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. HeÍs 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," says 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." Elephants live in families — there are 53 in Amboseli — 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 on 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."
