From a Spiral Notebook: Do elephants build nests?

Hi all,

First, the first of the drop-ins at the Sidney Library went really well. The next dates are Oct. 5, Nov. 2 and Dec. 7, from 2 to 4 pm. Do drop in if you can! More information here.

Next, a question: do elephants build nests?

This question was raised when my uncle, who has a Trivia Question of the Day page-a-day calendar, phoned to ask what was the largest mammal that built nests. I said elephants. (spoiler alert: I was wrong.)

Photo by Casey Allen on Unsplash

Before I was wrong, we had to ask the age-old grade school biology question of what is a mammal (bears live young, feeds breast milk, hairy etc.), and the much more difficult question of what is a nest? Is it a round sleeping place built of sticks or grass? Is it a place to lay and incubate your eggs? My mum said probably not, as we’d already established that mammals don’t lay eggs. (Thank you for your comment, Mr. Platypus, but we’re not talking to you.)

Oxford Languages Dictionary, which was the first to show up when I Googled “what is a nest?” said it’s “a structure or place made or chosen by a bird for laying eggs and sheltering its young”, so that didn’t help. Merriam-Webster said “a.: a bed or receptacle prepared by an animal and especially a bird for its eggs and young,” which allowed mammals into the equation, though it wasn’t exactly welcoming. M-W went on to say “b.: a place or specially modified structure serving as an abode of animals and especially their immature stages” such as an ants’ nest.

Googling “what makes a nest a nest?” brought up only bird articles, so that was no help.

Googling “do elephants build nests?” was very exciting, in that Global Sanctuary for Elephants said yes! According to Global Sanctuary for Elephants, they make little nests in the grass when they sleep at night. These are described as about the size for two elephants, and cute.

Gladdened to know that I was in fact right, sadly I kept looking, and became almost certainly wrong. There were no other yes answers, but many no’s. Answers.com said no and added “they don’t lay eggs either”. Elephants do, according to a BBC link, eat weaver bird nests, but that is neither here nor there in our debate.

Do I think they build nests only because of Horton Hears a Who? No, I’m sure I’ve seen something about nest-building before. They have secret graveyards; surely they have nests. I like the image of elephants strewing grass in a circle, humping it up with their trunks, settling down inside. Baby elephants would be especially sweet in nests.

The usual tie-breaker, Wikipedia, lists many animals other than birds building nests, including gorillas (which is page-a-day’s answer), but makes no mention of elephants.

In conclusion, why don’t elephants make nests? They should.

FROM THE SPIRAL NOTEBOOK

Here’s a little piece I wrote when I was sort of supposed to be writing something else.

This time she ignored the prompt and wrote a weather report. The island across the little channel in front of the picnic table where she was writing had disappeared. Fog made it an unfinished painting, the water ending in white gouache.

The weather on her side of the water was perfectly clear – a sunny Sunday afternoon – but all around her about 3 km away was a white band of fog covering everything above the ground. She felt like she was in a bowl. Or a springform pan, as the edges were straight up and down. When she looked up, most of the sky was still blue. The Canada flag on the pole to her left partly unfurled and waggled in the wind.

What is it about weather that can change emotion so completely? Her stomach coiled in dread. No horizon. No air. She was contained, claustrophobic. A small motorboat entered her view from behind the wall of fog near the island and she took a relieved breath. There was still a world out there.

The motorboat disappeared behind some trees, the wake returning to normal waves. The fog began to erase the barge near the spit, nothingness eating its colour, then its edges, until it had disappeared.

She reminded herself that she did not believe in flat Earth conspiracies or corporeal gods. No one had scooped a 3 km-diameter section of land – the land on which she sat with her notebook – and put it in a snowglobe. That had not happened, and no one was about to shake her world up and down until artificial snow began to fall.

She knew this. Still, she hoped for wind.

NOTES

• Please feel free to reply to this email, either by hitting reply (it will only go to me), or by commenting on the Substack website (there are little speech bubble things at the top and bottom of the letter) if you’d like to be part of a larger discussion. You can also “like” the post if you want.

• Also feel free to pass this along to any friends who might be interested. They can subscribe, if they like, by hitting the big blue button that says “subscribe”.

• And thanks, as always, for reading.

Yours,
Kelsey