Just over a quarter of the way through the Blogathon, I thought I’d pause the reviews for a sec and point to an article I just found on the BBC:
African elephants hate climbing hills because it is too costly in terms of energy, a study suggests.
They found that the animals rarely visited high ground and scientists think this is due to the energy they must expend to climb the slopes.
How is that news? I’d have thought it was bleeding obvious that elephants won’t climb hills because they get tired.
Apparently, and this is even better, they find it just as tiring to walk back down the hills. “Icy Mike”, a Kenyan elephant, lived and died 4,400 metres up Mount Kenya, because he couldn’t be bothered to walk back down. Bless. Also, who called him “Icy Mike”? Sounds more like a Mafia hitman than a nellyphant.
So…
How does an elephant get up a tree? It stands on an acorn and waits for it to grow.
How does it get down from a tree? It stands on a leaf and waits for autumn.
Seems there’s more truth to the old jokes than anyone would ever have thought!
(Gorgeous photo by Cynthia Cavalcanti on Flickr)