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We are made and set here, the writer Annie Dillard once wrote,

to give voice to our astonishment.

Katie Payne is an acoustic biologist with a Quaker Sensibility,

and she's found her astonishment in listening to two of the world's most exotic creatures.

She has decoded the language of elephants and was among the first scientists

to discover that whales are composers of song.

By Gully, they're singing of all things.

They're doing something that we recognize as singing.

And so what that has done for me is to make me feel that what laws

it had to be discovered is absolutely limitless.

We are not at the pinnacle of human knowledge.

We are just beginning.

I'm Christa Tippett, and this is on Beeing.

For more than two decades, Katie Payne worked with the Bioacoustics Research Program

at Cornell University's Laboratory of Ornithology.

She's best known for creating the Elephant Listening Project,

in dense forest areas of Central Africa.

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