Elephant Memories: Thirteen Years in the Life of an Elephant Family

Front Cover
University of Chicago Press, 2000 - Nature - 364 pages
Cynthia Moss has studied the elephants in Kenya's Amboseli National Park for over twenty-seven years. Her long-term research has revealed much of what we now know about these complex and intelligent animals. Here she chronicles the lives of the members of the T families led by matriarchs Teresia, Slit Ear, Torn Ear, Tania, and Tuskless. With a new afterword catching up on the families and covering current conservation issues, Moss's story will continue to fascinate animal lovers.

"One is soon swept away by this 'Babar' for adults. By the end, one even begins to feel an aversion for people. One wants to curse human civilization and cry out, 'Now God stand up for the elephants!'"—Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times

"Moss speaks to the general reader, with charm as well as scientific authority. . . . [An] elegantly written and ingeniously structured account." —Raymond Sokolov, Wall Street Journal

"Moss tells the story in a style so conversational . . . that I felt like a privileged visitor riding beside her in her rickety Land-Rover as she showed me around the park." —Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, New York Times Book Review

"A prose-poem celebrating a species from which we could learn some moral as well as zoological lessons." —Chicago Tribune
 

Selected pages

Contents

Acknowledgments
8
Introduction
15
An Amboseli Day 19731975
19
Drought 1976
41
Migration 1977
63
Mating 1978
89
Social Relationships 1979
119
Births and Babies 1980
145
Flexibility 1982
203
Population Dynamics 1983
229
Life Cycle and Death 1984
255
Future Generations 19851986 and Beyond
283
Epilogue December 26 1986
319
Afterword November 1999
325
Amboseli Elephant Research Project Publications as of November 1999
345
Index
357

Elephants and People 1981
175

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