I have a friend who talks to birds. When I accompany him on early-morning walks, he’ll stand beside a pond or weed patch and make little tsk-tsk noises that to my untrained ear don’t sound particularly birdlike. Nevertheless, soon a flitter of warblers and sparrows appears seemingly out of nowhere.
Zoology
A song sparrow • Photo © Tom Raymo
Photo by Alexas_Fotos on Unsplash
Be thankful today’s rodents are small
I’m not feeling very friendly toward rodents right now. I have mice in the pantry and squirrels in the attic.
John J. Audubon's illustration of the pinnated grouse, of which the heath hen is an extinct subspecies
Noting of species is a human pastime
Most of us have heard of the passenger pigeon, a bird that once darkened the skies of North America in its teeming numbers, and now is no more. The last passenger pigeon, named Martha, died at the Cincinnati Zoo on Sept. 1, 1914.
Photo by Andy Wang on Unsplash
A real cool Jules Verne-like journey
It is a story right out of science fiction. Mysterious Island. Lost World. Journey to the Center of the Earth. Except in this case the story is true.
Photo by Anne Nygård on Unsplash
The ins and outs of how insects fly
Summertime, when the livin’ is buggy.
Stromatolite formation in the Exumas, Bahamas • Photo by Vincent Poirier (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Survivors from an ancient time
Cryptozoology is the study of unexplained and alleged sightings of strange creatures not documented by standard zoology.
The Goggle Eye, or Cercyonis pegala • Photo by D. Gordon E. Robertson (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Playing the name game by other rules
Tradition has it that Adam was allowed by the Creator to name all the creatures of the Earth.
Photo by Zachery Perry on Unsplash
No stuffed moose could get in the way of his story
This is the story of the moose that went to Paris. It is the story of how Thomas Jefferson got stiffed for a stiff.
Photo by Mike Arney on Unsplash
Gorillas in the myth
“Man’s curiosity and desire to control the world impel him to study living things,” wrote Robert Yerkes in the prologue to his book on chimpanzees, published just after his retirement as director of the Yale Laboratories of Primate Biology in 1942.
Ted Geisel aka Dr. Seuss (1904–1991) • Library of Congress (Public Domain)
The odd critters of Seuss’s are matched by the zoos’s
Dr. Seuss in the science pages? You bet.