Innholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2023 i BBC Wildlife Magazine

Living World Lionel Kelleway looks for three-spined sticklebacks STICKLEBACKS ARE TIDDLERS WITH A big personality, and April is the start of their spawning season, when the male fish transform from dowdy, brownish creatures to aquatic eye candy. Their belly flushes scarlet, while their flanks and eyes acquire stunning blue highlights. Equally striking is their change in behaviour. Territorial males will not let rivals come anywhere near, nor in fact will they permit anything red, alive or dead, to intrude on their patch. They are guarding nests made from scraps of weed and other vegetation, in the hope that passing females will be tempted to spawn there. Should a potential mate appear, they seal the deal by zigzagging through the water to show off their fitness and the location of their…

SWARMS OF HAIRY BLACK FLIES WITH dangly back legs are a feature of warm spring days, especially over wetlands, along country lanes and hedgerows, and in woodland glades. These are St Mark’s flies, named for their emergence on or around St Mark’s Day (25 April), although our changing climate is weakening this traditional link by helping them appear earlier. Another of their names is ‘hawthorn fly’, which honours their fondness for the nectar of hawthorn blossom, also hard to avoid at this time of year. As is often the case in the fly world, adult St Mark’s flies survive barely a week, after feeding on decaying vegetation as maggots. The black clouds consist mostly of males, waiting for their chance to mate with emerging female flies. Though the swarms are…

ONE OF THE QUIRKIEST OF ALL MAMMALS, the egg-laying echidna of Australia, has been found to employ an appropriately eccentric method of cooling off in the heat, according to research published in Biology Letters. “Short-beaked echidnas have the broadest distribution of any mammal in Australia,” says Christine Cooper who led the new research. “They’re all over the place, from alpine areas through to the deserts and the tropics.” Past experiments in the laboratory have suggested that echidnas cannot survive air temperatures above 35°C. “Heat exchange is much more complex in the wild than in the lab where the air temperature is kept constant by design,” says Cooper. “Echidnas live in areas where they must be dealing with these high temperatures. In fact, people have measured the temperatures in logs where…

Most plants have both female and male parts – they are hermaphrodites. But one of our commonest spring wildflowers, red campion, exists as separate sexes. Peer into the pale flower centres and you should see either club-like male stamens or curly female stigmas. Usually males, which produce the pollen, outnumber females, which ensures there is plenty to go round. IN BRIEF Penguin discovery A new emperor penguin colony in Antarctica has been discovered by scientists using satellite mapping technology. This recent find makes a total of 66 known emperor penguin colonies around the coastline of Antarctica, with exactly half having been discovered by satellite imagery.…

Finding sanctuary A doe and her kid peer around watchfully on an early July morning, while foraging in a city cemetery in Wiltshire. The burial grounds pictured in this portfolio all stand on the edge of woodland, providing ideal habitat for roe – one of Britain’s only two truly native deer species, along with red – allowing them to retreat into the shadows of the surrounding trees if disturbed. Roe deer feature on Wild Isles, on air and iPlayer from early spring Nursing times Young twins suckle their mother, who nudges her offspring to help them find her teats. These kids are just two or three weeks old, born in May after five months’ gestation – though nine after mating; roe deer are among the few British mammals that employ…

MEGAN SHERSBY ANSWERS Despite the name, it isn’t a chicken – and nor is it a mountain. Instead, the mountain chicken is actually a species of frog which is native to Dominica and Montserrat. Also known as the giant ditch frog, the main reason for its local name of mountain chicken is that it is said to taste like chicken, though the name could also be derived from its large size, or its chicken-like and squawking alarm call. Sadly, this large frog is now at risk of extinction and is listed as Critically Endangered. A combination of habitat destruction, invasive species and hunting have contributed to its decline, but the main cause for the recent plummet in numbers is a chytrid fungus, which causes the fatal disease chytridiomycosis.…

