Animal of the Week, November 13, 2011 -- spoonbilled sandpiper

A couple of years ago, Chris Packham—a man who is currently peppering BBC's Autumnwatch series with titles of songs by The Damned—suggested that the giant panda should be allowed to go to extinction as the effort to save this evolutionary dead end would detract from more achievable conservation goals.

Recently, Murray Rudd of the University of York, UK did a survey to find out what conservation scientists thought of the idea. Turns out that 60% of scientists were in favour of some sort of triage system that might see some of the most endangered charismatic species put on palliative care until they breathe their last. Though specific species weren't named, one might guess at some of the species that might be included, they'd be the really rare ones that cost a lot to maintain—giant pandas, tigers, Javan rhinoceroses perhaps... And perhaps this week's animal, Eurynorhynchus pygmeus (the spoonbilled sandpiper).

As part of an effort to save the small wading birds from extinction, 13 individuals have been brought to the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust at Slimbridge, Gloucestershire, from the breeding grounds in Chukotka—a peninsular in Russia's  far northeast (so far east that a bit of it is in the western hemisphere). With just fewer than 100 breeding pairs, habit loss and hunting on migratory routes to their southeast Asian wintering grounds could drive these birds to extinction in the wild in the next few years. Conservationists hope that if they can educate the people who hunt the birds and protect breeding grounds and stop-off points on the migratory routes they will one day be able to release the offspring of these captive birds back into the wild.


For the large part, these birds look like most other waders (small, brown, speckled, and indistinguishable to non-serious birders), but their odd spatulate bill used to filter small invertebrates from silt in shallow water sets them apart.

And herein lies the problem with a conservation triage scenario—people, including scientists, care more about certain things than others. Your passionate bird conservationists will want to save the spoon billed sandpiper, your tiger conservationist the tiger, whereas your scuba diver will probably want to protect coral reefs and let the sandpipers shuffle off to the last post. Triage might be a rational idea, but I guess consensus might be difficult to achieve.

Animal of the Week September 5, 2011 -- Come home cow

So, I have done 170 editions of animal of the week since the end of 2004, and yes, it is a well acknowledged fact that 52 weeks x 7 years far exceeds 170. A far more worrying statistic is that some BOFFINS recently estimated that there are 8.7 million species of plant and animal species in the world, and about 7.7 million of those were animals. So, if I were to feature every single animal that probably exists in the world as an Animal of the Week it would take me almost 150 000 years to do so. And that would rely on my doing one a week! Pigs (already done, so can't even tick a cheaky one off the list) might fly.

Right, I'd better crack on.

Yvonne

This week's animal is Yvonne the cow, or rather, in her honour. Given that I have so many animals to cover it's a bit foolish to do one that already got a look in (day 8 of course), but who can resist? Yvonne's excursion around the woods of Bavaria captured the headlines in Germany and beyond when she escaped the truck to the abattoir on May 24, and her capture captured more headlines on September 2, when she was captured. At first the farmer wanted Yvonne back, then German authorities wanted her shot. Then animal lovers around the world wanted her alive, and authorities decided to leave her be. Thankfully Yvonne was taken alive given a tasty dose of tranqs when she went to join another farmer's herd for company. The chap who caught her got a 100 000 euro award from a German Newspaper, and Gut Aiderbichl animal sanctuary in Austria, paid 600 euros to have her as a star attraction.

Aurochs on the rocks at Lascaux, Prof Sax

Yvonne's frolics in the Bavarian forests echoed those of her wild forebears. Cows are descended from aurochs (Bos primigenius) -- enormous wild cattle that from 250 000 years ago roamed from Portugal to Vladivostok and from Scandinavia to Egypt and Kerala. The ancient cattle feature heavily in Stone Age cave paintings and were likely important in the folklore of Eurasian hunter gatherers. Sometime not too many millennia after 10 000 years ago when sedentary human civilisations began to grow, they were one of the first animals to be domesticated. At least two populations of wild aurochs were domesticated, one in India giving rise to the humped cattle or zebu, and one in the middle east or Europe giving rise to cows like Yvonne. Habitat loss, hunting, and diseases spread by domestic cattle caused the populations of aurochs to dwindle and by the early 1600s just a small population remained in the forests of central Europe, the last individual died in 1627 in Poland.

