Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2021 i BBC Wildlife Magazine

discoverwildlife.com It’s not just the magazine that’s had a refresh. Head to our website discoverwildlife.com where we’ve been beavering away on great content 24/7. We’ve recently added some spectacular photo galleries, such as these shots from Suzi Eszterhas’s latest book, New on Earth: Baby Animals in the Wild. Keep in touch wildlifeletters@immediate.co.uk instagram.com/bbcwildlifemagazine twitter.com/WildlifeMag facebook.com/wildlifemagazine…

STICKY SITUATION Just imagine the chips you could steal with a tongue like that! An amber mountain chameleon displays lightning-fast reflexes while hunting in Madagascar in an astonishing shot by Christian Ziegler, featured in this autumn’s Montphoto (montphoto.com) – an international photography and video contest. Over half the world’s chameleons are found on the island and this species calls a 30km² patch of forest in the Montagne d’Ambre National Park home. To enjoy an online gallery with all of the winning Montphoto 2021 images, make sure you visit our website.…

WHAT’S IN A NAME? THE TERM ‘A SHREWDNESS OF APES’ was coined in 1486, at a time when scientists wouldn’t have attributed to apes the cognitive ability we now recognise in their brains and habits. ‘Shrewdness’ around the time of the 15th century meant wickedness and came from a sense of playfulness and mischief. However, today it denotes intelligence and astuteness. So, by a stroke of linguistic luck, the phrase has maintained its currency.…

BUTTERFLIES ARE THE EMBODIMENT OF all that is delicate, graceful and charming. And yet new research reveals behaviour among south-east Asian milkweed butterflies that’s anything but – they tear open their own larvae to consume the tissues within. Many caterpillars protect themselves from predators by accumulating toxins from their food-plants and advertising their unpalatability with bright warning colours. The chemical weapons of choice among the milkweed butterfly family are pyrrolizidine alkaloids. But the adults use the toxins for more than just defence. They’re turned into sexual pheromones by the males, who also pass on alkaloids to their mates in their sperm as a nuptial gift. This means that males need a lot of alkaloids. They can top up their supplies by scratching the leaves of their food-plants with their feet…

The hippo glances at us briefly, before continuing its lumber across the track. I can’t help thinking that it doesn’t seem to think much of us. Here in the South Luangwa National Park in eastern Zambia, dusk is fast approaching, the sun sinking inexorably towards the horizon. My guide, Patrick Njobvu, explains that it’s around this time each day that the hippos leave the pools and rivers in which they’ve spent the day, to graze on the land. They follow the same routes each night, creating paths across the land, which gradually become tracks and then, with repeated footfall and the downpours during rainy seasons, turn into channels and gullies. Patrick adds how, when they become deep enough, these gullies are used by leopards to stalk their prey. Having been…

Sailing north from the small port of Ballycastle soon brings you to the sheltered crook of Rathlin Island. Shaped like an ‘L’ and part of County Antrim, this is a land of rocky causeways and grassy glens, rich in Northern Irish mythology that tells of fierce battles and legendary creatures. Even the famous Giant’s Causeway, which stretches under the Sea of Moyle to Rathlin, is said to have been formed by an angry ogre hurling rocks into the sea. How could such tales fail to capture the imagination of an eight-year-old from deepest Essex? That’s how old I was when I first visited Rathlin on a family holiday. Little did I know when embarking upon that trip that I would stumble across a real-life animal that would rival any fairytale…

Can all animals navigate? Not all animals are capable of ‘true navigation’, or moving towards a destination without using familiar landmarks. True navigators can travel far to forage for food or breed in favourable climates, correct for displacement when thrown off-course by air or water currents, then find their way back home through homing. Which species can use homing? The best known example is the homing pigeon, a domesticated rock dove that humans have used for centuries as a reliable means of delivering messages. But equipping pigeons with GPS devices has shown that they’re actually no better at navigating than their wild relatives, just more motivated to get home ASAP. Some species are able to home-in on a particular place with pinpoint precision. Salmon and sea turtles swim thousands of…

16-year-old student Joe is learning about wildlife both in college, where he studies Animal Management and Wildlife, and during his weekly volunteer days at Nosterfield Nature Reserve near Ripon in North Yorkshire. What does your volunteering involve? I don’t work on any one particular project, but help out on whatever is planned for that day. This has included planting wetland plants and creating new habitats for the reserve, and restoring old habitats that were once in the Nosterland area. I’ve helped out with bird ringing, the breeding bird census and the breeding wader survey. I’ve also done sound recording overnight to find out which species of bird that we can’t see are flying over the reserve. Why do you volunteer? I volunteer so I can give back to the reserve,…

