Skip to main content

Elephant Memories by Cynthia Moss

I've felt an increasing desire to learn more about elephants recently. I'm not sure what started it, but come on...they are so seriously cool. They have awesome bendy trunks that can pluck a flower or knock over a lion! And you hear allusions to how intelligent and sensitive and social they are. Plus I just love any huge animal. After searching around a bit online, I came across this book. Cynthia Moss spent 13 years in Amboseli National Park at the base of Mt. Kilimanjaro studying the elephants that lived there. The research that has been carried out there, by her and others, seems to provide us with the most comprehensive body of knowledge that we have about how elephants function over an (at least sort of) long period of time in a relatively undisturbed natural habitat. There are so few left. And to truly understand population dynamics, social structure, and how the elephants and their environment respond to each other, takes a long time. Elephants can live over 60 years and they do develop somewhat intricate relationships, which can be wildly thrown off by the poaching of important matriarchs, droughts, shrinking habitats and other events. I have heard references to the culling of elephants before, which is done in certain areas in the thinking that it will preserve the vegetation from being completely decimated and ultimately be better for the environment. I was interested to read that it is likely a much more complicated web than we realize and that human tampering is almost always worse in the end than just letting nature do its thing. Elephant families consist of females, usually of several generations, and their calves, the males of which go off on their own by age 15 and roam more independently or join up with other males at times. Certain family groups have friendly bonds with others and choose to spend much of their time together. When times are good and there is no drought, they are fun and frisky. It was touching to learn that in many instances where they had to confront or chase away some aggressor or other and could easily have killed them, they took deliberate care not to. They seem like such wise and sensitive animals. As usual, humans are botching things badly and it will take quite a bit of action to prevent them from going completely extinct. The ivory trade is still the number one threat to their existence. Reading this definitely makes me want to see what I can do to support their conservation.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mrs. Sherlock Holmes by Brad Ricca

I've actually found a few cool book recommendations on Pinterest and this was one of them. Being obsessed with all things Sherlock, I skimmed through it at the library and it's one of those books that already had me interested by the first sentence- always a good sign! It's the true tale of Grace Humiston, a New York detective and lawyer in the early 1900s. She was the first female US District Attorney and spent most of her career providing cheap legal help to low-income immigrants (her motto was "Justice for those of limited means") and taking on cases dealing with white slavery. The majority of the book, however, focuses on Ruth Cruger, an 18 year old girl who went missing, whose case the police completely (and probably intentionally) bungled, and how Humiston eventually unraveled the mystery. She was doing all this before women could even vote, and she did her work not only in the midst of a generally sexist climate but also threats to her life and livelihood...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Nasty Bits by Anthony Bourdain

The Nasty Bits is a collection of articles Bourdain wrote for various publications and it covers a huge variety of countries and topics. On one assignment, he spent 5 days on a giant boat that's kind of a luxury bunch of floating condos for multi-millionaires. You can buy an apartment on it and drop in whenever you feel like it, get off wherever you feel like it, and it makes stops at swanky events around the world- Cannes film festival and the like. You've got tennis courts, putting greens, a library, and more. An incredibly bizarre thing I never knew existed. My favorite articles were the one recounting a trip to Greece where pretty much everything went wrong and he found himself in a cliff jumping situation with an annoying host...it was just so hilariously written...and The Evildoers, where he talks about his favorite fast food from other countries (tapas, pho, tacos, etc.) and how America has unfortunately got it so wrong in this area. ...is fast food inherently evil? ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Rise of the Rocket Girls by Nathalia Holt

Similar to the movie Hidden Figures , but going back to earlier decades, this book tells the story of the women who served as human computers to send the first satellites into space and plot the trajectories of various spacecraft by hand. A student of Caltech and his buddies who liked to experiment with rockets, known as the Suicide Squad, gained some funding and eventually the more dignified name of JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory), along with a full staff of engineers and an all-female team of computers. For a while they stayed in business by serving the needs of the military, but their interest all along was space exploration, not weapons, and when NASA was created they were absorbed into it and were ultimately able to focus on their real dream. JPL was a unique opportunity for women who were accomplished mathematicians to put their skills to employable use, since their gender automatically excluded them from consideration for engineer positions. It's pretty crazy to read about ...
Post a Comment
Read more