Having survived into fairly recent history we've good accounts of what aurochs looked like -- 1.75 m at the shoulder (the largest domestic cattle reach about 1.5 m); the males black with a light stripe down their spine, the females red; and long lyre shaped forward sweeping horns. The genes of aurochs remain in domestic cattle, and in the early 1900s the Heck brothers tried to reawaken those genes by crossing together some of the more primitive European domestic breeds by breeding Heck cattle, a recreated aurochs, now used in some rewilding projects. The wild gene obviously still runs strong in some of the tamer domestic cows without this back-breeding, as Yvonne clearly shows.

What the Heck?! Walter Frisch

Some people have suggested that Yvonne could sense that she was about to be packed off to the abattoir and that is why she 'went aurochs'. It's a common story that some animals destined for the butcher's slab can sense their fate -- as a child I once sported an impressive black eye after a sheep we were trying to load onto a truck to the slaughterhouse leapt over my head (at least that's what my parents had me tell social services).

Animal of the week August 22, 2011 -- Funky monkey

Despite repeated promises to send more regular animals, I am red faced with embarrassment at my failure to do so, but it has been a busy summer and I've been rushing around exhausting myself till I am blue in the face -- but not as red and not a blue as the face of this week's (month's) animal of the week, Mandrillus sphinx (mandrill)

Mandrills are perhaps the most striking primates for several reasons. Not only are they they the largest monkeys, with the biggest males reaching a weight of 54 kg, they are also the primates with the greatest sexual dimorphism (difference in body size between the sexes) -- with females typically reaching just 14 kg -- just over a quarter the size of the largest males and half the size of the average male (although for extreme sexual dimorphism, see the green spoon worm). But what mandrills are best known for are their brightly coloured faces and bottoms.

Both the front and rear ends of mandrills are shaded with vivid blues and reds, the colours are brightest in the dominant breeding males. Mandrills are rather poorly understood creatures and the precise functions of the bright skin colours are unknown, though they no doubt help communicate since the intensity of colours increases not only with sexual dominance but also with agitation and excitement. Mandrills live in forests in Cameroon, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea and Congo (Brazzaville) where the bright colours and a scent gland on their chests might help communication in dense vegetation. Mandrill groups typically consist of up to 20 females and their offspring led by one dominant male, although several of these groups may frequently associate with each other in large gatherings called hordes -- some hordes may number over 1000 making them the largest gatherings of non-human primates.

Other primates with bright or noticeable rear ends include drills (the closest relatives of mandrills, which lack the brightly coloured faces), baboons, and chimpanzees -- baboons have large red backsides all the time to create a cushion for upright sitting and female chimpanzees to advertise fertility. Another primate with similarities between its arse and face (in terms of appearence and what comes out) is David Cameron.

Figure courtesy of Robert Young, wikimedia commons

Animal of the week July 25, 2011 -- look whose genome

This week's animal hit the headlines (well, the science headlines) a few weeks back when it joined the list of species to have had their genomes sequenced. This list is rapidly growing, but still the effort involved in sequencing a genome is such that only the most simple or most interesting organisms are sequenced -- over 200 bacterial strains with their relatively small genomes have been sequenced, but the number of complex organisms sequenced remains small, with people focusing on the most scientifically interesting.

Humans and our closest relatives the great apes have been sequenced, scientific model organisms such as fruit flies, mice, and dogs too. But why would anyone want to sequence the genome of Heterocephalus glaber (naked mole rats)?

You might not think it to look at these hideous looking fossorial rodents -- kind of like an old man's shriveled hairy prepuce with the teeth of Esther Rantzen (and not in the way the old man would agree to) -- but they are a well-spring of scientific intrigue.

For a start, naked mole rats (from the Horn of Africa) and their larger furrier cousins Damaraland mole rats (from Namibia), are the only mammals to live live in societies like those of bees, ants, wasps, and termites with a single reproductive female and workers who do not breed but gather food to feed the queen and the pups (so called eusocial societies). Or rather than feeding the pups the tubers that the workers gather in their underground foraging, the workers feed the youngest with their own droppings -- the eating of droppings (or coprophagy) is not uncommon among rodents, rabbits do it, and another former animal of the week, the mountain beaver does it.

