One of nature’s grand spectacles is the annual migration of monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus), in which the insects travel from the U.S. and southern Canada down through the Great Plains to a small bit of forest in the mountains of Mexico, where they gather in a spectacular mass display comprising millions of breeding individuals. What […]
It’s Friday! Which seat will you take? Tigers swimming! Filmed underwater, where they appear to be grazing on the bottom of the pool! Well, who knows, but here, courtesy of reader Michael, is some nice video of. . . The Tiger Temple at Australia Zoo has the only glass underwater viewing in Australia! What better […]
UPDATE: It’s been pointed out by a couple of readers, and gleefully by the Discovery Institute, that the first video below comes from a documentary on Intelligent Design called “Flight: The genius of birds”. I didn’t know that when I posted it, and I didn’t look up the link at the end, for I was […]
We’ve recently seen videos and photos of flying squirrels from the New World, but here’s a very distant relative, the sugar glider from Australia (Petaurus breviceps). Flying squirrels are placental mammals, while sugar gliders are marsupials, and have evolved their morphology and behavior completely independently of flying squirrels. This is in fact a remarkable […]
One thing is for sure: even though it’s wicked cold, the squirrels are out foraging when they can. Lots of them are raiding the buffet I’ve set out for them on the windowsill, and they’re gorging themselves like pigs. Since I’ve scraped the snow off the sill, and it faces south, sometimes the squirrels have […]
I may have posted this first video before, but I couldn’t find it by searching for “elephant.” At any rate, I don’t have much information except that it purports to show a baby elephant encountering the ocean for the first time. And that seems pretty accurate. It will raise your spirits unless you’re one of […]
Introduction by Jerry: It’s been known for a long time that three-toed sloths (genus Bradypus, several species) have the odd habit of descending about once a week from the trees in which they live, defecating on the ground at the base of the trees, burying their feces under leaves, and then climbing back up the trees, […]
The website “Animals” at Trove has a post on a rather complex series of events ensuing after biologists put a mock “egg cam” amidst a penguin colony, hoping for some good penguin shots. They got them, but got some other serendipitious shots as well. As they note: A falcon-like bird was unwittingly turned into a […]
I’m not sure I’ve ever posted a “reader’s wildlife photo” taken with a phone camera, but this one was so nice and so unusual that I had no choice (of course, I never have a choice!). Reader Glenn sent the photo and a note: Here’s one I snapped with a cheap phone camera without any […]
by Matthew Cobb The first of these videos of cats playing the shell game popped up in my Tw*tter feed yesterday (forgotten from whom). I then went mooching on YouTube and found the others. Mine is a life well spent. The ‘shell game’ (aka the Three Card Trick or Find the Lady) is a classic […]
