Katy Payne
Board Member
Katy Payne is a Research Associate in the Bioacoustics Research Program of Cornell University's Laboratory of Ornithology and founder of the Elephant Listening Project (ELP) whose purpose is to develop an acoustic monitoring program for forest elephants. She started her studies of animal communication with a fifteen-year study of the constantly changing songs of humpback whales -- a fascinating example of cultural evolution. Then in 1984, Payne and two associates discovered that elephants make infrasonic calls that lie below the range of human hearing and travel exceptionally well.
Payne is the author of Silent Thunder: In the Presence of Elephants (1998) and Elephants Calling (1992), a children’s book.
