Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2023 i BBC Wildlife Magazine

WADING BIRDS OF MANY KINDS stream through north-west Europe in September, part of a sustained wave of shorebird migration that began back in July and will continue into November. A champion among them is the bar-tailed godwit, capable of epic 200-hour ocean crossings at consistent speeds of around 50-70kph, the longest non-stop flights of any land bird. These mind-blowing feats are, in fact, achieved by the Alaskan subspecies that flies in a vast arc over the Pacific to New Zealand for the winter, but the subspecies that visits Britain and Ireland from Arctic Scandinavia and Russia is also an impressive athlete. To stay in the air so long, the godwits must feed furiously round the clock in the weeks before they set off. This allows them to grow fresh feathers…

A RECENT STUDY OF A DEVON HEDGEROW found more than 2,000 species, showing the huge biodiversity value of this linear habitat. Provided a hedge is well managed, one of the most eye-catching species at this time of year is often black bryony, whose scarlet berries appear from September and persist into the winter months. So fat, bright and glossy they seem almost unreal, like strings of glacé cherries, these fruits are toxic in humans and best left to the birds. Black bryony is a climbing plant whose tendrils always curl around their supports to the right, in a clockwise fashion. Wild honeysuckle, another hedgerow rambler, does the same, as do domesticated runner bean and sweet pea plants, whereas the stems of hedge bindweed twist to the left, anti-clockwise. This fascinated…

An elephant’s trunk HOW DID THE ELEPHANT GET ITS TRUNK? One theory goes that, by gathering food while the mouth focuses on chewing, it enables the ingestion of the disproportionately large volumes of food required by bigger animals. Or perhaps it arose alongside the development of tusks, which prevent elephants getting close to their food with their mouth alone. It might even have started out as a snorkel in a semi-aquatic ancestor. BBC SOUNDS People Fixing The World: Helping elephants and humans get along…

1 VENUS FLYTRAP Best-known carnivorous plant; uses a snap trap to capture prey 2 COMMON BLADDERWORT Belongs to the Utricularia genus, known as bladderworts, which use bladder traps to suck in their food 3 SUNDEWS Plants that use secretions to ensnare their meals 4 CALIFORNIA PITCHER PLANT Like all pitcher plants, this species uses a pitfall trap 5 CORKSCREW PLANTS Genlisea species use a ‘lobster pot trap’ – easy to enter, but hard to leave due to spikey inward-pointing bristles 6 RAINBOW PLANTS Plants of the Byblis genus secrete a glue-like substance called mucilage 7 NEPENTHES RAJAH Malaysian pitcher plant species known to trap shrews, frogs and even birds! 8 ALDROVANDA VESICULOSA Its snap traps are arranged in circles around a central free-floating stem 9 HUMPED BLADDERWORT An aquatic, mat-forming…

KILLER WHALES ARE ‘EXTREMELY ferocious… and will attack human beings at every opportunity’. That’s according to a 1973 US Navy manual. Sure enough, the recent spate of attacks on small boats in south-western Europe seems to justify such fears. If you were to believe the press and social media, we’re in the midst of a ‘killer whale uprising’. But claims about their murderous intent are blatantly untrue. The evidence doesn’t stand up. Killer whales do attack, and sometimes kill, trainers in captivity (not surprisingly) but, unlike polar bears, great white sharks and many other top predators, they have never killed a person in the wild. So what’s happening? Since May 2020, there have been more than 500 reported attacks on sailing boats, as well as some fishing boats, RIBs and…

“I NEVER COULD HAVE imagined this is how my life could turn out,” says Melody Mnisi. “Now it’s my dream to introduce young people to nature and to inspire young African women like me to believe anything is possible. Melody is a 23-year-old South African and has just qualified as a field guide. Despite growing up very close to Kruger National Park – a world-renowned safari destination – she never had the chance to see or enjoy its wildlife. “This was something for white people, not poor black people like me,” she says. “I always wondered what was on the other side of the fence.” But everything changed for Melody when she completed a Wild Shots Outreach (WSO) photography course, learning how to use a camera and going on her…

IT WAS IN 2000, DURING A DIVE in a deep-sea submersible, that scientists stumbled upon a place unlike anywhere else on Earth. From a distance, it looked like an abandoned metropolis, its tall, smoking towers left billowing long after its inhabitants had fled. On closer inspection, the site, located 800m deep in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, turned out to be teeming with microbes, and the towers, seen in sharp focus, the likely source of their nutrition. The Lost City is now recognised as a unique hydrothermal ecosystem, where temperatures rise to 40-70°C and calcium-rich, alkaline waters spew from seafloor vents, creating carbonate chimney-like structures over time, the largest of which, called Poseidon, reaches 60m tall. Life thrives here: not just microbes, but sponges, crabs and even corals. Scientists…