In terms of length, two impressive species battle it out for this title, both measuring over 15cm. The male Hercules beetle (Dynastes hercules) has an astonishing horn which, combined with body length, means that he can reach up to 19cm. However, the other contender – the titan beetle (Titanus giganteus) – has a body length of up to 16.7cm, without needing any horns to measure so large. FACT. Some mushrooms glow in the dark. They contain luciferins – the same compound that makes fireflies light up. Glowing attracts insects, which help to spread the mushroom spores.…

ACROSS 7 ___ Nevada, US mountain range noted for its rich and varied habitats (6) 8 ___ woodpecker, bird native to Mexico (8) 9 Large ocean fish also called an opah (8) 10 US state to which the Kodiak bear is endemic (6) 11 Cold-water marine species in the family Cyclopteridae (8) 12 Stinging plant (6) 13 Natural world; sum of habitats and ecologies (11) 18 ___ anemone, fluffy-looking deep-sea creature (3-3) 20 Term for the development of an individual organism (8) 22 Plant in the family Piperaceae, cultivated for spices (6) 23 Not adult (8) 24 Forest epiphyte of Mexico and North America (8) 25 Fly ___, white-spotted red mushroom (6) DOWN 1 Fruit belonging to the Philippine tree Canarium ovatum (4,3) 2 Horned pheasant (8) 3 Elk (6)…

How did you get into photography? I grew up in the Galápagos. I was using my dad’s camera to record wildlife until a film-maker gifted me his old Pentax SLR. I then met the editor of Audubon magazine and, at 19, had a story published on giant tortoises. I’ve never looked back! What would you be if you weren’t a wildlife photographer? Very boring or dead. Which of your shots is most important to you, and why? That’s like asking a mother to choose her favourite child… Any ‘wow’ moments? Nothing has amazed me more than watching a few wise bull sealions herd tuna into natural traps in the shoreline – they simply run out of water and leap ashore. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I realised what they…

Tweet of the Day Martin Hughes-Games presents the story of the curlew Spring is a feast for all the senses, when wild sounds in particular seem thrillingly intense. None more so than the haunting song of the male curlew, with its long, low notes quickening into a sustained bubbling trill that sends shivers down your spine. But unless we do more to help this threatened species, its soul-stirring springtime display will soon be lost. 10 national animals The choice of national animal can tell you a lot about a country’s identity 1 UNICORN Scotland Fictional animal placed on the royal coat of arms in the 12th century 2 BENGAL TIGER India Among the world’s largest big cats 3 BALD EAGLE USA Perhaps the most well-known 4 STEPPE EAGLE Egypt  Bird of prey of steppe habitat 5 BEAVER AND CANADIAN…

AN AUSTRALIAN SPIDER HAS BEEN FOUND to spin webs over ponds that are capable of plucking insects from the surface, according to new observations published in Ethology. Various species of long-jawed orb-weavers are known to construct their webs close to water. But it seems that at least one sets snares that are in direct contact with the water, allowing them to catch water striders and other insects that live on the surface. John Gould, who led the work at Australia’s University of Newcastle, says it’s not yet clear whether the webs are attached to structures below the surface, to floating algae or directly to the water itself. “We suspect that it is a combination of these attachment points that are used in conjunction,” he says. According to Geoff Oxford…

THERE’S GOOD NEWS FOR RHINOS. The latest poaching figures have just been released and half as many were killed illegally by poachers during the four-year period that ran from 2018 to 2021 than the previous four-year period. So why aren’t we dancing in the streets? Well, first, poaching is still rampant. There were 2,707 reported deaths during those four years – and no one is going to celebrate an average of two rhinos being killed every day. Also, while poaching has declined overall, it is still too high for populations to recover (and continues relentlessly in some hotspots – South Africa’s Kruger National Park, in particular). Second, we’ll never be able to declare rhinos safe. (Unfortunately, the same applies to most other endangered species – because conservation never ends.) The…

