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Did you do a double take? This striking behaviour reflects the strong parental care (and perhaps patience) shown by female alligators during the early months of a juvenile’s life. After hatching, young alligators often remain close to their mother, who offers protection from predators and even other adult alligators. Resting on the adult’s head or back provides safety, warmth, and a vantage point above the water’s surface. Contrary to common belief, adult alligators do not indiscriminately attack everything nearby; feeding behaviour is context-specific. In this case, the adult recognises the juvenile as its own offspring and tolerates its presence, demonstrating an important survival strategy within the species.

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Snakes have been around for about 150 million years – which is a little longer than we have, that’s for sure.  One of the questions that snakes provoke from kids (of all sizes) is how on earth do they manage to eat things that look, to all intents and purposes, way, way bigger or longer than them?  How can this happen? It looks impossible.

Well, if you have been around for as long as snakes, you have the time to solve this kind of problem.  Plus of course, we sometimes look at problems from our perspective.  Our jaw bones are fused which means that we would not be able to get something ridiculously large in our mouths and down into our stomach (although I have seen people try at parties).  The jaw bones of the snake, on the other hand, are not fused.  They are still connected but by a ligament of such elasticity that their mouths can be dramatically stretched.  The gape can be large – even up to 180 degrees (and that has to be seen to be believed).  That always leads to another question – when a snake swallows something much bigger than itself, how come it doesn’t suffocate?

This and other questions are answered in the video below, a TED-Ed lesson by Niko Zlotnik, directed by Anna Benner and narrated by Adrian Dannatt.

There have been no beavers in the English county of Bedfordshire for four hundred years.  They were hunted out of existence throughout the country as farms expanded due to the increase in population and demand for more food.  There was, it seems, no place for beavers.  Incredibly, they were thought to do more damage than good. The beaver is of course one of the best ecosystem engineers that we have available to us.  The landowner, Charles Whitbread, had to get a licence (The Beaver Trust helped with the application) and build an enclosure for the beavers (which must have cost him quite a lot of money), so he is obviously particularly please to see his plan come to fruition, at Southill Estate. This video from the Wildwood Trust shows the release of the family of Eurasian beavers at the Estate.  What a wonderful day it must have been for everyone involved!

Beavers are among the most transformative agents of ecological recovery in the natural world. In the English landscape, where vast areas of wetland have been drained, channelled, and degraded over centuries, these remarkable animals quietly reverse the damage all on their own. By building dams and reshaping waterways, they slow the flow of water, reducing flood risk and allowing it to spread and soak into the land. In doing so, they create complex, thriving mosaics of ponds, marshes, and wet meadows.

These newly formed habitats support an extraordinary diversity of life, including insects and amphibians to birds and mammals - triggering a chain reaction of returning species. At the same time, beaver wetlands lock away significant amounts of carbon in waterlogged soils and vegetation, contributing to climate resilience. What makes this even more striking is that all of this is achieved without costly infrastructure or intensive human intervention (OK, once the new habitat is set up, but after 400 years some groundwork had to be done!). Beavers, working instinctively, accomplish landscape-scale restoration in ways that are not only effective, but also self-sustaining and economically efficient.

Let’s hope the beavers at Southill Estate thrive! Watch the video below.

Here’s the story of Doris the duck and her nine eggs, as told on the BBC’s new nature programme, Secret Garden.  Narrated by David Attenborough, it shows how the ducklings “talk” to each other and so trigger hatching at the same time, so that all nine get to experience life simultaneously.  Of course, the mother duck does not have the father around, and looking after  nine ducklings present her with a set of big challenges. The first one is getting the ducklings from the nest to the water.  As they jump down, you will  be forgiven for keeping fingers, toes and everything crossed, but thanks to the cushioning effect of their downy feathers, they all make it to where they want to go intact. Phew!  

Mum Doris is waiting at the bottom of the drop to escort them the last of the way to  the water, and once they make it, she gets them into hiding as soon as she can.  There are predators about, and she wants to make sure they all her ducklings survive!  This is a beautiful piece of film-making from the BBC and I look forward to watching the rest of the episodes on iPlayer.  Let’s keep our fingers (at least) crossed that Doris and her ducklings make it through!

The Greater Glider is cute, but not many people get the chance to see one in the eastern Australian wilds it calls home.  They are shy, solitary and nocturnal, yet one thing is certain – this endangered marsupial species has adorable down to a fine art.  It was, until 2020, believed to be a single species, with variations according to habitat.  After careful research using high-throughput genetic marker techniques, it was discovered that the genus Petauroides was not monotypic – it did not contain a solitary species, after all: there are three species of greater glider. Image

Southern Greater Glider

So, what does one do when this happens?  Keeping things simple and straightforward is always a good plan, so we now have the Northern, Central and Southern greater gliders – named after the regions of the range in which they are found.  Just to make matters a little complicated, each species comes in two forms.  The central greater glider is usually silvery-brown, while the southern greater glider is especially well known for having both dark and pale grey-white forms (the variation seems to be a normal colour morph rather than a sign that they are different sexes or ages. In other words: some are naturally darker, some paler).