What is a red-billed chough? Red-billed choughs, known as choughs, are jackdaw-sized members of the crow family. They are jet black with a curved red bill and bright-red legs and feet. They are incredibly inquisitive, like all corvids, and are often found in flocks. They are very site faithful and do not readily disperse. Where do choughs live? In the UK, choughs are only found in Cornwall, parts of Wales, and the Scottish islands of Islay and Colonsay, plus a newly released population is growing in Jersey. There are currently about 394 breeding pairs across the British Isles. What habitat do they prefer? Grassland is ideal for foraging, and dung from livestock provides an additional source of invertebrates. Clifftops are favoured as the cliffs provide nest sites. What do choughs…

During an expedition to the high Andes in 2020, a yellow-rumped leaf-eared mouse was found on the summit of Llullaillaco, a 6,739m-high volcano straddling the border of Chile and Argentina. The species also occurs at sea level, so it is clearly highly adaptable. But writing in the journal PNAS, where they published their discovery, the biologists note that it’s far from clear what the Llullaillaco population eats at these altitudes, which are 2,000m above the range of green plants. The world’s highest mountain tops are under-explored by biologists, so it’s a record that might yet be broken.…

BOOK OF THE MONTH An African odyssey Africa: A Creative Journey Written and illustrated by Shelly Perkins, shellyperkins.co.uk, £35 WILDLIFE ARTIST SHELLY PERKINS documents her travels through Africa, sketchbook and camera in hand, in her engrossing new book. Lions, zebra, wild dogs and elephants all star, and Shelly recounts her personal experience of sketching them in the field. Shelly is no stranger to BBC Wildlife – her illustrations have graced our pages many times over the years in both features and columns. Here, though, we see the full breadth of her talents, from pencil and watercolour field-sketches through to her vibrant, multi-layered studio works and photography as well. Africa’s varied wildlife and landscapes are brought vividly to life, with the text offering insights into the behaviour of the subjects and the…

ACROSS 1 Small-headed parasitoid insects in the family Acroceridae (9-5) 10 Bulb of a plant in the genus Allium (5) 11 ___ waterthrush, songbird of the eastern USA (9) 12 Subspecies of prairie chicken, extinct since 1932 (5,3) 13 Suckerfish (6) 14 Dense, dark-coloured hardwood (5) 16 New World plant belonging to the genus Tripsacum (9) 19 Fibre made from the leaves of a plant native to Mexico (5,4) 20 Archaic name for an ant (5) 22 South American river, home to the pink river dolphin (6) 24 Taxonomic class (8) 27 Freshwater char of North America (4,5) 28 Western ___, Scottish archipelago, home to corncrake and hen harrier (5) 29 Large New World wading bird, Ardea herodias (5,4,5) DOWN 2 Producing a single offspring (9) 3 Marine snail with…

Bristol-based photographer Sam Hobson has some top tips on how to get creative with our eight-legged friends and their delicate silk structures. • SHOW THE SPIDER “Garden spiders often sit still in the centre of the strands, enabling you to perfect your focus and experiment with depth of field.” • GO ABSTRACT “Try a shot that focuses on individual strands, explores angles or makes a feature of the water droplets” • CREATE A SENSE OF PLACE “Capture the web in context. Is it in a garden, or a field? Are there signs of autumn to include, such as fallen apples or leaves?” You can read more photography tips at discoverwildlife.com/how-to/photograph-wildlife…

THE ENTOMOLOGY COLLECTION OF NATIONAL Museums Scotland is held at the National Museum of Scotland’s Collections Centre in Edinburgh. Ecologist Katty Baird works as a volunteer with the British Lepidoptera collection, documenting the number of different specimens onto a database. “This helps the museum know what material they have and where it is housed in the collections centre,” she says. “This makes it much easier for researchers to find the butterflies and moths they are looking for.” Katty also documents the details of some specimens – when and where they were caught – and adds these to the National Moth Recording Scheme. “I have a particular interest in the moths collected by Alice Blanche Balfour, a naturalist who lived in East Lothian about 100 years ago. She recorded butterflies and…

Pacific swift, Shetland COMMON SWIFTS ARE A FAMILIAR FIXTURE of our summer skies, but there are a number of rarer species in this bird family that visit as occasional vagrants from afar. Three of these show a common feature that is lacking in our own common swift (in all but a tiny handful of aberrantly plumaged individuals) – a white rump that stands out a mile on an essentially otherwise dark-looking bird. For the avid rarity hunter a glimpse of this feature on any distant swift is sure to get the heart pumping! One such swift seen in Shetland in early July was quickly identified as a Pacific swift, a species that breeds throughout eastern Asia and winters as far south as Australia, where flocks have occasionally been reported to…

