When you think about where a guitar comes from ... you might not think of elephant poop.
"We use ebony for the fingerboard and the bridge on nearly every guitar that we make. And it's a wood that's been around for since the pharaohs," said Bob Taylor, founder and CEO of Taylor Guitars.
The company was founded in 1974, and is still headquartered in El Cajon.
Ebony is a hardwood prized in guitar making for its tone, damping and durability. The wood is an essential component of most acoustic guitars. It's also traditionally jet black.
On the factory floor in El Cajon, tour guide Nick Kennedy spreads out an array of guitar necks, adorned with ebony fingerboards.
"So it used to be that people would only buy ebony for musical instruments if it was as close to jet black as possible. The darker the better, right?" Kennedy said.
In 2011, Bob Taylor bought an ebony sawmill in Cameroon. It was a risky move — the mill was in serious disrepair. But what really shocked Taylor was that more than half the ebony trees cut down were wasted because the wood couldn't be sold.
"We were just having a little meeting, and I said, 'Well, how's it going?' 'Oh, not so good, sir.' 'How come?' 'Well, because it's really hard to get the high quality wood.'"
Taylor learned that throughout the industry, black wood was considered high quality. Markets had always demanded black wood.
And conventional logging methods meant loggers didn’t know if the ebony is black until they cut down the tree.
Taylor asked the millworkers how much of the wood they logged wasn't black — the so-called "high-quality" ebony. They told him anywhere from six to eight out of 10 trees were considered unsellable. Loggers would cut down the tree, determine it can't be sold, then just leave it in the forest.
The ebony that's not black has a striped, variegated color pattern. It's actually beautiful — and otherwise identical to the black wood.
"It's all the same wood," Kennedy said. "The color of the ebony doesn't change how the instrument sounds or its structural durability."
So Taylor decided to do something radical: put that discarded wood on its nicest guitars. People kept buying them, and other guitar makers followed suit.
This simple change alone meant a more efficient ebony supply and a step toward reducing forest waste. But Taylor didn't stop there. He joined forces with UCLA biologist Tom Smith to support forest conservation and research.
The Congo Basin Institute was UCLA's first overseas affiliate, supporting scientific research and training in Africa. Smith and Taylor collaborated on a new project with the CBI to promote a sustainable ebony industry, biodiversity and reforestation in the region. The Ebony Project launched critical research alongside economic and community development.
It all started with trees.
"We wanted to plant some trees. The goal at first, he said, 'Give me a half a million dollars, and we'll plant 15,000 trees over the next two years, and we'll give you back the research,'" Taylor recalled of his early collaboration with Smith. "And it just never stopped, and that money wasn't enough. And, you know, it was harder than you might think."
They soon found that planting trees isn't as simple as throwing seeds in the ground. They needed to understand more about how the whole ecosystem supports ebony forest growth.
Eventually, they had a breakthrough. One key, they found, is elephants.
Ebony seeds that pass through an elephant's digestive system are more likely to thrive.
"It's the main seed disperser. So imagine it's a big fruit. An ebony tree is in the persimmon family. And they're sweet. So elephants eat these big things. They walk along and they poop it out. And when we find pieces of their dung out in the forest, that tree sprouts and lives because it's protected from the predators. The rats and the squirrels and the little things aren't digging through the elephant dung to get to that seed. But if it's just laying on the ground, they can," Taylor said. "So that seed has everything in it that it needs to become an ebony tree, and now it's protected by elephant dung."
As of 2025, the project had planted nearly 50,000 ebony trees — and helped local villages manage their own forests.
The effort also includes planting tens of thousands of fruit trees, like bush mango and avocado. This diversity improves forest soil health and provides food for local communities — all because of a piece of wood on a guitar.
For Taylor Guitars, ebony and elephant conservation fits right in with the company's longstanding initiatives to make guitar manufacturing more sustainable.
"An elephant and ebony go together like ebony and ivory. These are all things we want to save, the elephant, the forest, ebony, guitars, music," Taylor said. "I always like to just say we just want to live in the reality of the forest."
To learn more about Taylor Guitars' history and its ebony initiatives, listen to the episode of The Finest podcast.
