The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals: A Book of Personal ObservationsHornaday, William T. (William Temple)
Science
The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals: A Book of Personal Observations
Hornaday, William T. (William Temple)
Animal behavior
After the incident had been closed, I gave the men a brief lecture
on the language of bears, and the necessity of being able to
recognize the distress call.
You can chase bison, elephants and deer all day without hearing a
single vocal utterance. They know through long experience the
value of silence.
The night after I shot my second elephant we noted an exception.
The herd had been divided by our onslaught. Part of it had gone
north, part of it south, and our camp for the night (beside the
dead tusker) lay midway between the two. About bedtime the
elephants began signalling to each other by trumpeting, and what
they sounded was "The assembly." They called and answered
repeatedly; and finally it became clear to my native followers
that the two herds were advancing to unite, and were likely to
meet in our vicinity. That particular trumpet call was different
from any other I have ever heard. It was a regular "Hello" signal-
call, entirely different from the "Tal-_loo_-e" blast which
once came from a feeding herd and guided us to it.
But it is only on rare occasions that elephants communicate with
each other by sound. I once knew a general alarm to be
communicated throughout a large herd by the sign language, and a
retreat organized and carried out in absolute silence. Their
danger signals to each other must have been made with their trunks
and their ears; but we saw none of them, because all the animals
were concealed from our view except when the two scouts of the
herd were hunting for us.
In captivity an elephant trumpets in protest, or through fear, or
through rage; but I am obliged to confess that as yet I cannot
positively distinguish one from the other.
Once in the Zoological Park I heard our troublesome Indian
elephant, Alice, roaring continuously as if in pain. It continued
at such a rate that I hurried over to the Elephant House to
investigate. And there I saw a droll spectacle. Keeper Richards
had taken Alice out into her yard for exercise and had ordered
her to follow him. And there he was disgustedly marching around
the yard while Alice marched after him at an interval of ten
paces, quite free and untrammeled, but all the while lustily
trumpeting and roaring in indignant protest. The only point at
which she was hurt was in her feelings.
Two questions that came into public notice concerning the voices
of two important American animals have been permanently settled
by "the barnyard naturalists" of New York.
The Voice of the American Bison. In 1907 the statement of George
Catlin, to the effect that in the fall the bellowing of buffalo
bulls on the plains resembled the muttering of distant thunder,
was denied and severely criticized in a sportsman's magazine. On
October 4 of that year, while we were selecting the fifteen bison
to be presented to the Government, to found the Wichita National
Bison Herd, four of us heard our best bull _bellow_ five
times, while another did the same thing four times.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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