A Hundred Anecdotes Of Animalsby Pandi1w

Six Mice, One Leaf, a Berry Boat 🐭🍓

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The Smallest Cargo Boat

A party of mice has gathered its berries. Between the harvest and the store lies a river. In ‘Mice as Navigators’, an anecdote collected in A Hundred Anecdotes of Animals in 1901, the answer is a boat small enough to grow on the water. The unnamed witnesses describe six to ten mice choosing a water-lily leaf, or another floating object, and piling their berries in its centre. Together they bring their laden vessel to the water’s edge. Then the crew climbs aboard. Their arrangement is the memorable detail: heads gathered over the berries, backs turned towards the water. The little company drifts with its cargo until it reaches the opposite shore. There, according to the account, the mice unload the harvest and carry it away to store. The book offers this as testimony to an overlooked animal’s ingenuity. It does not name its eyewitnesses, so the voyage belongs to the collection’s treasury of reported marvels. What stays in the mind is its scale: an expedition, a crew, and a winter’s provision, all balanced on a leaf. (14.0s)

Six Mice, One Leaf, a Berry Boat 🐭🍓

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