ATLANTIC BLUEFIN TUNA, AMONG THE fastest of all marine animals, have been staging something of a comeback in British and Irish waters in recent years. The mighty pelagic predators – the largest on record weighed 680kg and was over 4.25m long, though specimens that size are unlikely today – disappeared from our coasts in the 1960s. However, they are starting to appear off south-west coasts again, usually between September and November. They’re here to hunt shoals of mackerel and herring, and, as revealed in BBC series Wild Isles, will sometimes follow common dolphins to find their prey. With torpedo-shaped bodies and streamlined fins that retract when sprinting at speeds of up to 70kph, bluefin tuna don’t hang around. They are supercharged with oxygen-rich red muscle and can raise their body…

The brown rat is a native of Central Asia that was introduced to the British Isles around 1720. Its droppings are putty-like, usually with a blunt end and a pointed end. When fresh, they are blackish-brown in colour, rough in texture and rancid smelling. According to The Mammal Society, “The brown rat is a true omnivore and will consume almost anything, but cereals form a substantial part of its diet.” The species is most seen in farmland and urban areas and its droppings are often deposited in a scattered group.…

The Azores, Alaska or Antarctica may well be the first destinations that spring to mind for the ultimate whale- and dolphin-watching experience. However, the UK and Ireland’s seriously impressive marine mammal list can put our small collection of islands, on a good day, almost on a par with these more established, exotic locations. While unpredictable weather conditions close to home can make cetacean-spotting tricky at best, we now have a better understanding of the annual movements and behaviour of whales and dolphins in our waters. There have been increased sightings of certain whale species around Britain and Ireland – a positive sign of their recovery from historical commercial whaling. All the collated data of observations suggests that the best time to search for marine mammals here is in late summer,…

Emperor Seamounts Millions of years ago, a chain of silent volcanoes arose deep in the Pacific Ocean. Today, the surface waters of the Emperor Seamounts provide rich feeding grounds for migrating albatrosses, whales and tuna, and its nooks and crannies host hidden gems such as gold corals. Gakkel Ridge Deep beneath the Arctic ice is a mountain range taller than the Alps that stretches 1,800km, from Greenland to Siberia. Spotted with active volcanoes, its dark surface is covered with mats of white microbes and its waters are home to unusual eyeless shrimp. Arabian Sea Located in the northern Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea contains one of the most oxygen-depleted parts of the ocean. Far from being lifeless, these waters are home to strange creatures such as flying squid and tiny,…

Cornwall was the last place choughs bred in England, in 1947, before becoming extinct in the country. Then in 2001, after a decade of habitat restoration, a small group arrived from Ireland, with a pair deciding to stay on the Lizard. The next spring, to everyone’s delight, they bred and since then the Cornish chough population has slowly but surely grown. The Cornwall Chough Project has encouraged local farmers to develop chough-friendly land management, and closely monitors and protects nests during the breeding season, too. The Cornwall Chough Project, now called the Cornish Chough Conservation Network, is widely considered one the UK’s best-known bird success stories in recent times.…

Is a hog badger a pig or a badger? It’s not hard to see how the hog badger got its name. But as members of the mustelid family, these omnivorous denizens of South-East Asian forests are very much badgers that look like pigs rather than pigs that look like badgers. Unsurprisingly, they have long been a source of confusion for taxonomists. One of the three living species, the Sumatran hog badger, was originally classified with the Edentata, the mammalian group that includes sloths, anteaters and armadillos. What is a clubmoss? With their numerous tiny simple leaves, these small unobtrusive plants are easily mistaken for true mosses, but they are more closely related to ferns and flowering plants. They comprise one of the oldest surviving plant lineages, dating back about 400…

On the rocks I visited Kuldiha forest in Odisha, India and shot this five-bar swordtail butterfly ‘puddling’ on the ground. Souvick Mukherjee, Burdwan, India Little distraction Little owls are funny characters and this chick was more interested in our hide than being fed. Catherine Baldwin, Lincoln Grubs up Gigrin Farm in Powys is a red kite feeding and rehabilitation centre, and this bird is hovering before swooping in to collect some food. Martyn Foss, Buckley In the frame The colourful king penguins of the Falkland Islands are very photogenic and seem to pose at times. Bob Brewer, Chichester Berry nice I like to walk in the forest and photograph wildlife. There are many wild animals, like this badger, in the forests of the Czech Republic. Zdeněk Filák, Czech Republic SHARE!…

