Dogs have been at people’s side for longer than any other animal. But a lot of their actions can only be explained by their past before they were tamed by humans. For example, you may have noticed that a dog turns round three times on the spot before setting down to sleep – this may be because its ancestors had …

Most people think that cats purr to show pleasure or contentment. Purring is a king of low continuous rattling hum, but it is nothing to do with a cat’s real voice, for the vibration frequency is far lower that that of the vocal chords. In fact, a mother cat uses purring to call her kittens to feed. At birth kitten …

When someone falls from the fourth or fifth floor, and survives, we call it a miracle. When a cat falls from that height, we watch astonished as it lands on all fours, pauses, then straighten up and walks away looking just a little fazed. What would you call this, a miracle or God’s grace? Any guesses why cats survive while …

The ‘powder’ on the wings of moths and butterflies is really a layer of any, colored scales, which overlap each other almost, like the tiles on a roof. If you touch the wings with finger the “powder” is rubbed off, leaving the wing more or less transparent and colorless. The scales are generally like the shape of a hand tapered …

Birds preen themselves to clean and waterproof their feathers, to maintain their general health and to keep them lying smooth and neat. This preening or grooming starts as the nestling’s feathers are breaking out of their sheaths. The young bird spends a great deal of time combing the feathers with its bill and freeing them from bits of sheath and …

Not all birds migrate, but a lot of them do, two of the best known British migrating birds being the swallow and the house martin, which fly south in the autumn to spend the winter in parts of Africa. The reason they do this is because of the need for food, of which there is a great shortage in northern …

Birds which peck grain and other seeds also peck grit to help them to digest these hard foods. Because birds have no teeth, the work of chewing, which would require muscles and strong jaw bones, is done by the gizzard. This makes it possible for the skull to be delicate in structure and therefore light in weight. Grit is taken …

There are two kinds of beavers: the American and the European. The European beaver, found in Norway, Poland, Germany and France, lives in burrows. But the American beaver builds a dam across a stream or lake to construct his home or lodge. The lodges are made of huge logs of trees. The American beaver constructs solid dams and lodges because …

Bats use high-pitched sounds to find their way about. They are nocturnal animals. That is they move about by night. So they have developed their hearing to such an extent that they can find their way by a method known as echo-location. The blind-flying abilities of bats were first studied by Lazzaro Spallanzani (1729-1799). He surgically removed the eyeballs from …

The dodo, a large clumsy bird, which could not fly used to live on the island of Mauritius near Africa. But European settlers changed the dodo’s habitat and took away its supply of food. By 1681, there were no living dodos. It was extinct. Many other kinds of animals and birds have become extinct in recent years. There are many …