The light catches the pink ears on the newborn elephant (Photo by Petter Granli and Joyce Poole)

A baby elephant is born – that’s one cute data point.

ElephantVoices founders Joyce Poole and Petter Granli recently shared the joy and drama of a baby male elephant’s birth in A Gift to the Maasai Mara – A baby Elephant is Born on the National Geographic blog A Voice for Elephants. Read how Joyce and Petter observe and understand the language of elephants and try your own hand at learning elephant communication with The User’s Guide to Elephant Calls. JRS is proud to support the work of ElephantVoices in the Gorongosa, Mozambique and in the Maasai Mara, Kenya and to assist in the development of the handheld EleApp for field-based elephant monitoring by local partners and the vital databases on Elephant Who’s Who and Whereabouts.  The data and the technology is revealing new insights about elephant behavior that is guiding conservation efforts in the transboundary areas of the Maasai Mara and Serengeti and is being transferred to nascent conservation efforts in Mozambique.  Against the abstraction of geospatial data analysis, the story of the birth of the little elephant is a sweet reminder of the magic of biodiversity and that our best hope to preserve biodiversity is caring and creative people and their community partners.