Tweet of the Day Miranda Krestovnikoff presents on the quetzal THE SNEEZE BEGAN AS A TICKLE IN MY RIGHT nostril. It was almost imperceptible, like a mosquito landing lightly on my arm, ready to strike. Or a lone butterfly flapping its wings, producing a breeze that would unfurl into a tornado; a tidal wave of latent energy that demanded to be unleashed. Some people can suppress their sneezes delicately into a tissue. But not me. Mine are foghorn blasts that rattle windows and burst eardrums. Which wouldn’t normally have been a problem, except that I was standing in the quiet Guatemalan jungle, and Alfredo Tol Gonzalez, my guide, thought he’d just heard a quetzal. Any noise would scare it away. I’d staggered out of bed at dawn and hauled my…

YOU ARE STANDING AT the edge of a vast river estuary. To your right you can see the small seaside village of Findhorn; to your left you can make out the distant mountains of the Highlands. Directly behind you is a wooden birdwatching pavilion slowly falling into disrepair. It’s a cold winter morning and a low mist is hovering over the surrounding saltmarsh. The mournful cries of curlews and oystercatchers stand out from the incessant murmur of thousands of pink-footed geese further out, which appear as a mass of swirling grey. Having spent the night roosting on the mudflats, the birds are taking a while to warm up. Their calls are at first muted and staccato, with the occasional louder ‘wink’ echoing through the melee. As the sun climbs higher,…

ARJUN DHEER ANSWERS Of the four extant species, only female spotted hyenas have a pseudopenis – and in fact, they are even more unique in being the only female mammals to lack an external vaginal opening! We still aren’t sure why the females have a pseudopenis, but it clearly has its perks, and there are two main ideas explaining its evolution. Firstly, it means they have absolute control over who they mate with, and their full cooperation is required. Males do not provide any offspring care, which means females have to bear the burden, so it makes sense for them to be choosy about which males sire their young: they want to maximise the survival of their cubs. Secondly, because female hyenas are more likely to suffer aggression from other…

PARASITE. THE WORD ALONE CAN make your skin crawl. Parasites are viruses or organisms, and can be anything from inconvenient pests that don’t normally kill to mind-controlling puppet masters with (often disgusting) life strategies that have evolved to benefit themselves at the cost of other life-forms: their hosts. What is parasitism? It’s a relationship in which one partner exploits the resources of the other. Those resources are typically food – sometimes in the form of body parts – so a parasite will harm the host by reducing its ability to survive and reproduce. Parasites are generally smaller than their hosts and tend to consume the body, making them micropredators. As the biologist E O Wilson once neatly put it, parasites are “predators that eat prey in units of less than…

PRIZE-WINNING PHOTO Miniature marvel My picture really shows that beautiful things come in small packages! This tiny fiery-throated hummingbird in Costa Rica – about the size of your thumb – was darting from this branch to the local flowers, and the shot was taken in a moment of rest for it. Although it was raining at the time, some spectacular breaking light caught the hummingbird, showing off its luminous feathers and beautiful colours. Andy Edge, Essex Cold snap A pod of eight to nine orcas skulked silently through these towering icebergs in the Antarctic Peninsula. They surfaced randomly so it was near impossible to maintain a visual on them, but I was lucky to get this shot after hearing the female exhale as they surfaced. Ross Wheeler, Cornwall 3, 2, 1… Sat…

FOR YEARS I VISITED A SMALL 220HA nature reserve on the Rhine track in Baden-Württemberg. The purple heron, which is rare in Germany, breeds there. There are only about 60 breeding pairs in the country. After their arrival, I was able to observe, document and photograph them nest building, mating, occupying their nests and raising their young. I am always very happy when I spot the first purple herons at the end of March. It means that the herons that have arrived have successfully covered the long journey from the Sahel in North Africa. Atmospheric shots in fog or rain are particularly successful in the morning. Another attractive time is in the evening, when the sun illuminates the reed zone and purple herons fly overhead. As they live very hidden…

