The Cingino dam sits at around two thousand metres in the Italian Alps. Its downstream face is a wall of blockwork with narrow joints, and for years photographers have recorded Alpine ibex standing on it, sometimes several at once, apparently defying the angle.
The attraction is mineral. Water seeping through the concrete and stone deposits salts on the surface, and ibex living on high alpine pasture are chronically short of sodium and other minerals. Their hooves, with hard rims and flexible pads, catch on the millimetre-scale ledges between blocks, and the animals move deliberately rather than leaping.
The species itself is a recovery story. By the early nineteenth century Alpine ibex survived only in the Gran Paradiso area of Italy, in a population of roughly a hundred animals, and every ibex in the Alps today descends from that remnant. The dam behaviour is well photographed but barely studied, so how often it happens and why females predominate are not established.