The Rhino's Silent Call

One day last year at the San Diego Zoo, a female Sumatran rhinoceros named Barakas was singing a mournful, whalelike song punctuated with grunts and moans. Through a window in her indoor enclosure she occasionally rubbed noses with Ipuh, a newly arrived male from Indonesia. Ipuh was munching abstractedly on ficus leaves and looking bored. But animal behaviorist Elizabeth von Muggenthaler, crouching among buckets and hay bales in an adjoining storeroom, was not deceived. She watched the fluttering needle on her tape recorder, which was hooked up to a microphone in Ipuh’s stall, and she suspected the rhino was rumbling--but in a basso so profundo as to be below the hearing range of human eavesdroppers.