V's Reads

I've felt an increasing desire to learn more about elephants recently. I'm not sure what started it, but come on...they are so seriously cool. They have awesome bendy trunks that can pluck a flower or knock over a lion! And you hear allusions to how intelligent and sensitive and social they are. Plus I just love any huge animal. After searching around a bit online, I came across this book. Cynthia Moss spent 13 years in Amboseli National Park at the base of Mt. Kilimanjaro studying the elephants that lived there. The research that has been carried out there, by her and others, seems to provide us with the most comprehensive body of knowledge that we have about how elephants function over an (at least sort of) long period of time in a relatively undisturbed natural habitat. There are so few left. And to truly understand population dynamics, social structure, and how the elephants and their environment respond to each other, takes a long time. Elephants can live over 60 years a...