Today I was checking in on my adopted elephant orphans at the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust by reading their monthly updates, and came across something that I had heard of before with the orphans and it is truly amazing.

Daphne Sheldrick was preparing several bull orphans to graduate from the baby nursery in Nairobi to the Ithumba
orphanage where the middle-aged orphans live. Please keep in mind that to transport these orphans it is an 8 - 10 hour trip in a truck. I don't know the exact distance, but I would guess it to be around 150 miles. Some of the younger elephants at Ithumba knew the two bulls soon to join them, but the older elephants had never met these two young bulls. I will paste Daphne's account below.

"It is intriguing how the Ithumba elephants always seem to know when to expect others, something illustrated clearly in the Diaries. Kamboyo and Zurura left Nairobi at 5.30 a.m. on the morning of the 8th, and that same morning, as soon as the Ithumba elephants emerged from their Night Stockades, the Big Girls, namely Yatta (the Matriarch), Mulika, Nasalot and Kinna began trumpeting and running hither and thither, clearly excited and behaving uncharacteristically, even though the Keepers had yet to be informed that Kamboyo and Zurura had been loaded successfully and were on their way!. The Keepers only got this news at about 8 a.m. - another indication of the amazing intuition that elephants possess. It can only be telepathic, since the Big Ithumba Girls have never met Kamboyo or Zurura".

This is not a first-time event. This has happened before when elephants were about to be transferred from Nairobi to either Ithumba or Voi. If the keepers in Ithumba had known about it, one could say that the orphans picked up on their emotions. However, in this case, even the keepers didn't know about it. Thus some how. the elephants "sensed" that new family was arriving. It is truly remarkable. One can only hope that some studies might be done on this to try and understand how this could happen. I think it is too far away for infrasound to work. How else can one explain it? For now it is just a mystery, but one can hope that the mystery will be unraveled and understood in the future.

It is known that elephants can communicate via infra-sound which would be able to travel so far. But what surprises me is that Daphne Sheldrick does not consider that. She would know.

It could well be infra sound or could there be another sense that as we became civilized we have lost? Sixth sense?

The lower the note the further it travels but its direction is also scattered, the higher the note the shorted it travels but it's direction is very accurate.
I'm not sure but if I remember right sound travels 10 times further in a liquid than a gas & 10 times further in a solid than a liquid. There are a number of variables to this, type of liquid, type of solid & frequency.

These are the basics of seismic exploration. If you know the speed of sound through a given object at a given frequency then you can tell of any variations.
If an elephants ultra sound is far lower than any other natural sound than it is possible that this sound stands out from the general mush of noise transmitted through the ground.

Years ago in the evening for one hour we used to have the "Goon show" on the radios in Antarctica. Named after a popular BBC comedy radio program of that time.
For one hour the radios were open to all, the was no etiquette as everyone talked at once in many languages about family, chess games any thing! It sounded like a crowd scene from a Hollywood movie...But....if you listened carefully you could eventually tune into one conservation & the rest would fade into the back ground.

It could be that elephants, & others use ultra sound to check on the world like us reading a newspaper or phoning a friend. "Lets see what happening at the nursery! Haven't heard from Billy since he told us about the trucks....He must be in one..Perhaps he's coming here!"

I also thought of infrasound but from what I understand, infrasound only goes something like 60 miles. Thus Ithumba would be far to distant to make this a possibility.

I have seen and videoed the results of infrasound at Amboseli. On one occasion I was out with one of the researchers and there was a large group approaching, and they all stopped "on a dime" at the same time though we heard absolutely nothing. Obviously they had heard an infrasonic command, perhaps from the matriarch, perhaps from another family far off, but it was exciting to see.