Elephant Voices

In Between the Ears: Elephant Voices, science journalist Laura Spinney explores a unique archive of elephant calls and behaviour with its creator, Joyce Poole, the world authority on elephant communication. They listen to moments of birth, joy, mating, danger and death from the perspective of the elephants – as well as hearing Joyce's field note recordings from her studies.

Elephant Eudora's hours-old calf has just been mobbed by hyenas. Rattled, she sends another infant away with a flea in his ear, causing him to seek solace from his own mother who is nearby. We hear his baroo-rumble, a sort of "Mum she was mean to me" whimper, and his mother's soothing coo-rumble in response. In the background Eudora's newborn suckles noisily.

This is elephant domesticity in audio form, except that there is nothing domesticated about these elephants. They belong to one of the 30-odd families who roam wild in Kenya's Amboseli National Park, and whom Joyce Poole has studied and recorded for nearly 50 years. The clip belongs to a remarkable online archive of elephant calls and behaviour, the Elephant Ethogram, that she and her husband Petter made public in 2021.

The Amboseli project is the longest running of its kind, and much of what we know about elephant communication comes from it. It's thanks to Eudora and her kin that we know elephants can communicate over staggeringly long distances, using beautiful, body-shaking calls below the audible range, that elephants address each other by name - being of the very few species besides humans to do so.

Joyce Poole in conversation with Laura Spinney
Music Composed by Nick Romero
Producer & Sound Design - Julian Mayers
A Yada-Yada Production