Elephant Diaries

Last week, an article titled ‘If you were an elephant...’ by Charles Foster swept us away with its charm, beauty, and lines like “By trying to become an elephant, you might become a much more thriving human.”

The writing is so immersive that by the time we finished reading the piece, our senses were heightened, we were alert to the faintest of sounds and could almost feel a trunk where our nose is. 

We enjoyed reading this so much that we decided to pull up some writing on elephants that have been our favourites, the ones we’ve gone back to many times over.

Satao: last of the great tuskers by Mark Deeble

“I think the old bull knows that poachers want his tusks, and I hate that he knows.”

Mark Deeble writes a moving account of Satao, a bull tusker in Kenya’s Tsavo East National Park. Satao was one of the last of the fabled 100+ pounders, meaning that each of his tusks was so large that it weighed over 50kg, and could be rested on the ground. He was so magnificent that like many other tuskers, he fell to a poacher’s poisoned arrow. When Satao died, he probably had the largest tusks in the world.

We also recommend another story called 'Satao - one year on' by Deeble - this one about looking for Satao’s remains a year after the tusker died.

What Elephant Calls Mean: A User’s Guide by Christy Ullrich Barcus

“Elephants like to let loose and play around. They run around in a loose, floppy way, heads down, trunks swinging, and tails up as they make pulsating play-trumpets and nasal play-trumpets.”

Trumpets, roars, cries, rumbles, grunts, snorts – elephants use an incredible range of vocalisations to communicate. Barcus talks about elephant acoustic databases, and has included many recorded elephant calls in the article that you can listen to.

An apology to the Iyerpadi gentleman by TR Shankar Raman

“We had come to the colony to inform the people to watch out for this tusker on the move, but, again, it was not necessary. The people had seen him and, moreover, the tusker had no interest in the houses. He really knew where he was going.”

This article, written closer to home, is by TR Shankar Raman, a scientist with the Nature Conservation Foundation. In Valparai, in the Annamalai hills, elephants and people share spaces – both wild, and not so wild. In this short, evocative piece, Shankar Raman writes about his interaction with one particular tusker, and how he would like to apologise to the elephant for assuming that he might need directions.

Tracking Ivory by Bryan Christy

"These tusks ... operate really like additional investigators, like members of our team, and almost like a Robocop." 

Approximately 30,000 African elephants die each year as a result of poaching. Investigative journalist Bryan Christy set about tracking the route of the tusks that exchanged hands, borders and currency. He got a taxidermist to create two fake ivory tusks, which he embedded with specially designed tracking devices. This cover story follows these tusks to see where they end up.

Are there any stories on elephants that you love? Share them with us.

Photograph: Radha Rangarajan