Here are some of the things the animal is credited with being able to do with the trunk: pick up a pin from the ground, select and secure a single tussock of appetizing herbage, uncork a wine bottle, untie a slip knot, unbolt a gate, throw up and catch a baseball, pull the trigger to fire a gun, ring a bell.
A female elephant owned by the Duke of Devonshire in the 1880’s was allowed almost a free range over the park of his estate. She made herself useful by sweeping the paths with a broom and by carrying a garden watering pot. Her most celebrated achievement was that of opening a tightly corked wine bottle. She would hold it against the ground at about a 45 degree angle with one of her front feet and gradually twist out the cork—barely protruding above the neck of the bottle—with her trunk. After emptying the contents into her mouth she would hand the empty bottle to her keeper.
Fiendish Vampires of the Night
About the middle of the eighteenth century belief in vampirism spread like an epidemic across France and England. Dead men hellishly condemned to live forever came out of their sepulchres at midnight, took the forms of various animals, and feasted on the blood of the living (who, in turn, died and became vampires). This was a superstition which previously had been confined largely to Slavic countries. Its influence in France and England seems to have started with tales brought back from the New World by Spanish explorers of actual vampires—sinister, black-winged, fiend-faced flying mammals who actually fed on the blood of sleeping humans. Thenceforth the popular conception of a vampire was that of a large bat, hovering over the unsuspecting, eternally doomed sleeper.
The stories doubtless were greatly ornamented and exaggerated. However, the vampire bat of the American tropics is a gruesome reality. It is now known to be a carrier of the rabies virus.
It is a small, brown bat condemned by nature to live exclusively on blood. Its throat is too small to swallow solid particles. Its stomach is especially adapted for rapid digestion. It feasts on all sorts of mammals, including man, and the incisions of its razor-sharp teeth are so nearly painless that a sleeper seldom is awakened. Supposedly it always bites man on the bottoms of the toes.
The loathsome little creature does not actually suck blood, as long was supposed. Instead, according to observers, it laps up blood with its tongue. Its saliva is believed to contain an anti-coagulant which keeps a wound bleeding for hours. From 20 to 25 minutes is required for a meal, during which the animal gorges itself until its body becomes spherical.
“We slept so soundly”, records an Amazon explorer, “it was not until morning we discovered that we had been raided during the night by vampire bats and the whole party was covered with blood stains from the many bites. It may seem unreasonable to the uninitiated that we could have been thus bitten and not disturbed in our sleep but the fact remains that there is no pain produced at the time of the bite, nor for several hours afterwards.”
It feeds only at night Like most New World tropical bats, it sleeps during the day in the total darkness of caverns where it hangs in clusters from the ceilings. Such a bat cave, about as gruesome a place as could be found on earth, was explored a few years ago by Dr. Raymond L. Ditmars of the American Museum of Natural History. This cave, which the bats shared with scorpions who had wing spreads of five inches, was found in the Chagras Valley of Panama.
The mammal has a strikingly spider-like appearance. Probably alone among bats it can walk as a quadruped, using its wings as front feet. That, of course, is what they were originally before the grotesque creatures invaded the air.