As well as being one of only two eusocial mammal species, naked mole rats are the longest lived rodents. They can live for up to 30 years -- a true rat of the same size would be lucky to live for three. Part of the reason for their longevity is likely their low metabolic rate, they don't regulate their own body temperature in the same way as most mammals, relying on the sheltered environment of their extensive tunnels and their hairlessness to do that for them, and in times of hardship when food and water are scarce they can lower their metabolisms even more -- perhaps a good thing for them right now given the situation in their home range.

A low metabolism is also likely an adaptation to the low oxygen environment of their underground homes. The high concentration of carbon dioxide in their tunnel networks would likely end up an irritant to many other animals as the gas would convert to acid, but luckily naked mole rats feel no pain: another fascinating facet of these animals. And then, their front teeth, which they use to dig burrow are on the outside of their lips, so they can gnaw away at the east African subsoil without getting mouthfuls of dirt.

But best of all, why their genes are of most interest to scientists, and another reason for their long lives: they do not get cancer. In decades of study not a single cancer death has been observed in the species -- the possession of two different cancer suppressor proteins (where most mammals have only one) helps prevent cancers. But other mechanisms may be involved in protection from cancer and longevity, and perhaps this genome sequencing will help lay bare the naked mole rats' secrets. Utterly ugly, utterly unlovely, but very very interesting.

Animal of the Week June 6, 2011 -- Is it a bird? Yes.

Sorry for the hiatus. Since last I wrote I've moved house and been to New Orleans. Although The Big Easy didn't flood, tornadoes in the southern states meant a days delay to my return and a very very bumpy flight from New Orleans to Chicago. Not something that this week's animal of the week would experience -- by flying only in the best conditions, Anser indicus (bar-headed geese) are able to cross the Himalayas under their own steam, flying at heights of 10 km, in just 1 day.

These pretty, small geese are some of the highest flying birds, and scientists have long wondered how they could scale the Himalayas. The problem is not just the height of the mountains, but also the low density air making it harder to gain lift, with less output from each wingbeat. People had thought that the geese used tailwinds that whip up the Himalayas during the daytime to help them on their way, but a new piece of research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA shows that they mostly fly at night, mostly. By flying when the air is still, the the geese avoid potentially dangerous air currents that would blow them off course or even cause injury, allowing them a non-turbulent, predictable journey -- pretty important in this low oxygen environment where mistakes could cost a bird its life.

The geese breed on the plateaus of central Asia, but overwinter in India. Their trip across the Himalayas is one of the most remarkable migrations in the natural world. Not only have they evolved to fly at the right time, but other adaptations to flying through the low-oxygen, low density air at 33 000 feet include haemoglobin with high oxygen affinity and wings with a larger surface area than those of other geese of their weight.

For those of you wishing to know what happened in the AV vote for the frog, turn out was so low that no decision cold be reached...unfortunately the same didn't happen in real life.

Animal of the Week April 25, 2011 -- AVnimal of the week

Many is the time that people have tried to make suggestions for animals of the week. But I've not once succumbed despite please from close friends, celebrities, and my niece and nephew -- AOTW is my autocracy. But this week, just this week, I'm injecting a little democracy. And I'm going to ask you to vote for your preferred species. Let's start with three species, Pelophylax lessonae (pool frog), Pelophylax ridibundus (marsh frog), and Pelophylax esculentus (edible frog).

Marsh frog

The pool frog and the marsh frog are the descendants of a single species that was divided into two populations when glaciers covered much of Europe during the last ice age. When Europe's glaciers receded, the two populations emerged from their refuges in southern Europe as distinct species. The marsh frog larger with longer legs and the pool frog with white vocal sacks and short legs. But although they were distinct species, where they met they could interbreed, and they did, producing the hybrid edible frog.

Edible frog

But the edible frog -- intermediate size, intermediate legs, a compromise of the two -- actually behaves as a (slightly peculiar) species in its own right, unlike many other hybrids which are infertile and can't breed. The offspring of two adult edible frogs are typically fatally deformed, but when female edible frogs reproduce with males of either of the other two species they produce viable edible frogs. The situation is complicated further by the fact that in northern Denmark and southern Sweden, edible frogs seem to reproduce quite happily without the help of the parent species.

