Free As The Wind Blows

By Simon Robinson/Amboseli

KENYA'S ELEPHANT TEAM You Might Not Buy Ivory If You Saw This Family

Parked on a grassy bank in her 15-year-old, blue-green Land Rover, elephant researcher Cynthia Moss peers through her binoculars at a group of females and calves 200 ft. in front of us. It is late afternoon, and Moss and I have driven from her camp in Kenya's Amboseli National Park to the eastern edge of nearby Longinye swamp. Our job: to count and identify the elephants as observers in an airplane estimate numbers from above. Behind us, across the border in Tanzania, looms the hulking mass of Africa's highest peak, Mount Kilimanjaro, its snow-capped dome giving way to gently sloping flanks that shimmer blue in the dying light. Crumpled along the horizon to the west and east are distant smaller mountains: Chyulu, Ol Dionyo Orok and Longido. To the north is nothing but huge sky and endless plain.

A year-old male calf is playing with a long, stringy tuft of grass. He opens his mouth as if to eat it, but his trunk moves in the wrong direction, and the grass pokes him in the eye. Moss laughs. "He doesn't want to eat. He's too little," she says. "He's just practicing." After a few minutes, a 10-year-old female elephant walks toward us. She plops in front of the car and uses her trunk to hurl dust over her back. Crossing her back legs, she leans forward as if to kneel. Her tusks dig into the ground, and she extends one of her back legs behind her. "Oh, totally ridiculous," observes Moss. "She's feeling silly and wants to play, but there's no one to play with."

Moss, 59, never tires of watching elephants. To her, they're much more fascinating than the Broadway players she used to watch decades ago as a theater reporter for Newsweek. Born in Ossining, N.Y., she had graduated from Smith College with a philosophy major. But she fell in love with Africa while traveling there in 1967 and moved a year later to Kenya, where she worked on other elephant projects before setting up her own in 1972. Since then, without formal scientific training, she has learned more about the family structure, life cycle and behavior of elephants than perhaps anyone else in the world. "What she has done is incredible," says Iain Douglas-Hamilton, whose research in the mid-1960s first proved that elephants lived in families. "This is the only place to get absolute data on elephant-population dynamics over a long period."

In books like Elephant Memories and films such as Echo of the Elephants, Moss has told the world what she knows about her favorite animals--and helped ensure their survival. As recently as a decade ago, they were being slaughtered wholesale by poachers, who ripped out magnificent ivory tusks to be made into jewelry and piano keys. The testimony of Moss and others stirred outrage that led to an international ban on the free trade of ivory. "Before we started our studies, people felt elephants were there to be used in the way man thought best," says Moss. "But the more we learn about them, the more arguments we have to protect them."

She could not have chosen a better laboratory. Though it covers just 150 sq. mi.--a tiny handkerchief on Kenya's vast open plains--Amboseli contains one of the least disturbed elephant populations in Africa. While visitors flock to see the great pachyderms, along with buffalo, cheetahs, gazelles, hyenas, lions and zebras, poachers hardly ever dare invade such a popular destination. "No population is completely undisturbed these days," says Moss. "But this one is more natural than most."

That morning, Moss and I had seen 70 or so elephants, strung out across 200 yds., moving along a dusty track toward the park's central swamp. "There's Sybil, Lolita," observes Moss. "Look, who's that one with the two holes in her ear? Oh, that's Laura." An elephant's ear has distinctive markings--holes, nicks and tears--along its outer edge, as well as unique vein patterns within. Think of it as an oversize fingerprint. By photographing each ear, Moss and her assistants at the Amboseli Elephant Research Project have built up a database on every elephant in the park--some 700 when Moss arrived 28 years ago, and close to 1,100 now.

By knowing all the elephants, Moss has been able to build up a remarkable picture of the way they live. "They turned out to have a very complex and multitiered society," she says. "One study indicates they have the largest social network of any land mammal save humans." Elephant families--there are 53 in Amboseli--are dominated by the oldest female, or matriarch. Groups of families form "bond groups" and so on through five levels of interaction. The matriarch "is very important," says Moss. "She's the repository of knowledge for her family. So much depends on the decisions she makes in times of danger or just from day to day."

The males are just as interesting. Forced to leave the family when they become sexually mature at about 14 years old, they do not reach social maturity--or at least the females are not interested in mating with them--for an additional 15 years or more. Then bulls enter their first period of musth, a Hindi word used to describe a physiological and psychological state observed periodically in Indian elephants. A bull in musth excretes a viscous fluid from glands on the sides of its head, dribbles urine constantly and appears to have just one aim: to mate. All bulls have their own one- to three-month period of musth every year. "The rest of the time, they're retired," says Moss. "Feeding, resting, getting fit."

