackerman (Ah-Choo!: The Uncommon Life of Your Common Cold, 2010, etc.) looks at the new science surrounding avian intelligence.
The takeaway: calling someone a birdbrain is a compliment. And in any event, as Ackerman observes early on, “intelligence is a slippery concept, even in our own species, tricky to define and tricky to measure.” Is a bird that uses a rock to break open a clamshell the mental equivalent of a tool-using primate? Perhaps that’s the wrong question, for birds are so unlike humans that “it’s difficult for us to fully appreciate their mental capabilities,” given that they’re really just small, feathered dinosaurs who inhabit a wholly different world from our once-arboreal and now terrestrial one. Crows and other corvids have gotten all the good publicity related to bird intelligence in recent years, but Ackerman, who does allow that some birds are brighter than others, points favorably to the much-despised pigeon as an animal that “can remember hundreds of different objects for long periods of time, discriminate between different painting styles, and figure out where it’s going, even when displaced from familiar territory by hundreds of miles.” Not bad for a critter best known for bespattering statues in public parks. Ackerman travels far afield to places such as Barbados and New Caledonia to study such matters as memory, communication, and decision-making, the last largely based on visual cues—though, as she notes, birds also draw ably on other senses, including smell, which in turn opens up insight onto “a weird evolutionary paradox that scientists have puzzled over for more than a decade”—a matter of the geometry of, yes, the bird brain.
Ackerman writes with a light but assured touch, her prose rich in fact but economical in delivering it. Fans of birds in all their diversity will want to read this one.Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59420-521-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
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