Pool frog

The pool frog is native to the UK, but both other species exist here as introductions. Mostly the species eat flies, dragonflies, crickets, worms, and other invertebrates. The marsh frogs, the largest, can eat other amphibians and small mammals! These three frogs form the green-frog species complex. All very typical frogs, fairly green and largely aquatic, living in ponds, lakes, and slow flowing water -- let's call these three mainstream frogs.

To increase the democratic pool, let's recall the other two anurans to have featured as animals of the week, the mouth-brooding platypus frog and the brutish, invasive cane toad.

Perhaps you like the smallness of the pool frog, or you appreciate the fact that it made it to the UK on its own. Perhaps large size and long legs float your boat and the marsh frog would be your favourite. Perhaps you think that you like the quirkiness of the middle-ground edible frog. What do you think other readers of AOTW will like? Perhaps you really don't like the bastard hybrid edible frog, but like their parent species. Do green frogs just not do it for you at all and you'd rather plump for a cane toad or a platypus frog.

Well, you don't have to select just one, you can rank them all in order of preference from your favourite 1 lo least favourite 5. You can select just your favourite one; or you can select just two, three, or four. The frog with the fewest first preferences (1s) in the first round will be eliminated, and the votes recast, counting the second preferences of those whose first preference has been eliminated.

The ballot sheet is randomly assigned as

A: Marsh

B: Edible

C: Cane

D: Platypus

E: Pool

 Let me know your preferences for anuran animals of the week by emailing me at animal_oftheweek@yahoo.co.uk, by twittering @animaloftheweek (please #aotw), or by posting a blog comment?

Choose your frog by an alternative voting system: just like the Conservative party did theirs!

Animal of the Week April 11, 2011 -- Doctor, doctor, you look like a fish

Yamada Kazuki

It can never be said I am not riding the crest of coming fads... it's only taken me five years since the first fish spa opened in Japan to feature Garra rufa (doctor fish, nibble fish, kangal fish) as animal of the week!

Also known as reddish log suckers, in the rivers of their homelands in the Middle East, these small members of the carp family use their sucker-like mouths to hoover up algae, detritus, and invertebrates. In aquariums, these fish help prevent algal build up. But if you keep em hungry, these fish happily view human skin as a feeding surface, and they rasp off dead and diseased skin. 

This fish massage therapy has been used for many years in Turkey, where patients have visited warm springs to have the fish nibble off their dermatitis and psoriasis. In the past few years the use of fish in beauty therapy has proliferated, with spas using the logsuckers -- although marketing materials show a preference for the name "doctor fish" for some reason -- opening up in Japan, Korea, the USA, Europe, and in 2010 the Sheffield, UK. In the USA, cosmetology (no, I didn't make that up -- someone else did) regulators have decreed that fish therapy should not be used because their code requires that equipment is sterilised after use, and you can't really autoclave a fish. Hmmmmmm, whitebait.

Most fish therapy involves simply dipping your feet in a tank of fish and having them pick away the dead skin, corns, and athletes' foot -- that's what you can get in the market at Camden from time to time, where the concerns about not being able to sterilise the tanks between treatment really strike home. I put a Ben Goldacre mask on for a moment and looked for mentions of Garra rufa in PubMed to see if any studies had been done on their use in the treatment of skin diseases. To date, one pilot study was archived showing that a course of fish therapy dramatically improved moderate to severe psoriasis... well, a course of fish therapy combined with UVA treatment... combined with UVA treatment and post UVA massage with shea butter and aloe vera... well fish therapy improved psoriasis (when given with UVA and unguent) in a self-selected self-reporting sample of 67 patients in a study published in the journal Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1697753/?tool=pubmed).  Since 2006, nothing.

The interest in fish "therapy" grows unabated, and you can even buy home kits. In Singapore, a fish massage tank start-up kit will set you back just 175 Singapore dollars (£85). And why wouldn't you get one? See this testimony from one happy customer:

"Now I'm able to enjoy fish spa everyday with my family members. We have so much fun feeding the fish with our leg while watching our favourite television programme. By the way, my skin is now extremely soft and smooth."

http://www.yourdoctorfishspa.com/ 

Animal of the Week April 4, 2011 -- One does not a summer make

Malene Thyssen

Taking a step back from what I've got in my garden this week... I've not yet seen a single one of this week's animal in my garden, although it is only a matter of time before I see Hirundo rustica (barn swallow) if not in the tiny space out back, then skimming over the top of the gardens or flitting inches from the ground in Regents Park or Hampstead Heath.

