Animals news

• Cockatoos show appetite for dips when eating bland food, find scientists

  10-02-2025 17:00
  
  Birds observed going to lengths to flavour food, with particular penchant for blueberry-flavoured soy yoghurt dipWhether you savour Ottolenghi’s recipes or prefer a feast from Nigella’s cookery books, humans enjoy mixing flavours and textures when preparing food. Now research suggests some cockatoos do too.Researchers have previously discovered that some of the birds dunk dry rusks in water before eating them, just as some people enjoy dunking a biscuit in tea, apparently reflecting
  
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• ‘Total chaos’: Monkey blamed for nationwide power cut in Sri Lanka

  10-02-2025 10:47
  
  Energy minister says monkey ‘came into contact with grid transformer’, causing hours-long outage in sweltering heatA countrywide power outage in Sri Lanka has been blamed on a monkey that clambered into a power station south of Colombo.The blackout, which began around midday on Sunday, left many people sweltering in temperatures exceeding 30C (86F). Continue reading...
  
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• Country diary: A burbling blackbird, an early great tit – the sounds of spring are starting to happen | Lev Parikian

  10-02-2025 06:30
  
  West Norwood, London: Listen closely and you’ll hear that rehearsals are under way for the more full-throated performances in the coming monthsThe signs are there, if you look. Hazel catkins hanging heavy and yellow in the all-too-brief sunlight, snowdrops poking through the soil, a tentative crocus or two. As daylight grows, sunset nudging past 5pm, I count the seconds till the arrival of the swifts (7m at the time of publication, give or take). Spring, as Tom Lehrer once observed, is her
  
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• More than 1,100 dead sea turtles washed up along southern India’s coastline

  10-02-2025 06:00
  
  The mass death of once-endangered olive ridley turtles in January has prompted an increase in wildlife patrols and a crackdown on fishing boatsMore than 1,100 dead olive ridley sea turtles have washed ashore on the beaches of Tamil Nadu state in southern India this January.“I never heard [of] such large numbers of turtles stranded at any beaches of Tamil Nadu at least in the last three decades,” Kuppusamy Sivakumar, an ecology professor at Pondicherry University said. Continue readin
  
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• Commonwealth championship sheepdog trials - in pictures

  10-02-2025 04:21
  
  More than 300 pairs of dogs and handlers entered the Commonwealth championship sheepdog trials in Port Fairy, Victoria, vying for the title of Australian dog of the yearSign up for the Rural Network email newsletter Continue reading...
  
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