TIME.com - Heroes for the planet - Cynthia Moss, 2000

JAMES NACHTWEY/MAGNUM
CYNTHIA MOSS (DRIVER) AND HER COLLEAGUES
FEBRUARY 28, 2000

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Heroes for the planet – Cynthia Moss

Kenya's Elephant Team
You Might Not Buy Ivory If You Saw This Family
BY SIMON ROBINSON | AMBOSELI

Parked on a grassy bank in her 15-year-old, blue-green Land Rover, elephant researcher Cynthia Moss peers through her binoculars at a group of females and calves 200 ft. in front of us. It is late afternoon, and Moss and I have driven from her camp in Kenya's Amboseli National Park to the eastern edge of nearby Longinye swamp. Our job: to count and identify the elephants as observers in an airplane estimate numbers from above. Behind us, across the border in Tanzania, looms the hulking mass of Africa's highest peak, Mount Kilimanjaro, its snow-capped dome giving way to gently sloping flanks that shimmer blue in the dying light. Crumpled along the horizon to the west and east are distant smaller mountains: Chyulu, Ol Dionyo Orok and Longido. To the north is nothing but huge sky and endless plain.

A year-old male calf is playing with a long, stringy tuft of grass. He opens his mouth as if to eat it, but his trunk moves in the wrong direction, and the grass pokes him in the eye. Moss laughs. "He doesn't want to eat. HeÍs too little," she says. "He's just practicing." After a few minutes, a 10-year-old female elephant walks toward us. She plops in front of the car and uses her trunk to hurl dust over her back. Crossing her back legs, she leans forward as if to kneel. Her tusks dig into the ground, and she extends one of her back legs behind her. "Oh, totally ridiculous," says Moss. "She's feeling silly and wants to play, but there's no one to play with." …

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