Field notebook
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Field notebook
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Permanent editions
Published facts keep their original date, evidence and correction trail. Drafts and withdrawn editions are never mixed into this index.
A hunting shoebill can stand still for many minutes, then throws its whole body forward in a lunge that ornithologists call a collapse, scooping bill, water and vegetation together before spitting out everything that is not food.
A rock-wallaby's hind feet are short and broad with thick, roughened pads and reduced claws. Traction comes from friction against rock rather than from hooking into it, which is what lets them cross near-vertical faces at speed.
Anoplophora glabripennis larvae tunnel deep in living hardwood, out of reach of surface treatment. The only reliable response found so far is to cut and chip every infested tree, along with apparently healthy hosts nearby.
Its patagium runs from the shoulder blades to the fore paws, from the fingertips to the toes, and from the hind legs to the tip of the tail, including the webbing between digits. Glides of about seventy metres are routine.
Common whelks lay eggs in a spongy aggregate of hundreds of capsules, which washes ashore as a pale lump. Sailors used the dried masses to wash with, giving them the name sea wash balls, and only a fraction of the eggs inside ever hatch.
Northern white-cheeked gibbons once sang in the forests of southern Yunnan. Repeated surveys since the late 2000s have failed to find any, and the species is now generally considered extinct in China, surviving only in Laos and Viet Nam.
Plains and mountain zebras live in stable family groups led by a stallion. Grevy's zebra does not. Males defend large territories around water and grazing, and females associate loosely, joining and leaving without lasting bonds.
Round stingrays sting only when trodden on, and their spine drives upward into a foot placed on top of them. Sliding the feet along the sand instead of stepping gives a buried ray warning and room to swim away.
Ptarmigan are the only grouse whose toes are feathered right to the claws, and the rock ptarmigan is one of them. In winter the foot feathering thickens, spreading the bird's weight across soft snow and insulating the foot in temperatures well below freezing.
Oilbirds leave their caves after dark to pluck oil-rich palm and laurel fruit while hovering, then return before dawn. No other bird combines nocturnal habits with a diet of fruit, and they echolocate to move inside their pitch-dark roosts.
Grooves between the thorny devil's scales form a network of narrow channels. Water touching any part of the body, including sand pressed against the belly and feet, is drawn along these channels to the mouth by capillary action, then swallowed by jaw movements.
A coot looks like a small black duck but is a rail. Its toes are not joined by webbing; each carries a row of stiff flaps that spread on the backstroke and fold on the recovery, and that also work well for walking on soft ground.
Nearly all cephalopods have a single visual pigment. Watasenia scintillans has three, an anatomy that would allow it to distinguish wavelengths in the deep water where bioluminescence and residual daylight differ in colour.
Rose-ringed parakeets now breed in London, Brussels, Amsterdam and cities across Germany, surviving winters far colder than anything in their native African and South Asian range by exploiting urban warmth and garden feeders.
By the early 1970s fewer than roughly two hundred golden lion tamarins were thought to remain in the wild. A combination of captive breeding, reintroduction and forest corridor planting has since raised the wild population above two thousand, though it remains confined to fragments.
Moulting replaces far more than the outer shell. The shed skin carries away the lining of the fangs, the book lungs, the foregut and part of the reproductive tract, which is why a freshly moulted tarantula cannot feed for several days.
Poison baits sweetened with glucose worked until they stopped. In affected populations, a change in taste neuron wiring makes glucose activate bitter-sensing cells, so the roaches reject sweetened bait, and the trait is heritable.
A secretarybird stamps on snakes and lizards with a strike so brief that measurement required high-speed video. The foot contacts prey for roughly 10 to 15 milliseconds, delivering force several times the bird's own body weight.
A threatened giant African millipede coils into a spiral and leaks fluid from pores along its sides. In many species the fluid contains benzoquinones, compounds that irritate skin, stain it brown, and can cause chemical burns to eyes.
Resident orca females usually stop reproducing in their thirties or forties but can survive into their eighties. Only a handful of mammals, humans among them, are known to have this long post-reproductive life, and most of them are toothed whales.
Male kakapo excavate shallow depressions on ridges and inflate a thoracic air sac to produce a deep boom. The bowl helps project a note low enough to travel kilometres through forest, but so low that females struggle to locate its source.
Mother-of-pearl is about ninety-five per cent calcium carbonate, a brittle mineral, yet abalone nacre resists fracture far better than the same mineral in bulk. The gain comes from architecture: microscopic plates stacked like bricks in a thin organic mortar.
Crickets and grasshoppers rub one body part against another. Cicadas do something different: a muscle snaps a ribbed plate on each side of the abdomen inwards, rib by rib, and each click of the buckling plate is a pulse of the song.
Ancient writers describe monk seals basking openly on Mediterranean shores. Modern ones pup almost entirely inside sea caves with underwater entrances, a behavioural shift widely read as a response to centuries of human disturbance.