Swallows are one of those species of impressively aerial birds including martins and swifts that arrive in spring to feast on the emerging flying insects as they raise their families. One way to tell the birds apart is the place in the air column they choose to feed. Sickle-winged swifts fly high overhead, house martins swoop around above rooftops, swallows often feed inches above the grass of meadows or the surface waters of rivers and lakes their buoyant graceful flight bringing them impossibly close to crashing in pursuit of supper. Close to, swallows are easily distinguished by their oily blue back and their red throats.

I saw swallows a month ago in Seville, bouncing off the surface of the Guadalquivir, and it seems that now they have caught up with me and made it to the UK, with the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust twitter feed telling me they've arrived at the Barnes Wetlands Centre in south west London.

The barn swallow is one of the most widespread birds in the world, with few countries where they are not to be seen at some point during the year. The birds follow the spring north, nesting from north Africa, Mexico, and northern India all the way up to the arctic circle. Then, as the nights draw in in the north, they head back south to Central and South America, sub-Saharan Africa, south Asia and northern Australia. Birds arriving in England now may have come all the way from Cape Town.

Individual birds cover over 11 000 km in their migration each year. And the estimated worldwide population of 190 million has a range that covers 51 million square-kilometres, which is more than a third of the total land surface area of the earth.

Sorry Aristotle, perhaps one does not a summer make, but all over the world 190 million swallows do.

Animal of the Week March 21, 2011 -- What else have I got in my garden?

After the foxes a couple of weeks ago, which have now quietened down a bit (although my nights are not without gekkering, and the foxes are sometimes noisy too), I thought I'd return to the theme of what noisy bloody animals have I got in my "garden" (a scrubby patch of paving with a couple of huge unregarded trees undermining the foundations of the property in which I rent a room).*

The foxes can still be heard scrapping some nights until about 3 am, at which point the "dawn" chorus of blackbirds, robins, blue tits, great tits, and wrens takes over. As Eos wraps her rosy fingers around the residential towerblocks of the Brandon Estate, the crows, oddly social as they are in London, join in with their percussive conversational cawing. With the sun up, from high atop the television ariels seagulls begin their evocative mewing, which despite being distinctly lacking in proximity to the briny deep summons a whiff of ozone to the nostrils, or perhaps that's just my bedroom.

So far, so native. But a recent addition to the local cacophony, and perhaps the loudest part of it is this week's animal of the week Psittacula krameri (ring-necked parakeet). For people living around southwest London ring-necked parakeets have been a familiar sight for a few decades now. But recently they have spread from their stronghold around Richmond, first west to Windsor and now north and east through the rest of London. They are now a common sight on Hampstead Heath and in the past couple of years they've colonised more central parks including Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens and even the grandest of all the parks, Kennington Park.

Ring-necked parakeets are native to a great swathe the old world from the foothills of the Himalayas to the forests of West Africa, but their closest natural home to Europe is the middle east. One -- likely apocryphal -- story of the birds' arrival in the UK puts their origins with the release of parakeets used in the filming of the African Queen at Shepperton Studios in Surrey. But given that parakeets are found in other major European cities including those in France, the Netherlands, and Spain (recently seen in both Madrid and Seville by yours truly), they are most likely descended from escaped pets.

Whatever their origins, the ring-necked parakeets seem to be here to stay. With tens of thousands of birds breeding in the UK, and sporadic sightings all over the country, if they haven't made it to you yet, it's perhaps only a matter of time before their raucous noisy fast flight becomes a familiar sight, certainly around major urban areas.  The birds are unmistakable: noisy, bright green, pointed wings and a long tail make them quite unlike anything else you are likely to see, and if they live near you, you will notice them in no time.

As with any introduced species, there's a fear that they might upset the ecosystems in which they find themselves outcompeting native birds, especially when they expand in such number. But then London and the home counties to the west are already so disturbed by human activity, perhaps that is how they have managed to establish themselves so successfully in our gardens, which, after all, are home to many alien species already -- the parakeets in my back garden sit in an enormous eucalyptus tree and an out of control fig.


