Millipedes are bizarre in a dozen different ways, but they don’t bite and curl up when threatened
Millipedes don’t have 1,000 legs – though biologists once found one with 1,306 legs hundreds of feet below ground – but if you are afraid of getting bitten, it’s centipedes that worry you, not these rather helpful nighttime dentrivores.
There are still things you don’t know about cats, from paw preference to the meaning of ‘catling’
There are 220 million pet cats worldwide and even more strays, but that doesn’t mean you know why, how they get into odd places or – brace yourself – the reason street urchins would bring cats to the doors of a Harvard lab in the 1890s.
Red-winged blackbirds are still signs of spring, but flocks rely on wetlands remaining plentiful
Many people worry – and rightly so – about deforestation, but wetlands where red-winged blackbirds live are disappearing three times faster than forests.
The early bird that gets the worm? It’s a robin.
American robins really are early birds. Besides being the earliest bird to start singing in the morning, they are one of the first to lay eggs in the spring.
The year’s wild cicada spring won’t be felt here, but we still get our share of these bizarre insects
The cicadas we get every summer are probably dog-day cicadas – the largest in North America, with a buzzing drone that can reach 100 decibels, as loud as a hair dryer or a subway train, though few of us ever see them.
Ravens are plotters and alliance-buildings among birds, able to outwit traps and plan
Despite having a brain about the size of a walnut, a raven’s cognitive ability is comparable to a great ape’s. Some even refer to ravens as “feathered apes.”
American woodcocks were so craved by hunters that the cocker spaniel was bred to find the kills
As recently as the 1970s, hunters killed 1.5 million woodcock yearly, and to this day hunters and archers throughout Massachusetts hunt woodcock during its hunting season from early October through late November.
Sharp-shinned hawks, stalkers of the bird world, use all their tricks to gobble smaller prey whole
Ninety percent of a sharp-shinned hawk’s diet is small birds, from the size of a sparrow to the size of a robin, and the larger females might even prey upon a pigeon or dove. Adult hawks need to eat four or five birds each day.
Eastern coyote maybe watching from the weeds succeeded through mixing with wolves and dogs
Eastern coyotes appear in a range of colors from dark brown to reddish to grayish and even white – from a recessive gene also found in golden retrievers like the one that in Newfoundland that ran off with a coyote in 2001 and was never seen again.
These visiting warblers will get a name change; dropping ‘Townsend’ can’t happen soon enough
What was this cute little songbird doing here in Cambridge? No one knows, but it got people’s attention – and now we’re paying attention to a very different aspect of ornithology and a sometimes grim history.