UPTON ON SEVERN, WORCESTERSHIRE “I WAS WALKING BACK FROM A morning spent cleaning out the hedgehog enclosures at Vale Wildlife Hospital when my manager Martin approached and asked if I was ready to go out on my first rescue. There had been reports of a badger caught in a flood in Upton on Severn. On arrival, only the boats in the town’s marina distinguished the river from the surrounding farmland now engulfed in water. Our hearts sank at the sight of mud flying into the air from an isolated pocket of land. The badger was digging for its life and had nowhere to turn amidst the deepening cold and murky January water. Paul from Severn Area Rescue Association met us with his jet ski, but the water was rising fast…

NICK BAKER “I have a childhood memory of my first one – a monster of a thing scuttling over a sea wall” P.34 GILLIAN BURKE “It’s shocking how many people still believe that there’s a ticking human population timb-bomb” P.15 MARK CARWARDINE The conservationist looks behind recent headlines about killer whales attacking small boats in Europe P.29 LUCY COOKE “The power of the bonobo sisterhood allows them to dominate the bigger males” P.25 MIKE DILGER From pilot to minke and humpback, UK shores host myriad whales, says the naturalist P.30…

THE BIRTH OF A MALE WHITE-TAILED eagle signals the success of the Roy Dennis Wildlife Foundation (RDWF) and Forestry England project to return these iconic birds of prey to their original widespread locations along the southern coast of England. The last time a white-tailed eagle chick fledged in England, the American Revolutionary War was in full swing, while in Germany, Mozart was working on his opera Idomeneo. For two centuries these magnificent birds, with wingspans up to 2.5m, were missing from most of the UK, having been wiped out by human persecution by the early 20th century. In 2020, the parents of the landmark bird were translocated from the Outer Hebrides and north-west Sutherland in Scotland to the Isle of Wight. This is an area with plentiful food to sustain…

As summer shades into autumn and the evenings begin to draw in, tawny owls make their presence felt. Young owls that fledged in spring are now dispersing to find territories, causing major upset among established pairs, including their own parents. The hooting and shrieking usually peaks on clear, bright evenings around a full moon, such as the so-called Harvest Moon. BBC SOUNDS Tweet of the Day: Mike Toms describes his encounters with tawny owls…

CAMPAIGNERS HAVE WELCOMED Iceland’s decision to suspend this year’s fin whale hunt until the end of August due to animal welfare concerns, a move that is likely to bring the controversial practice to an end. Luke McMillan from wildlife charity Whale and Dolphin Conservation (WDC), says, “This is a major success for our campaign to stop whaling in Iceland and could now finally bring an end to the slaughter there. Japan and Norway use similar techniques to kill whales so the spotlight is now on them.” The Icelandic government’s decision follows a report from the Icelandic food and veterinary authority, which concluded that the killing of the whales contravened the government’s own animal welfare laws. Iceland’s Minister of Food, Agriculture and Fisheries, Svandís Svavarsdóttir says, “I have decided to suspend…

WHEN A HUMMINGBIRD SIPS NECTAR from a flower, it’s drinking more than just sweet stuff – there’s a drop of the hard stuff in there, too. Nectar, like overripe fruit, is prone to fermentation, producing alcohol. Happily, new research suggests that the birds might know when they’ve had enough. Biologists at the University of California Berkeley have tested the preferences of Anna’s hummingbirds to different concentrations of alcohol in sugar solutions provided at artificial feeders. They found that the birds are as happy swigging on a solution containing one per cent alcohol as they are on an alcohol-free tipple. But when presented with an alcohol content of two per cent, they only drink half as much. “Because they’re drinking half the volume, the dosage of alcohol is about the same,”…

IN THE DEPTHS OF THE DEMOCRATIC Republic of Congo lives the most recently discovered, and rarest, of the five great ape species. It’s also the most diminutive, yet it’s impact on historical assumptions about patriarchal dominance has been the greatest. I’m talking about Pan paniscus, the bonobo. The celebrated primatologist Frans De Waal called the bonobo “a gift to the feminist movement”. Before the bonobo came along, models for human ancestry were based on the chimpanzee, Pan trogoldytes, as we share around 99 per cent of our DNA with them. Chimpanzee females are about a third smaller than males and physically dominated by them. Females are the sex that disperses from their natal group, so when they join a troop they have no female relatives to support them. Instead, they…