*Not for long. Once again I need to move since the landlord is selling this place. If you hear of anyone with a room anywhere in London, please do let me know.

Animal of the Week March 14, 2011 -- World's smallest primate sucks bugs

Having not followed Hollyoaks for the past couple of months, you might feel that my opinions on what qualifies as good television aren't really worth much. But recently, using the BBC iPlayer, I watched a quite marvellous hour featuring the man, the legend, David Attenborough.

Following on from the Madagascar series, Dave was making a return trip to the world's fourth largest island ostensibly to investigate the story of the extinct elephant bird. On an earlier visit for the Zoo Quest series in the 1960s, Attenborough had been handed the fragments of an almost complete egg that was laid by the largest bird ever to have lived: its eggs had a circumference of 1 m and a volume equivalent to 160 chicken eggs. Although David did have his egg dated (about 1400 years old) and had a look at the reasons why the birds might have become extinct (climate change, habitat loss, human's eating their eggs -- the olden-day Madagascans must have been stacked), the show was far more a return journey to the island he had first visited 50 years earlier than an investigation of the bird. Contrasting new footage with old, there was a quite magical sequence in which Attenborough filmed indris, whereas for Zoo Quest to film these lemurs had taken days of painstaking observation for a few minutes film, now David was able to get up close to a study group. The obvious joy on his face as an adult indri reached down and took leaves from his hand was a pleasure to behold. Anyway, yeah, watch it, it's on iPlayer and it's great.

Mark Carwardine

But it's not the elephant bird that's animal of the week, and it's not the largest living lemur the indri, no it's the smallest lemur, indeed the smallest primate Microcebus berthae (Madam Berthe's mouse lemur), which Attenborough also encounters as one of the new species not known when he first visited the island. Weighing just 30 g and measuring only 9 cm in length, it's no surprise that Madame Berthe's mouse lemur was discovered in just 2000 in Kirindy Mitea National Park.

In fact, many of the mouse lemurs have only been described in the past 20 years. Until 1977, all mouse lemurs were thought to be once species, the grey mouse lemur. But then some primatologist with a lot of time on his or her hands decided that some of the mouse lemurs in the south-west of Madagascar were more red than the others and recognised the reddish-grey mouse lemur as a species distinct from the grey mouse lemur. Genetic investigations in the 1990s and 2000s really opened the floodgates and now 17 species are recognised including Jolly's, Margot Marsh's, Claire's, and the smallest, this week's AOTW Madame Berthe's.

Whereas the grey and reddish-grey mouse lemurs are fairly widespread and resistant to extinction for the time being. Madame Berthe's and several of the others are found only in very limited areas and so are vulnerable to habitat loss. Mouse lemurs are omnivores and eat anything from tree sap, to insects, lizards and fruit, Madame Berthe's is, however, a specialist and obtains 50% of its food from an unusual source, the sticky secretions left behind by one species of plant-sucking bug.

Animal of the Week February 28, 2011 -- Will you stop that bleeding gekkering!

Pawel Ryszawa

Snowdrops finally out, the first daffodils just in bloom, not seen much in the way of crocuses yet -- the harbingers of spring are a little late this year. Apparently it was the cold spell in December that's caused a little delay. But noisily making up for lost time are this week's animals of the week, Vulpes vulpes (red foxes), which have been engaging in the highly vocal activities of renewal well into the wee hours of the morning in my back garden, and I JUST WANT TO SLEEP!

Red foxes are the most widespread species of carnivore: naturally distributed across almost all of Eurasia (besides the far south of the landmass), North Africa, and Canada, Alaska and the northern and eastern USA, they have also established themselves throughout much of Australia where they were introduced to establish fox hunting, but instead have helped bring many species of native animals to the brink of extinction (doh!).

With over 44 subspecies, red foxes vary greatly across their range, from large, bulky, deep ginger brutes in the far north, to slight, light-furred, large-eared desert races in the far south.  This adaptability has enabled them to fit in with the changing environment created by humans, and urban foxes are now very familiar to many people. Most of the UK's several billion urban foxes live in SE17 London where they gather for enormous orgies in my back garden as the spring approaches, and throughout the rest of the year terrify locals making their merry way home late at night by staring at them, eyes shining out of the gloom, just staring, judging if there are enough of them to overpower you. It's only a matter of time.*

Meetings between just one male and one female can lead to the sort of noise you'd expect if you invited a bunch of centaurs to a Lapith wedding. Foxes greet each other with a "wow wow wow" bark; a subordinate approaches a dominant animal they produce a long squeal with additional barks and grunting; the process of reproduction will involve a range of barking, squealing, huffing, and then. When the two animals become locked together by their genitals after the mating (this really does happen), the increasing fractiousness of the couple leads to combinations of all of the above.

