Moss never did return to school to earn a science degree. Instead, she has devoted the past 21 years to a course of self-designed study. Today, her long-term observations of African elephants have been hailed as a landmark by ethologists world-wide. Also to her credit are two highly-acclaimed popular wildlife books, "Portraits in the Wild" (University of Chicago Press, 1982) and "Elephant Memories" (William Morrow &Co., lnc., 1988).

Although Moss has turned over the daily monitoring of the elephants to assistants, she continues to serve as the director of the Amboseli Research Project. When not at her Amboseli camp, she makes her home in Nairobi, where this interview was conducted in August by science writer Virginia Morell.]

Q You made your first trip to Africa in 1967, when you were 26 and working as a reporter in New York. What drew you to this continent? Did you have any idea...

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