The page cannot be found

The robin, both European and American is famous for its red breast.  The subject of nursery rhymes and Christmas cards the male of the species is resplendent in red. Australia, too, has a robin.  One might, of course, expect this particular country to produce something a little different: it has form, after all.  So, step forward the pink robin, Australia’s passerine of pulchritudinous pinkness.


Just in case you think this is some kind of practical joke, here's a rare and short video of the pink robin.

This very interesting video is all about the Red Panda and how it got its name.  You might think that it was a straightforward process, but that isn’t really the case with beautiful animal which belongs in a class of its own (quite literally).  Of course, this tells the story of how it got its English name.  And it made me wonder – what do the Chinese call both species of panda?  As you will have seen from the video, panda is not a word of Chinese origin. Image Credit

The answer?  Well the Chinese call the giant panda 大熊猫 (dà xióng māo).  If we break that down, 大 (dà) = big, 熊 (xióng) = bear, and 猫 (māo) = cat. So literally, it means “big bear cat.”  That's a beautifully pragmatic name, even if it is scientifically inaccurate (but they probably didn't care about taxonomy). So what of the red panda? The answer is glorious! 小熊猫 (xiǎo xióng māo), literally means “small bear cat.”  It makes me think that Chinese is a very sensible language, far more so than English.  So one panda is the big bear cat and the other is the small bear cat. Ta da.

I digress – take a look at the video which explains, very humourously, how the Red Panda got its name (and other assorted facts).

Did you know that there are over 50,000 spiders on planet Earth today?  Just imagine if there were that many different species of human on the planet.  Good grief!  As well as being one of the most successful types of animal of all time, there are many questions the average person in the street couldn’t answer about arachnids.  For example, were spiders around at the time of the dinosaurs? When did the ability to produce silk happen and was it used in the same way as spiders use it today?  Where on the planet did spiders first emerge?  And are there any species of spiders that have weathered the millennia and are still with us today after millions of years?

All these questions and many more are answered in this fantastic video from Animated Earth (otherwise known as Peter Schumaker and Tristan Reed).  It really is one of the best natural history animations that I have seen over the last few years.  As such it answered a few questions about spiders for me that I didn’t even realise that I wanted to ask – such as how likely are spiders to survive an extinction event?

Watch the video below:

Dogs like nothing better than when something a little out of the ordinary happens. So, when the world has turned white one morning and the water has gone hard and slippery, you can’t blame a dog for getting a little excited, can you?

At first you might be a little unsteady on your paws but when there is a new and interesting experience to be had then a few slips and slides hardly matter.