PRIZE-WINNING PHOTO Patience and perseverance I arrived at the wildlife hide with a specific image in mind – I wanted to catch a fox as it emerged from the long grass. After several visits from different foxes, I managed to get this shot. With the camera set on manual mode, a shutter speed of 1/1250th and high-speed continuous shooting, I had to lie down for several hours in a very uncomfortable space waiting for one to arrive. When it did, I had to adjust the camera position and it then looked straight down the lens – what an experience! Ian Austin, Buckinghamshire A tern of speed Elegant terns are expert at catching unpredictable and quick-moving fish. I photographed these two diving for the same fish in Orange County, California. One…

As a philosopher and vegetarian, I was disappointed to see yet another article (Putting Insects On The Menu, August 2021) omitting the ethical considerations around the debate of consuming meat. How are these insects killed, for example? Would any true vegetarian or vegan even consider the cruel taking of another creature’s life when it is not necessary for human survival? What is absolutely vital for our survival is that we stop abusing the planet and start respecting all life, including that of insects. The article states that vegetarian and vegan diets are environmentally friendly, and we know they are healthier. The evidence is clear, and we should refrain from making the same mistakes over and over again. People shouldn’t be consuming meat if they care about their health, the survival…

Having hatched in eastern north America and then migrated thousands of kilometres south, monarch butterflies arrive at their over-wintering grounds in Mexico in November. Photographer Silvain Cordier captured this stunning image in the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, a UNESCO World Heritage Site containing most of the over-wintering grounds of the eastern population. A breathtaking natural phenomena, millions of these migratory butterflies arrive at the reserve each autumn. They will stay here until mid-March, roosting in the branches of pine and oyamel trees and relying on their fat reserves to survive the cold temperatures. In March, they begin mating, before beginning their journey back northwards, but no individual butterfly completes the whole trip – in fact, the annual cycle consists of four generations. MEET THE PHOTOGRAPHER ‘It was incredible’ Sylvain Cordier…

A project to turn rivers into a network of wild corridors to benefit wildlife and help mitigate climate change has been launched by forestry minister Lord Goldsmith. The Woodlands for Water project forms part of the government’s England Trees Action Plan, which aims to increase tree planting rates across the country to 30,000 hectares per year by the end of this parliament. There are 242,262km of watercourses in England and they offer a huge opportunity to create natural corridors that will not only sequester carbon but act as buffer zones to filter out harmful chemicals that can result from agricultural activity before they reach the river. The first phase of the project aims to create 3,150 hectares of trees in six river catchments from Devon to Cumbria by March 2025,…

The sting of a honeybee Evolution is a top-notch recycler, finding new and ingenious uses for structures that have ceased to serve their original purpose. The sting of a honeybee, for instance, started out as a stiff egg-laying tube called an ovipositor, an organ found in many female insects. Worker bees, though, have no need of an ovipositor, as they posit no ova (only queens perform that duty), allowing the workers to wield the organ defensively rather than reproductively.…

Jonathan Grey had the kind of upbringing most can only dream of: his father was a professional photographer whose passion was shooting wildlife, and the young Grey acted as assistant from the earliest times he can remember. “We never went on a family holiday, we always went somewhere for a specific purpose, for him to photograph something,” says Jonathan. “Before [I was] the age of five they were all relatively local: northern Scotland and places like that. Then we started going a bit further afield.” Jonathan discovered his lifelong passion for angling in Scotland, but “further afield” soon took them to Mallorca, Norway and Africa. He remembers standing in airport queues with holidaymakers, and being stopped by customs because he was carrying containers full of nuts and bolts to construct…

VAGRANT SPECIES DIARY BRITAIN AND IRELAND ARE BOTH geographically well placed for a range of unusual cetacean sightings – typically deep-water species that have wandered from the whale migration routes running along the continental shelf in the north-east Atlantic. Several such sightings were made this year from the Firth of Forth, where the star attraction was a sei whale seen over much of the spring and summer after it was first filmed at close range near to the Forth Road Bridge. The third largest whale on the planet, following the blue and the similar, but more regularly seen, fin whale, this poorly studied and globally rare species is also one of the fastest cetaceans. Sei whales are rare in British waters, particularly near the coast, but may also be under-recorded…

GREY SEAL PUPPING WHILE THE WHISKERY FACE OF A GREY seal popping out of our coastal waters will always remain a delight to spot, in no way could this fleeting view be labelled a ‘spectacle’. For the real seal deal you should instead head to a select number of beaches around our coastline, which at this time of year play host to an astonishing annual fiesta of synchronised pupping, before the boorish bulls then gate-crash the party with just one thing on their minds: mating again. One of just two pinnipeds breeding along our coastline, the other being the common (or harbour) seal, it is ironically the grey seal that is more abundant. Greys were originally thought to have bred across the entire northern Atlantic until the end of the…

