Katy Payne

Katy Payne (Photo Credit: Melissa Groo)

My church is outdoors mostly. What's sacred to me is this planet we live on. It’s been here for more than 4 billion years. Life has been on it only for 3 billion years. Life as we know it, you know, for a very short time. It’s the only planet where life has been found. And that, to me, I think, is ultimately, you know, what I consider it sacred. –Katy Payne

Speaking of Faith, NPR. Interview with Krista Tippet on February 1, 2007.

Acoustic biologist Katharine (Katy) Payne finds her faith in a sanctuary without a roof and walls, and the sacred songs that she listens to often have no sound--at least to human ears. A life-long nature and music lover, Katy has been studying the sounds and languages of two of the largest animals in the world: humpback whales and African elephants.

Forest Elephants (Photo Credit: Melissa Groo)

"Just being silent is a most wonderful way to open up to what is really there. I see my responsibility, if I have one, as being to listen," Katy tells NPR's Speaking of Faith host, Krista Tippet. Both of these intelligent, grand animals seem to capture the broadest definition of faith--they know--or sense--that there is something beyond them, beyond the present day and moment. Observing, listening to, and recording the sounds of the elephants allowed Katy to learn more about them, to tap into something unknown. The silence and the calm brings peace and a meditative moment, as Payne describes while speaking with Tippet:

They do something marvelous that I wish we would do more of the time. This is something you do find in Quaker meetings, actually, and in Buddhist meetings as well. The whole herd, and that may be 50 animals, will suddenly be still, completely still. And it's not just a stillness of voice, it's a stillness of body. So you'll be watching the moving herd, they'll be all over the place, they'll be pacing all directions, doing different things. Suddenly, everything freezes as if the move was turned into a still photograph, and the freeze may last a whole minute, which is a long time. They're listening. When they freeze, they tighten and lift and spread their ears. This tells us--this, among other things, tells us that they're concerned with what's going on over the horizon.

(Greenpeace)

And the whales, too, have steered Katy, a practicing Quaker and student of spiritual philosophy, in her life’s work and faith:

The ocean is really huge. When you get out on a little boat, you know it. You're clinging to a cork … And out there, rolling around and swimming through and perfectly at home in the waves are these enormous animals. And by golly, they're singing...And so what that has done for me is to make me feel that what lies ahead is absolutely limitless. We are not at the pinnacle of human knowledge. We are just beginning.

Katy's beginning, or at least the start of her animal communication research, occurred in the 1960's, off the coast of Argentina. Along with her husband at the time, Roger Payne, a whale biologist, Katy discovered that humpback whales not only communicate with one another through various pitches and calls, they also "compose" music to communicate. She found that their songs changed constantly and the sounds that created the music were very sophisticated.

In 1984, the elephants came calling--literally. Katy was spending the week at the zoo, "just being a kid," as she says. But what she really means is that she was allowing herself to be open to anything in the environment, and absorb it. By doing so, Katy noticed that every time she stopped by the elephant exhibit she felt the air pressure around her change. The change was actually produced by sounds--ones produced by the elephants who were talking to one another in sounds far lower than any person's ears could hear. These low-frequency sounds could travel over large distances and could help attract mates and also gather a whole family of elephants together. And like the humpback whales, these elephants drew on a vast library of sounds for their vocabulary.

And I noticed, little by little through that week, that I was feeling over and over again a throbbing in the air, change of pressure in my ears that would occur when I was near the elephant cages, but not when I was in the other parts of the zoo. And I knew just enough--perhaps because of the whale studies--to know that there is sound below the pitches of the sound that human beings can hear. And lo and behold, we discovered there was a whole other communication system there that no one had known about. It was just below the frequencies our ear could hear.

The Elephant Listening Project Team (Photo Credit: Melissa Groo)

In 1999, Katy founded the Elephant Listening Project (ELP) to help ensure the future of the elephants. In addition to monitoring the movements, relationships and social structure, welfare, and their environment, the researchers from the Elephant Listening Project use sound and video clips to tell the story of the African forest elephants and learn about the effectiveness of conservation efforts.

The ELP, and other elephant conservation and informational groups such as Save the Elephants and Elephant Voices, are helping to ensure the survival of these majestic creatures. The elephants' songs not only reverberate through the air to communicate with one another, they also resonate within the hearts of heroes like Katy Payne, who teach us to have compassion and faith in creatures we are just beginning to understand.