AS ANYONE WHO HAS LIVED IN A FLAT will attest, few things are more irritating than noisy upstairs neighbours. So spare a thought for this grumpy-looking hippopotamus in South Luangwa National Park, Zambia, suffering the chatterings of a red-billed oxpecker and its young (right) brazenly treating its head as a floating pontoon. The birds do come with some benefits, though, as they remove ticks, mites, fleas and maggots from hippos’ hides – a kind of cleaning service. However, they are also known to peck at wounds and occasionally drink their blood, so it’s unclear whether it is a mutualistic or parasitic relationship. Found across the savannah of sub-Saharan Africa, oxpeckers will happily hitch a ride – and steal a meal – from cattle, zebras and rhinos, too. Interestingly, observations of…

WE MAY NO LONGER USE THE gestures used by other great apes, yet we can still understand what they mean. That is the conclusion of a new study by scientists at the University of St Andrews, published in PLOS Biology. The study, led by Kirsty Graham and Catherine Hobaiter, involved 5,500 people playing an online game in which they had to interpret the 10 most common gestures used by chimpanzees and bonobos. Participants were asked to select the meaning of each gesture from four possible answers, and got them right more than 50 per cent of the time. Additional detail on the context of the communication only had a very small effect on success, suggesting that humans can correctly interpret ape gestures from the actions themselves. Video experiments have in…

BE THEY LONG, SHORT, CHUNKY, delicate, pointy, straight or curved, beaks are almost always symmetrical. The aptly-named wrybill, a plover endemic to New Zealand, is the only species whose beak bends to one side – always to the right. The function of the asymmetry remains mysterious. It might allow the bill to be used like a spatula to scrape invertebrate food from the curved undersides of pebbles. Tweet of the Day Sir David Attenborough presents the wrybill…

“EVEN AS A SMALL CHILD I WAS CAPTIVATED BY wildlife of all kinds,” says Helen Roy. “My fascination with the interactions amongst species, the environment and people led to a career as an ecologist.” Helen currently works at the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH) within the Biological Records Centre: “I feel so privileged to work alongside amazing people on a treasure trove of datasets that only exist because of the dedication of volunteers sharing their wildlife observations.” “Biological invasions are one of the five main causes of biodiversity change worldwide, including contributing to species extinctions,” states Helen. “People are moving species around the world at an unprecedented rate and in some cases these species manage to sustain populations, spread and adversely impact biodiversity and ecosystems – these species…

THE DISCOVERY OF A GREATER YELLOWLEGS in December 2022, 20km inland on the River Bride in County Waterford, Ireland (and still present in late January), must have made someone’s day. To see this shorebird isn’t so difficult these days with sightings well publicised, but to be responsible for the initial discovery and identification makes for a special treat – it may represent a once-in-a-lifetime achievement for a dedicated birder checking their local patch. Greater yellowlegs is a North American wading bird related to our redshank and greenshank and has made landfall in Northwest Europe on only a few dozen occasions, though the December sighting was the second Irish record of 2022. Very similar to the more regularly occurring lesser yellowlegs from the same region, it is one of several vagrant…

This term is used in reference to crocodiles burying their eggs in nests either comprised of holes, which are usually excavated in sand, or in nests that are formed as mounds, which are generally built out of vegetation. When the young leave the nest, they tend to prefer a solitary life, though they do hunt together and share their prey. Other collective nouns include a bask, a congregation or a float (when in water). Discovery – Tooth and Claw: Crocodiles, presented by Adam Hart…

Tweet of the Day Kate Humble presents the grasshopper warbler THE GRASSHOPPER WARBLER DOES AN excellent job of sounding like an insect. Its spring song resembles the high-pitched whirring of a grasshopper or bush-cricket and is sustained for minutes at a time, so that it blends into the background, just as insect sounds do. But rather helpfully, this migratory bird starts singing soon after it returns to the UK, from mid-April onwards, whereas real grasshoppers and bush-crickets don’t strike up until later in summer. The song is frequently compared to fishing line being paid out, and has its own name: reeling. This is a well-camouflaged bird that avoids the limelight, spending most of its life hunting insects close to the ground among damp thickets or waterside vegetation, making it easier…

