Wild as it Gets: Wanderings of a Bemused Naturalist by Don Pinnock

By Don Pinnock

What is your cat as much as if you end up now not round? Do dragons exist? Are clouds alive? Why did 3 males threat their lives for a unmarried penguin egg? those are only the various questions and tales questioned over via award-winning commute author and naturalist Don Pinnock during this assortment assembled from years of wandering round Africa. A humorous, pleasing and thought-provoking e-book.

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The very small • Atoms are pretty small. In a 1-millimetre thick slice of typical household copper wire there are as many atoms as all the grains of sand on earth. Five trillion could fit on the full stop at the end of this sentence. • If an apple was enlarged to the size of the earth, a hydrogen atom would be the size of an apple. • At least a billion of the atoms in your body once belonged to every other human being who ever lived – and a good few dinosaurs. • If every molecule in a quarter of a cup of table salt were a grain of rice, there would be enough to cover South Africa to the depth of 158 metres.

It swims towards its target like a man in a swimming pool of molasses but unable to move any of his body parts faster than one centimetre a minute. • A rat with the same number of brain neurons as a human would weigh 50 tonnes. Etcetera • If a spider’s web was as thick as a pencil, it could ensnare a jumbo jet. • In terms of speed per body length, a humming bird is faster than the Space Shuttle during re-entry. • If you squeezed the water out of a typical cumulus cloud it would only fill a small bathtub.

The ant-hill tiger South African IT whizz and one-time astronaut Mark Shuttleworth was once asked what struck him most when he gazed down at earth from space. ‘Great beauty,’ he said, ‘and human-made tears in the fabric of life. From up there you can see what we’re losing. ’ We share with elephants the ability and seeming need to alter the world around us. They turn forests into grassland and make paths for others to follow. We tame wild lands, make farms and build cities. Human terra-forming has been hard for all wild creatures – even for elephants.

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