How to Be an Elephant: Growing Up in the African Wild

The savanna is not an easy place to live, even for African elephants, the largest land animals on earth. If it's a challenge for these 7,000-pound giants, what's it like for their newborn babies?

An infant elephant has precious little time to learn the incredible array of skills that are necessary to keep up, from projecting her voice across a 10-octave range to using the 100,000 muscles in her trunk to stay hydrated. But this giant-to-be has the perfect classroom--a family herd made up of her mother, sisters, cousins, and aunts. With their help and protection, she'll learn how to survive, how to thrive, and how to be an elephant.

Award-winning author-illustrator Katherine Roy's How to Be an Elephant delves into the intricate family dynamics at play in a typical African herd. Drawing upon the latest scientific research and Roy's own expedition to Kenya, and brimming with lush watercolor illustrations and detailed diagrams, this book vividly portrays the life and development of an elephant from an uncertain newborn into a majestic adult. As informative as it is beautiful, Roy's unique portrait of an elephant's life will captivate young explorers and animal lovers alike.

David Macaulay Studio

This title has Common Core connections.

A School Library Journal Best Book of 2017
A Horn Book Fanfare Best Book of 2017
A Chicago Public Library Best Book of 2017

Katherine Roy is the award-winning author and illustrator of Neighborhood Sharks: Hunting with the Great Whites of California’s Farallon Islands and How to Be an Elephant: Growing Up in the African Wild. She is also the illustrator for the Expeditioners series by S. S. Taylor and of Buried Beneath Us by Anthony Aveni. She loves science, history, and big adventures, and is endlessly fascinated by the way things live. A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, she currently lives in with her husband and young son in Oregon, where she’s still learning how to be a human. You can visit her website to learn more about her work, her research, and African elephants.