Thursday, November 4, 2010

Quotidian Superheroes


Hey all,

I've always wanted to make a movie or a TV show about the superheroic feats of regular animals -- police dogs that can smell corpses at the bottom of a lake or tiny, delicate black-capped chickadees that hang out in -40 C weather jump to mind -- even before I knew about these Italian goats. These are photos (enlarge them by clicking on them) of Alpine Ibex climbing the Cingino Dam in northern Italy. Why do we invent yarns about superhumans when superheroes are all around us?



4 comments:

  1. Absolutely incredible! I didn't quite understand the image below at first. It looked like a tilted camera shot along a sand bank. Wondering what the rock climbers think of these super goats.

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  2. (Yeah, they think they're so great: tell those goats to teach a 3-course term, then we'll see who has it tough ;)

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  3. Wow, that is insane!! Do you know why they climb it?

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  4. They're not quite sure why these "show-offs" do it -- possibly because they can! -- but one of the writers in _The Guardian_ suggests it's because they need the salt that collects on the stone face of the dam. If you look up the video on Youtube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SR9k76OxzfA&feature=fvw), you can see that they do appear to be licking the dam wall.

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