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Take off When Caribbean flamingos move en masse, they make a huge visual impact. And an aural one too, with excited honking cries that signal the imminent ascent, then the beating of powerful wings nearly 2m wide as the birds fly between breeding, feeding and sleeping sites. Adults stay within Yucatán, but juveniles can venture beyond Mexico to the USA, the Bahamas, Cuba and the Caiman Islands. Look out Raccoons, jaguars and crocodiles pose a threat to flamingos, but safety is found in numbers. While some have their heads down to feed, others keep a beady eye out for lurking predators. Like whales, these birds are filter-feeders, and contained within their impressive-looking, aquiline beaks is a syringe-like mechanism that sucks up water and strains out food such as algae and…

TV HIGHLIGHT OF THE MONTH From courtship to partnership The Mating Game BBC One and catch-up on the iPlayer Get ready to travel the world again and learn about astonishing animals with the one and only Sir David Attenborough. As its title suggests, this new five-parter explores how species across the globe tackle nature’s ultimate quest – to find a partner, breed and pass on their genes. As the episodes unfold, we learn the mating ‘games’ of familiar and charismatic species, from singing humpback whales in Hawaii to chimpanzees in Uganda, whose stories are told with new and thrilling footage, as well as those of lesser-known creatures – including nursery web spiders in the UK, marine flatworms in Australia and the red lechwe (a species of antelope) in Zambia. The…

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WITH BBC WILDLIFE PICTURE EDITOR TOM GILKS Doug Gimesy talks flying foxes, fishing nets and epic fails What first made you get into wildlife photography? I always wanted to be a wildlife photographer. I started taking photos in 1977 when at high school, but lack of skill, confidence and money prevented me from pursuing it as a career. Then, on holiday on Kangaroo Island, South Australia, in 2015, I was shocked by how many roos were being killed on the roads, and how little was being done about it. I decided to get the story out there and get speed limits changed via a series of emotionally impactful images. You’re an Aussie, so: kangaroo or koala? That’s easy: platypus. It’s a mammal that lays eggs, has 10 sex chromosomes and…

SKELLIG ISLANDS, WEST COAST OF IRELAND If you do one thing in Ireland, visit the Skellig Islands,” said the boatman Thomas Bawn, sea-weathered and ruddy-faced, as two craggy mountainous islands reared from a restless ocean – jagged peaks clawing at the clouds. The sky was overcast and the sea the colour of iron as we headed towards the pair of islands that sit 15km or so off the Atlantic coast of Ireland’s County Kerry. We slipped past the smaller island – Little Skellig, a maelstrom of glimmering wings and home to thousands of gannets. The bobbing heads of seals were everywhere and the sea was alive with rafts of puffins and shearwaters. The cries of the seabirds were deafening, counterpointed by the sound of the less-hardy travellers throwing up over…

Breaking up is hard to do, but autumn signals a big change in fox family life, as the full-grown cubs leave the comforting surroundings of the vixen’s earth. Since birth they have been protected and fed by their parents, and in many cases one or more adults known as subordinates help too. However, for a couple of months the youngsters have been exploring further afield. Now comes the final break, when they wander off in search of their own territories and partners. Mammal ecologist Adele Brand explains in The Hidden World of the Fox: “As the shorter nights arrive, so do vulpine hormones.” Brand cites a US study, which found that young foxes disperse further and earlier the heavier they are, perhaps because they have more fat reserves and come…

Clinging to seaweedy rocks just centimetres from the spume, as pounding waves crash around them, purple sandpipers have a good claim to be some of the toughest of all shorebirds. They spend the autumn and winter on Britain and Ireland’s most exposed coasts, braving whatever storms throw at them. Breakwaters, piers and jetties suit them too, but you’ll never see them on more sheltered mudflats and saltmarshes where most other wading birds are. They’re in their element amid the foam and spray. They’re actually a warm grey, at least in non-breeding plumage. Any purplish sheen to their plumage is subtle, and most noticeable in spring and summer, which they spend on tundra and mountains in Iceland, Scandinavia and across the Arctic. Look for small groups hunting marine snails and other…

DETAILS. OR TO BE MORE PRECISE, memories and details. I feel bad now. I am sure my university lecturers worked very hard to deliver information-rich content, packed full of wonder, but the odds were stacked against them. To be fair, the odds were stacked against me too. Learning about nature in a dark, overheated lecture theatre was always going to be a challenge. Still, I worked hard to stay awake and alert by taking in details, any details. I would stare at the patterns of the grain in those old wooden lecture theatre benches. I pored over the dents, scratches and markings that, to my mind, formed the complex topography of miniature landscapes. Towering peaks, sheer cliff faces and dark trenches that dived into abyssal depths where microscopic worlds lay…

