Notes:
- Photo: @brenden_simonson (Giraffe with Calf) (via Cheetah Camp)
- Inspired by: “One more step is always possible.” ~ Richard Beard, The Day That Went Missing (Little, Brown and Company. November 5, 2018)
Tag: Calf
Love and Safety (and a punch in the gut)
A worker at the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust in Kenya shares a tender moment with an elephant calf. Your Shot photographer I. Ogila explains, “When poachers kill adult elephants for ivory, the young ones are usually left desperate and unlikely to survive alone in the wild.” But by being in the care of the Trust, “they get a chance to live and die of old age.”
Source: NationalGeographic.com. Photograph by I. Ogila, National Geographic Your Shot
Flanking us fifty feet away in an aquatic escort
The free-living dolphins of the Bahamas had come to know researcher Denise Herzing and her team very well. For decades, at the start of each four-month-long field season, the dolphins would give the returning humans a joyous reception: “a reunion of friends,” as Herzing described it. But one year the creatures behaved differently. They would not approach the research vessel, refusing even invitations to bow-ride. When the boat’s captain slipped into the water to size up the situation, the dolphins remained aloof. Meanwhile on board it was discovered that an expeditioner had died while napping in his bunk. As the vessel headed to port, Herzing said, “the dolphins came to the side of our boat, not riding the bow as usual but instead flanking us fifty feet away in an aquatic escort” that paralleled the boat in an organized manner.
The remarkable incident raises questions that lie at the heart of Carl Safina’s astonishing new book, Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel. Can dolphin sonar penetrate the steel hull of a boat—and pinpoint a stilled heart? Can dolphins empathize with human bereavement? Is dolphin society organized enough to permit the formation of a funeral cavalcade? If the answer to these questions is yes, then Beyond Words has profound implications for humans and our worldview.
~ Tim Flannery, The Amazing Inner Lives of Animals
Notes:
- Read full book review at The New York Review of Books: The Amazing Inner Lives of Animals
- Find book at Amazon: Carl Safina, Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel
Stand rapt in awe (50 sec)
Notes:
- Source: Grindtv
- Title inspired by Albert Einstein quote shared by Mindfulbalance: “He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.”