Downward spiral The glassy, smooth circle left on the water’s surface following a whale’s dive is called a footprint, and it’s formed by the powerful, downward motion of their fluke, which creates a temporary vortex. Better baleen it While pilot and sperm whales, and dolphins and porpoises have teeth, many larger whales, such as fin, humpback and minke have baleen instead. These fringed plates filter food such as krill, plankton and small fish from seawater. Smooth mover Keep an eye out for the world’s second biggest fish: the basking shark. Reaching the length of a double-decker bus, this gentle giant trawls the seas with its mouth open, filtering microscopic zooplankton. Their large, triangular dorsal fin moves slowly through the water, while the top half of their caudal (tail) fin and…

Shocking situation The plight of this Hoffmann’s two-fingered sloth – one of two sloth species in Costa Rica – in the small town of Puerto Viejo is emblematic of the threats facing these slow-moving mammals. After its home tree was felled, it clambered along these power lines as it would use vines in a tropical forest – but had nowhere to go. Fortunately, Rebecca Cliffe, founder of the Sloth Conservation Foundation (SloCo), relocated it to a safer wooded area. Others are not so lucky: hundreds of sloths are electrocuted each year on poorly insulated cables. Family ties A newborn brown-throated sloth clings to its mother’s chest for about six months, suckling and learning which leaves to eat. This female, named Esmeralda, lived wild. Many others have to adapt to urban…

AT FIRST, I THOUGHT I WAS HALLUCINATING. But as I closed my eyes and concentrated every synapse I could muster, I could hear it. It was almost imperceptible through the whining drone of a million cicadas, but it was definitely there; a contented, low grunt surpassing in tone and resonance the deepest bass from any choir I’d ever listened to. I peered into the gloom. Surrounding me was Marantaceae, a glossy, impenetrable mass of plant life that dominates the forest floor; above, most of the sky was obliterated by a tetris-like canopy of kapok, fig, ebony and Panda oleosa. This was the Ndzehi Forest, in the north western reaches of the Republic of the Congo. A few metres ahead, my tracker, Zeferin, had turned from super-sensed ape-seeker to landscape gardener.…

THE SEA IS A DAZZLING TURQUOISE, CHISELLED rough then smooth by a stiff warm breeze blowing up the English Channel. As I sit in the long grass surrounded by flowers nodding chaotically in the gusts and eddies blowing up the cliff face, I have to admit I’m pleased with the results of my bird survey. It means the first stage of my GCSE geography project, The Avian Diversity of the White Cliffs of Dover, is complete. “Legend has it that the bird’s red beak and feet came from dabbling and paddling in Thomas Becket’s blood” Fulmars, kittiwakes, swallows, jackdaws, kestrels – they and many more have been spotted and recorded in my small, well-worn and smudged red notebook. I’ve worked hard at this project, and enjoyed every minute. That day…

Email your questions to wildquestions@immediate.co.uk Why don’t birds have teeth? YOU JUST NEED TO GLANCE AT A 150-million-year-old fossilised Archaeopteryx to see that birds’ ancestors were not toothless. And yet avian dentition is now as rare as proverbial hens’ teeth. So what exactly happened between then and now? Biologists aren’t quite sure. What they do know is that, about 100 million years ago, genetic mutations emerged that prevent tooth development by blocking enamel and dentine production. These can be reactivated artificially to induce chicken embryos to produce peg-like reptilian teeth. More mysterious is why they lost them. One possibility is that replacing teeth with a horny beak reduces the payload, making flight more efficient. Beaks are certainly highly versatile tools that can be wielded to sip nectar from flowers, tear…

WHAT ARE ALGAE? The term is used for everything from microscopic bacteria and plankton to pond slime and seaweeds, but unlike animals and many other living things, algal groups are an assortment without a single common ancestor. That said, one feature is shared by most algae in every group: photosynthesis – the ability to make food from carbon dioxide and sunlight, releasing oxygen, just like plants. Are algae actually plants? It’s the other way around! Chloroplasts – the structures where photosynthesis begins inside plant cells – evolved from symbiotic cyanobacteria that were incorporated into what became green algae (chlorophytes). As descendants of this group, you could say that plants are actually green algae. Other algal groups originated via similar ‘endosymbiosis’ events (when one organism lives within another) independently, which is…

How did you get into your career? I’ve always loved nature. After studying fine art and documentary photography, I got a job with an insurance company, building my image library in my free time. I was then made redundant, so took the leap. Which of your shots is most important to you, and why? The Chilean flamingos in flight over the Andes, taken in Patagonia. It tells a story, which is what I always aim to do. The conditions were very tough and I was being constantly buffeted by savage winds, a challenge that makes the reward sweeter. Have you ever had any epic fails? I can think of a few. One happened during my first trip to South America, sailing down the Beagle Channel en route to Ushuaia, Argentina.…