In winter, the knots come by the thousands to feast on the riches in the intertidal mudflats of the Wash. These medium-size wading birds are rather dull and unprepossessing in appearance,…

Most people don’t go fishing at night—but most people aren’t fishing for bats. Jesse Barber and his colleagues are, in Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park. Barber studies…

What is a dog? Many people often think of dogs as kennel club creations. The purebred dog is man’s best friend, not the street dog. Man’s best friends live ubiquitously in the…

It takes a moment to register what’s missing from the elephants of Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique: Many of the females don’t have tusks. Usually, both male and female elephants…

Intelligence is shaped by the survival requirements that an animal must face during its everyday life, according to cognitive ecology. Some birds can remember where they buried tens…

Some people are confounded by actor Benedict Cumberbatch’s heartthrob status and compare his looks to an otter, bread dough, or an alien from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.…

There are two classes of words commonly applied to swifts: words about ethereality, and violent words. They are not contradictory. The violence makes the ethereal accessible. Swifts…

George Shiras the third (1859-1942) was captivated by the waters of Lake Superior at night, when sounds, shapes, and movements seemed more mysterious, more dramatic. Under cover of…

When I first adopted Lucas nine years ago from a cat rescue organization in Washington, D.C., his name was Puck. “Because he’s mischievous,” his foster mother said. Although…

Jerry Coyne is an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago. His research on population and evolutionary genetics has been widely published in professional and trade journals…