A video of an adorable baby elephant batting its little trunk wildly at tall grass captures a vital moment in the young calf's development - the elephant eventually realizes it can use its prehensile snout to grasp the grass and pull it out of the ground and into its mouth.
The World Wildlife Fund, which released the video, said the footage is "our Christmas gift to you."
The four-month-old elephant in the video is the newest and youngest member of The Flying Squad, a special group of elephants in Indonesia's Tesso Nilo National Park.
The elephant Flying Squad is a group of endangered Sumatran elephants and their mahouts (riders) who have been trained to ward wild elephants away from villages and farms where they are at risk of falling into ditches or being attacked by farmers defending their crops. The national park is home to both Sumatran elephants as well as many people who farm the land.
The Flying Squad model is in use in several locations around the world where man lives alongside elephants in their natural environment. On Sumatra, where Tesso Nilo National Park is located, the elephant's natural habitat is shrinking and - more and more - wild pachyderms attempt to feed themselves off of farmers' crop land. A farmer not wanting to lose his crop to a pack of hungry elephants is likely to set traps or poison bait that the creatures will come across when raiding crops. At least three elephants have been found dead in the park this year and a dozen were reported dead last year. Almost all of them were believed to have been poisoned, the WWF said.
"The Flying Squad is a highly successful model for reducing conflict between people and elephants in a way that is safe for everyone," said Christy Williams, WWF's Asian rhino and elephant program manager. "Human-elephant conflict is a problem in many elephant habitats across Asia and in Africa. We are hoping that with greater resources we can establish even more squads in order to prevent elephant and human deaths that don't need to happen. People and elephants can live in harmony," Williams said.
Other Flying Squads are in place in India's Assam region. Read more about the Flying Squads here.