The Elephant's Secret Sense: The Hidden Life of the Wild Herds of Africa

While observing a family of elephants in the wild, Caitlin O'Connell noticed a peculiar listening behavior in which the matriarch lifted her foot and scanned the horizon, causing the other elephants to follow suit, as if they could 'hear' the ground. "The Elephant's Secret Sense" is O'Connell's account of her path-breaking research into seismic listening and communication, chronicling the extraordinary social lives of elephants over the course of fourteen years in the Namibian wilderness.This odyssey of scientific discovery is also a frank account of fieldwork in a poverty-stricken, war-ravaged country. In her attempts to study an elephant community, O'Connell encounters corrupt bureaucrats, deadly lions and rhinos, poachers, farmers fighting for arable land, and profoundly ineffective approaches to wildlife conservation. "The Elephant's Secret Sense" is ultimately a story of intellectual courage in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles.