American Scientist

I was crouching silently in the tall elephant grass with Syamin Zulkifli, one of our project’s research assistants, with thick tension between us. We were in a tropical rainforest in Malaysian Borneo, and we could hear the looming footsteps of a herd of Bornean pygmy elephants as they approached us calmly but forcefully. The name “pygmy elephants” makes them seem like they should be sweet and small; however, they’re anything but that. At about 3 meters tall and weighing from 3,000 to 5,000 kilograms, most of the time these animals are gentle giants that graze peacefully. But if they are spooked, they will charge at anything that frightens them, which can make them just about the scariest creature to run into alone in the forest. Syamin and I were acutely aware of this fact, but we had stumbled across the herd while putting out a batch of our acoustic recorders. We had attempted to disappear up the side of a bank and into the grass to wait for the elephants to pass, but we had unwittingly put ourselves exactly where the herd wanted to go.