'60 Minutes' listens to elephants

Ithaca, NY — The Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Elephant Listening Project (ELP) is being featured in a segment on the CBS News magazine “60 Minutes.” The segment is scheduled to air Sunday evening, January 3.

ELP director Peter Wrege installs an autonomous recording unit (ARU), in a tree in Gabon. photo by Nicolas Bout.

The Elephant Listening Project is devoted to protecting endangered African Forest Elephants, focusing on habitat loss, possible impacts of energy exploration, and threats from poachers. To better understand how many elephants frequent an area, plus learn their ages, sex, and general health, ELP scientists focus on elephant communication. They record elephant sounds on remote recording devices. The devices are placed high in the trees at forest clearings in Gabon, the Central African Republic, and elsewhere.

60 Minutes correspondent Bill Simon interviewed ELP director Peter Wrege in Africa and visited the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, New York, to speak to Elephant Listening Project Founder, Katy Payne—the first person to discover that elephants communicate over long distances at sub-sonic frequencies. ELP researchers Mya Thompson and Melissa Groo were also interviewed for the segments along with Andrea Turkalo, a Wildlife Conservation Society biologist who is a world expert on African forest elephants and a founding member of the ELP.

To learn more about the Elephant Listening Project and its work, watch the 60 Minutes segment and visit the project website.