And then, when the meetings are less amicable, there's the gekkering. A strange, harsh, mechanical stuttering whir. I've seen a gekkering fox, what I presume was a vixen was rebuffing the advances of an unappealing dog and she was stood frozen, hackles up, head down, mouth fixed with teeth bared, body convulsing as she produced a noise a bit like a slowed down football rattle.  Whether the word really exists, or has simply been made up by a wikipedia wag, I'm not sure, but gekkering works for me -- I've often tried to describe it to people before and failed, so I think it probably needs it's own word, and gekkering does for me. But please, enough now foxes. Can't you give it a rest? Or just go somewhere else.

*foxes pose very little danger to humans, despite isolated attacks on babies in Hackney, they are unlikely to attack people -- happily dining on discarded fried chicken and dead pigeons.

Animal of the Week January 2, 2011

Hello! 2011, can you imagine that?!

I hope you all had a marvellous Christmas and New Year. Many thanks to mummy Hayward for providing many slain animals for me to get fat on over the Christmas period, to Lucy (where Animal of the Week started) for a whizz-bang new year's eve party, and to Peter for allowing a bunch of gorgeous hot messes into his flat on new year's day. Has Jason slept yet?

In the final days of 2010, the UK was gripped by the icy fingers of winter, causing the country to break down. Planes could not take off, trains could not run, public services collapsed, and my mother broke her leg on some ice as literally centimetres of snow smothered our once great nation. While winter certainly has its downsides, the cold weather provides prime opportunities to see some of our wonderful wildlife with little effort. From the icicle fringed end-terrace of maison Hayward in rural Oxforshire, ma and I watched a couple of roe deer hanging out in the the primary school playing field. The bird feeders in the garden attracted great, blue, and long-tailed tits, dunnocks, chaffinches, robins, and a pied wagtail. The cotoneaster bush and another tree (identity unknown, I am no botanist) laden with fat red berries attracted more blackbirds than you could shake a stick at. Our winter-visiting thrushes were represented by 20 or so redwings and eventually, after much anticipation, a fat fieldfare. But none of these is animal of the week, what could possibly top such a wonderful list of wildlife? This week's animal is Bombycilla garrulus (waxwing).

John Harrison at http://flickr.com/photos/15512543@N04/

Typically just a hundred or so waxwings arrive in the UK from northern Europe in late autumn and early winter, hanging around Scotland and the east coast, eating the red berries of cotoneasters, pyracanthas, and rowans. But in years when they breed very successfully, waxwings can arrive sooner and in much larger numbers; these years are known as explosion years, and 2010 was such a year. Thousands of birds arrived in late October and have spread throughout the country.

Having heard reports of the large number of waxwings and given the combination of snow and heavy loaded fruit trees I was hopeful that I'd see one of these handsome birds. I'd been down for a couple of days a week before just after the first snow (and my mother) fell, but no waxwings then. The trees outside the kitchen window remained resolutely waxwing free as I prepared the ham on Christmas eve, as I stuffed, basted, the turkey, assembled pigs in blankets, boiled the sprouts, and steamed the pudding on the day itself. But then, as I did the washing up, I spotted an unmistakable outline, the impressive crest marking a wonderful bird. I had a chance to get a good sight of the bird, including the bright flashes of yellow, the rosy crest, and the striking wing and tail markings, before the solitary individual was spooked by something and took to the sky with the cloud of redwings. Unlike the redwings, the waxwing didn't return.

I last saw waxwings perhaps more than 20 years ago, then it was a flock of 20 or so birds feeding on trees just down the road from where I spent Christmas. Seeing just one was no less of a treat. If not looking out for waxwings, you might dismiss them casually as the similarly-sized starling, but keep your eyes peeled over the next few weeks as they really are lovely birds, and it may be a while before you stand such a good chance of seeing them.