Driving one day with Soila Sayialel, Moss's project manager, we spot Robert, a 38-year-old bull. Earlier that day he had wandered along the road to Amboseli's airstrip, blocking tourist buses on the way to a flight. "If they don't find any females to mate with, they want to prove how strong they are in other ways," says Sayialel. Robert has spotted a herd of six females and three calves and is striking out toward them across a meadow of lush green grass. He moves from cow to cow, sniffing each one to see if she is in heat. No luck, so he slowly breaks away from the group toward two buffalo lying in the midday heat. They rise and eye Robert warily. He stands for a few minutes as if to let them know who's boss and then moves off toward the airstrip road again.

Moss encourages other researchers to visit Amboseli and offers 10-day courses in elephant-observation techniques. Students have come from Ethiopia, Namibia, South Africa, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. That helps Moss achieve one of her main goals: to get Africans involved in the conservation of their wildlife.

Her most accomplished proteges, in fact, are her three Kenyan assistants: Sayialel, 37; her sister Katito, 28; and training coordinator Norah Njiraini, 38. All three say they were shy around other people and scared of elephants when they joined the project. Now they lecture tourist groups and drive around the park daily to record elephant positions, family structures, births and deaths. Their work is all the more impressive when you consider the women's background. Soila and Katito are from the Masai tribe, one of the most fiercely tradition-bound in Kenya. When their mother insisted the girls attend school, their father refused. He wanted to marry them off so he could collect the bridal price: a dozen or so cows and perhaps a few bags of sugar. But their strong-willed mother appealed to the local chief; when she got her way, the couple separated. "Now my whole community is proud of me," says Soila. "Sometimes my father comes to me and says, 'I educated you.' But we know it was really my mother."

Listening to the women talk about elephants, identifying the families with codes, is like eavesdropping on gossiping friends. "The AAs are gentle. They mind their own business," says Moss, sitting under a thatch-roofed cabana in her camp, which nestles in a grove of Phoenix palms. "The RAs are a bit neurotic, confusing. But the MBs are very independent." "What about the OAs?" I ask, sneaking into the conversation. The women laugh. "They're a little boring," says Soila. "Not much character." "It has to do with the matriarch's personality," says Moss. "Of course, talking about elephants in this way is not scientifically acceptable to many people, but without using such words, we have a hard time describing what we observe."

Is there a favorite bull? I ask. "There are more bulls we don't like than cows we don't like," says Moss. Everyone nods. "But what about M22, Dionysus?" asks Njiraini. Moss's face lights up: "So nice. Just a total gentleman--dignified, calm, reasonable, tall and handsome. M22 is the only bull I've seen who goes to the front of a female and strokes her face before he mates her. Even males seem attracted to him, as if they're in awe of him."

Amboseli's elephants used to raise the ire of the Masai, who are slowly leaving behind their traditional nomadic existence and settling in small villages to farm. Elephants compete for food with the Masai's precious cows and will occasionally kill a cow or goat. When that happened in the past, young Masai warriors usually sought revenge. But after a series of elephant killings a few years ago, Moss and her assistants helped develop a solution: a "consolation" scheme in which Masai are given $210 for every cow killed by an elephant and $70 for every sheep or goat killed. "Now people are beginning to look positively at elephants," says Daniel Leturesh, a local Masai leader. "We benefit if tourists come here to look at the elephants, and if we lose an animal, we also benefit."

But the battle to save elephants will never end so long as humans value ivory. African countries have been collecting tusks from animals who died naturally or were culled from herds, and last year the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species allowed one-time sales from some stockpiles. In April CITES will consider widening the now limited trade or closing it again altogether. Kenya and several other nations use armed patrols to guard elephants, but the patrols can't be everywhere all the time. Anecdotal evidence suggests that poaching has increased since last year's ivory sales. "Even if elephant numbers have recovered, there is nothing new since the horrors of the '80s to stop the ivory trade," says Moss. "Laws are just as lax, African wildlife departments are even more poorly funded, and corruption is worse."

Moss's mission as an elephant advocate often takes her away from the Amboseli fieldwork she loves so much. She spends about three-quarters of her time writing, giving lectures in the U.S. and Britain and raising money, much of which comes from the African Wildlife Foundation in Washington. An updated version of Elephant Memories should be out in May, and she's working on a volume of papers by scientists who have studied the Amboseli elephants. She is also trying to build a $5 million to $7 million endowment, the African Elephant Conservation Trust. That would help give elephants permanent protection--and let her spend more time with her big-eared friends.

One night in camp, after a shower in a wooden cubicle offering a stunning view of the stars, Moss contemplates why she never tires of watching elephants. "If you sit at an airport and watch the people, it's interesting but only two-dimensional. If you sit and watch people you know, say, at a family gathering, you see the uncle who lent some money but was never paid back, and you know all the family quarrels. It becomes so three-dimensional when you have all that history, so much more interesting. I don't think I could ever leave this place." She has become one of the family.

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