A lEADING CONSERVATION BIOLOGIST has called for urgent research to be carried out into how feeding garden birds could be having unintended consequences for some of the UK’s most threatened birds. Currently, 17 million UK households spend £250m a year on more than 150,000 tonnes of bird food. Alexander Lees from Manchester Metropolitan University believes that this supplementary feeding is boosting the numbers of more dominant garden birds, such as the blue tit and great tit, at the expense of more subordinate birds, such as the marsh tit and willow tit, two of the UK’s most threatened birds. Lees explains: “One of the reasons for the decline of willow tits is that 40 per cent of their nesting attempts fail because blue tits essentially steal their nesting cavities in trees.”…

Costa Rican naturalist Percy Piedra points to the bough of a cecropia tree drooping over a murky brown river that twists and winds through Tortuguero National Park. Even viewed through his telescope, the animal he has spotted is almost invisible, its body having blended into a knotted tangle of branches and leaves. Only when a rangy limb begins to scratch sluggishly at a mass of grey-green fur virtually indistinguishable from the vegetation does the creature finally betray its hiding place. For Jade, visiting Costa Rica from Texas, the sighting is enough to bring her to the verge of tears. “This is the first time I’ve seen a sloth in the wild,” she chokes. “I’ve been dreaming of this for years.” The sloth hasn’t always been viewed with such enthusiasm. Its…

IT MAY SOUND EXOTIC TO BE travelling to Lima, Marrakech or Paris for a climate summit, but only one thing is certain about an event like this: it will involve two weeks of very hard work and very little sleep. Catching a few hours’ rest on an uncomfortable plastic bench while waiting for documents and agreements to come through; drinking terrible coffee from a machine to stay awake; laughing through the tiredness with colleagues and fellow negotiators from all over the world; spending long hours in small, hot rooms arguing over details, words and punctuation that signal what countries will do in the face of climate breakdown. These are just some of my memories of COP, the international climate summit that takes place every November. This year, at least, I…

Massive in size and complex in physiology, an elephant’s trunk is made up of more than 40,000 muscles, as well as some 140kg of flesh, fat, nerves and connective tissue (there are no bones in a trunk). Large, external muscles control the vertical, horizontal and lateral movements; smaller, internal muscles help with finer movements and flexibility function. An elephant’s trunk has many uses, from smelling, breathing, trumpeting, drinking and storing water to grasping food, greeting other elephants, displaying aggression and spraying dirt. It is one of the most versatile organs in the animal kingdom, able to pick up a pin or pull down a tree. Researchers can also glean information about an individual elephant by studying its trunk. A green patch on the underside, for instance, means a youngster has…

Why a series on mating behaviours? Because it shows the natural world at its most spectacular. Animals set out to impress one another when they start courtship and mating, and my goodness how impressive they can be, so it makes for a wonderful sight. The equipment animals have for their mating displays, the feathers, all the paraphernalia, it can be very dramatic. It doesn’t take a huge leap of the imagination to put yourself in the position of those birds and be impressed beyond bounds and beyond speech. What can be more impressive than the display of the Argus pheasant? It is just astounding. You have a history with the Argus pheasant, don’t you? I’ve been trying to film the Argus pheasant forever. I remember saying when I first heard…

ACROSS 1 Asian songbird associated with rice plantations (10,5) 9 Disease spread by rodents and 4 down (6) 10 Convolvulus (8) 11 Pheasant-like bird of South America that might be helmeted or wattled (8) 14 Plant that completes its life-cycle within one growing season (6) 17 Small, stone-dwelling lizard that lives in South Africa (4,4,5) 20 Colourful Pacific sea creature, also called an ochre starfish (6,3,4) 23 Term for hilly or mountainous habitats (6) 25 Small freshwater turtle (8) 28 Spider silk (8) 29 White-plumaged herons (6) 30 Songbird of southern Africa, Certhilauda chuana (5-6,4) DOWN 2 Plant genus that includes onion and garlic (6) 3 Wild ___, shrub of southern Africa, also called lion’s tail (5) 4 Tiny parasitic insects (5) 5 Arm joint, in primates (5) 6 Country…

Don’t miss our European Wildlife Photographer of the Year online gallery! On the 28th October, the winners of the German Society for Nature Photography’s (GDT) prestigious annual awards will be announced. Visit our website for highlights from all the categories. • Birds • Mammals • Plants and fungi • Landscapes • And more! ABOUT THE AWARDS The European Wildlife Photographer of the Year has long been the benchmark for technically, aesthetically and artistically outstanding – not to mention groundbreaking – nature photography. Check out the livestreamed awards ceremony on 28th October at 7pm at gdtfoto.de.…