Amazing Animals

 

Amazing Animals: The Mole

Much of a mole’s life is spent in a burrow system that it tunnels underground, so it is not often seen. Its presence is evident from the soil heaps (molehills) it makes while tunnelling, and in medieval times one of the names given to the mole was moldewarp (earth thrower).

 

When tunnelling, a mole uses one front foot to force soil upwards into a molehill while it braces the other, and its hind feet, firmly against the walls of the tunnel. A mole can move twice its own weight of soil a minute.

 

Amazing Animals: The Green Woodpecker

The green woodpecker is highly adapted to both life on the ground and in the trees. Its long toes have strong, sharp, curved claws that act like a climber’s crampon to help the bird climb tree trunks. Even the tail has a role to play and the feather shafts are particularly strong so they can be used to help the bird support itself.

 

The green woodpecker has an amazingly long tongue, rooted just above the eye, which runs right around the crown of the head before reaching the bill where it ends in a sticky tip. This is the ideal tool for winkling out insects from deep in crevices or holes.

 

Amazing Animals: The Otter

As the otter is always going in and out of water it needs a coat that can act as both mackintosh and warm blanket. This is exactly what its rich, thick fur provides. The coat is made up of two layers: the visible one is long and coarse, while the under-fur is fine, glossy and so thick that it is almost impossible to part.

 

When the otter submerges, the under-fur traps a layer of air bubbles, which insulates the animal by preventing water getting in. This layer also creates the characteristic silver colour that otters have when they are swimming under water and the trail of bubbles that marks their progress.

 

Amazing Animals: The Swallow

The old country saying that ‘one swallow doesn’t make a summer’ is more justified than many of its kind. For although the swallow is popularly regarded as a harbinger of summer, the first birds may appear from their South African wintering grounds (6,000 miles away) as early as the beginning of March.

 

Adult birds usually return to the same area where they bred the previous year and often to exactly the same site. When men lived in caves swallows probably did the same; nowadays they have adapted to nesting in buildings and under bridges. Over 150,000 insects are needed to raise a single young swallow to the fledgling stage.

 

Amazing Animals: The Kestrel

Hunting Kestrels are masters of the art of hovering, surpassing all other European birds of prey in their ability to remain motionless over one spot. Balancing the opposing forces of uplift and gravity, wings beating in short bursts, tail fanned out and moving from side to side like a rudder, the kestrel’s body gyrates. However, its head remains absolutely motionless with keen eyes focussed to pinpoint any movement in the grass below.

 

On seeing prey, the bird swoops, halts to check exact location, and then with half-closed wings and sharp talons outspread, it drops like a stone on the victim. The characteristic hovering method of hunting is used more in the summer months than in the winter.

 

Amazing Animals: The Pygmy Shrew

The pygmy shrew is Britain’s smallest mammal, not much bigger than a stag beetle. It has a head and body length of 40 to 60 mm and it weighs only 2.4 to 6.1 grams. It is so tiny that it is near the limit at which a warm-blooded animal can exist. If the animal were any smaller its body surface would be too extensive for its bulk and it would lose heat too rapidly to maintain a warm body temperature.

 

The shrew does in fact lose so much energy as body heat that it must constantly search for food, and will starve to death if it fails to eat for more than two hours.

 

Amazing Animals: The Jay

Acorns are the jay’s favourite food and during September and October it is common to see it searching for them beneath oak trees. It is fascinating watching the jay burying surplus acorns in its own emergency larder, either in woodland clearings under leaves and roots or buried in moss, to eat when food is scarce in the winter.

 

Even when snow covers the ground the jay remembers where it has buried the food, although a percentage of acorns are forgotten and survive to germinate into oak seedlings. As it carries the acorns 1-3 km away from where they were originally found, the jay is partly responsible for the dispersal of the oak tree.

 

Amazing Animals: The Sparrowhawk

Taking advantage of woodland and hedgerow cover, the sparrowhawk seizes its prey whilst it is still perched or just after it tries to fly away. Often it is killed by the pure impact. Usually it takes sparrows, chaffinches, thrushes and starlings, but it also attacks larger birds such as woodpigeons.

 

In the case of larger birds the impact is not always enough to kill them outright. The sparrowhawk attacks the prey and fights to bring it to the ground, pinning it down with its long powerful legs, before beginning to tear at it with its sharp hooked beak. The long legs keep the body of the sparrowhawk away from the flailing wings and stabbing beak of the prey as it tries to kill it.

 

Amazing Animals: The Pipistrelle Bat

One of the myths repeated about bats is that they are blind. This is very far from the truth. They can see, and use their eyes to help them find their way around when flying and feeding.

 

However, all our British Bats depend much more on their sense of hearing, by using a sonar system, evolved through millions of years, which enables them to ‘see with sound’. They send out short shouts, or pulses of sound that bounce back from objects in front of them to give a ‘sound picture’ of what is there.

If you shout under a bridge you will hear an echo. Bats can gain a lot of information as they listen for returning echoes. They judge such things as the distance, speed and size of the insect they are hunting. This system is called echolocation – locating things by their echoes.

 

Amazing Animals: The Stoat

The stoat is usually bigger than the weasel. However, this is an unreliable way to tell the difference. The characteristic black-tipped tail of the stoat is what you ought to look for. As stoats are bigger they are more often above ground than weasels and as a result they put themselves at risk from attack by birds of prey.

 

This is where the black-tipped tail comes in. If a stoat is caught in the open by a bird of prey, as the bird attacks the stoat will whisk its tail up at the last moment, to distract the bird’s attention and, more importantly, the attention of the bird’s talons.