Enjoy!
It seems like a lopsided match-up, goose versus gorilla, but things aren’t always as they appear.
In a video uploaded to YouTube, which has already been viewed more than 39,000 times, a goose and a gorilla go head-to-head — and it’s the gorilla that ends up retreating.
After a really good stare-down, the goose then takes off towards the gorilla, flapping its wings in an aggressive manner. At that, the ape backpedaled feverishly, not wanting to test the bird’s limits.
Amazing video!
Cheetahs are the fastest runners on the planet. Combining the resources of National Geographic and the Cincinnati Zoo, and drawing on the skills of a Hollywood action movie crew, we documented these amazing cats in a way that’s never been done before.
Using a Phantom camera filming at 1200 frames per second while zooming beside a sprinting cheetah, the team captured every nuance of the cat’s movement as it reached top speeds of 60+ miles per hour.
The extraordinary footage that follows is a compilation of multiple runs by five cheetahs during three days of filming.
And now, for your amusement, we have an elephant playing a harmonica.
Enjoy!
When the elephant keepers at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo hear the sound of a harmonica, it’s not the radio they’ve left on. Instead, it’s the Zoo’s 36-year-old Asian elephant, Shanthi, who, unsolicited, has a propensity for coming up with her own ditties using whatever instruments the keepers have provided. These include harmonicas, horns and other noisemakers. The Zoo has captured some of Shanthi’s most recent capriccios on this video.
The keepers provided the instruments after they noticed that Shanthi, more so than the Zoo’s two other elephants, likes to make noise with objects. According to keepers, she will use her trunk to cover anything with a hole in it and blow until it makes a sound—and will often coax the objects to get different types of sounds from it. She taps objects with her trunk and flaps her ears against objects that make noise. Now they give the melodious pachyderm noisemakers as a form of enrichment.
Shanthi is the mother of the Zoo’s 10-year-old calf, Kandula. Asian elephants are endangered in the wild, where 30,000 to 50,000 Asian elephants still live in the forests of south and southeast Asia. Visitors to the Zoo can watch an elephant demonstration, which sometimes includes Shanthi’s musical skills, at 11 a.m. most days at the Zoo’s Elephant Trails.