GLOBALLY, INVASIVE RATS ARE ONE OF the major problems affecting seabirds breeding on islands. When rats jump ship and colonise, their predation of eggs and chicks can lead to massive slumps in seabird numbers. In turn, this makes the rain of seabird poo washing out to surrounding waters shrink from a torrent to a trickle. Surprisingly, for jewel damselfish living on coral reefs there, that affects their habits – including how they react to other fish. Jewel damselfish are aggressively territorial and will attack intruders – even much larger fish – that stray into territories they hold over small patches of reef. The fish are also capable of ‘farming’ turf algae that grow on coral branches. This plant material is their staple food, but not all such algae are equal.…

THE SUN HASN’T YET risen, but all 12 crew on board the Toftevaag are awake and giddy with anticipation. It’s summer 2022, and we’re in the midst of a three-month research season off the Balearic Islands for the Altinak Research Institute. We’re currently sailing within the Cabrera Archipelago National Park, just south of Mallorca, which in 2019 was extended to include almost 90,000ha of open sea. Cabrera Gran, the main island that we departed from, now lies more than 10 nautical miles to the west of our boat, but we are still well within the park’s boundaries. It isn’t long before we spot a small pod of bottlenose dolphins off our starboard side. They glide and glisten in the dark water just under the bow, almost within reach, staring back…

Email your questions to wildquestions@immediate.co.uk AMY ARTHUR ANSWERS Despite the joy of seeing a red squirrel up close, recent research suggests that feeding them may be harming the species. The iconic rodent, once widespread in the UK, is now only found in a handful of woodlands. As breeding is limited within these isolated populations, changes to diet or habitat, or the introduction of disease can impact an entire population in just a few generations. Analysis of over 250 skulls from different locations in the UK has shown significant changes to the jaws of red squirrels in Formby, Liverpool. Here, the usual diet of hazelnuts and pine seeds has often been supplemented with biscuits, chips and peanuts from humans. These treats require much less chewing, which researchers say could have caused…

TV HIGHLIGHT OF THE MONTH Green and pleasant land Wild Isles Coming to BBC One and iPlayer soon Buds are emerging, sap is rising and birds are on the wing. But just as exciting to wildlife-lovers will be the new five-part natural history series coming to BBC One and iPlayer this spring. Wild Isles celebrates the diverse species and landscapes found on the islands of Britain and Ireland, together with the more than 6,000 lesser islets that make up our archipelago. Renowned conservationist Sir David Attenborough presents the programme, going on location with the film crew, who took three years to shoot this stunning series. The first episode offers an introduction to British and Irish wildlife and the following four focus on the key habitats: woodland, grassland, marine and freshwater.…

ON TOP OF HER DAY JOB AS A VET IN KHARKIV, Anastasiia Dmytrivna Domanska gives up her evenings volunteering for the Ukrainian Bat Rehabilitation Center (UBRC), treating sick and traumatised bats. What does your volunteering involve? The bats that people bring into the rehabilitation centre are often suffering from infections, malnutirition and parasites. I examine them and treat them, offering life-long rehabilitation when necessary. My work includes treating everything, from bats giving birth to tooth decay! UBRC receives up to 3,000 bats each year from all over the country. If they arrive during the winter (when bats are hibernating), we cannot release them back into the wild, so we need to feed those weak and sick individuals. Sometimes we have up to 300 bats to feed each day! Why do…

STEWART ISLAND, NEW ZEALAND THERE WAS NO MISTAKING IT. A distant, sharply inflected, screaming ‘woo-eee’ penetrated the gloom as the flames from a couple of candles flickered, and shadows danced about the inside of the remote hut where I sat with my companion. It could have been a scene from a horror film. Two days it had taken me to walk through undulating forest and scrub to this spot, and we were still half a day’s walk from our destination of Mason Bay. I was muddied, exhausted, scratched and bitten, but a rest and a meal of instant noodles and mussels picked from some nearby rocks had revived me somewhat. I was on a mission. A backpacking gap year had taken me to the wilds of Stewart Island, New Zealand,…