‘There’s a hedgehog by the road’. ‘Just opposite the house’. They were the shouts from the bedroom immediately before we all went to see what was going on. There—in the middle of the day—was a young but well-grown hedgehog, these days called the West European Hedgehog (Erinaceus europaeus). I kept enough hedgehogs in the 1950s and early 60s to know that a hedgehog out by day is in trouble. There was a great deal of local building and road works during that week and we suspect their shelter had been disturbed. It was in a dangerous position by a road and with only an open small school field and ..read more

Fifty years ago the late Jim Linzell and I were writing our monograph, Salt Glands in Birds and Reptiles, for the Physiological Society's Monograph Series; it was published in May 1975. In this series I revisit some of the topics and people who followed up the discovery of salt glands in birds by Knut Schmidt-Nielsen. ——————————- Larry Zane McFarland from Find a Grave As well as Hubert and Mable Frings and the albatrosses of Midway (here) others followed up the discovery of salt glands by seeing which other species had them and how they worked. One was Larry Zane McFarland of the Dep ..read more

In the days when colour printing was extremely expensive, the Avicultural Society had special appeals for funds to support the appearance in Avicultural Magazine of the occasional colour plate. A well-known bird artist was then commissioned. Although the whole run of the Society’s magazines can be found online, the plates rarely see the light of day. Therefore I decided to show one, now and again, on this site. This is the 20th in the series. – – – – – – – – – –   The artist for this plate was Chloe Elizabeth Talbot Kelly (born 1927) who went on to illustrate a number of field guides. H ..read more

Fifty years ago the late Jim Linzell and I were writing our monograph, Salt Glands in Birds and Reptiles, for the Physiological Society; it was published in May 1975. In this series I revisit some of the topics and people who followed up the discovery of salt glands in birds by Knut Schmidt-Nielsen. ——————————- Knowledge of how birds survive at sea can be divided into two eras: Pre-1957 and Post-1957. It was in 1957 that Knut Schmidt-Nielsen (1915-2007), along with his colleagues, Carl Christian Barker Jörgensen and Humio Osaki, who were visiting scientists at Duke University in North Carolina ..read more

In the days when colour printing was extremely expensive, the Avicultural Society had special appeals for funds to support the appearance in Avicultural Magazine of the occasional colour plate. A well-known bird artist was then commissioned. Although the whole run of the Society’s magazines can be found online, the plates rarely see the light of day. Therefore I decided to show one, now and again, on this site. This is the 19th in the series. – – – – – – – – – – The artist of this plate and author of the accompanying article was Karl Plath (1886-1970). Plath had trained and exhibited as an a ..read more

This Besra (Accipiter virgatus) was photographed a few weeks ago in a tree it sometimes visits in the morning. The Besra is a forest bird but is known to frequent perches in the open at that time of day. It is widely distributed in southern Asia. It is only in recent decades that the taxonomy and identification of sparrowhawks has been worked out. In the 1960s the Besra was completely unknown to Hong Kong birders. That is because there were only though to be two species visiting Hong Kong: the Japanese Sparrowhawk (Accipiter gularis) and the Eurasian Sparrowhawk (Accipiter nisus). Both were ..read more

  In a wood near Aljezur we saw this moth, best described as very hairy with very impressive antennae. Only after we got back home did we non-lepidopterists track down what it was. To confuse matters, it has recently had its name changed. We found a photograph online, also from Aljezur, of Ptilocephala albida. However, that species has been ‘split’ recently and the form in Portugal is now Ptilocephala lorquiniella. The species is psychid moth, known collectively as bagworm moths since the larvae construct from silk and debris a case in which the rest and then pupate. Only adult males ..read more

Soon after I had started ‘A’ levels at school in 1959, the two of us doing zoology were joined at the door of biology block by Jim Key (James John Key 1917-1976) the senior biology master. He had been arguing with Stan Revill (1907-1993), senior history master, and was keen to test his line for further sparring in the staff room. They had both listened to the BBC’s Reith Lectures by P.B. Medawar entitled The Future of Man. That was, of course, before Medawar had become Sir Peter and had been awarded the Nobel Prize. The staff room argument was about whether natural selection in Man, was over ..read more

AJP photographed this Great Mormon Butterfly (Papilio mormon) in the garden in May. He has seen large numbers of this large butterfly (around 5 inches -125 mm) this year. Females are highly polymorphic. In some parts of southern Asia the females mimic toxic butterflies. The fact that the males have the choice of a number of different female forms within an area seems to have been responsible for their common name of ‘mormon’. Great Mormons figured in one of the key papers on mimicry and its evolution. Ian Thornton (1926-2002) then Reader in Zoology in the University of Hong Kong sent specime ..read more

  ANIMALS magazine was launched in January 1963 by Purnell & Sons as a weekly. The editor was John Paget Chancellor (1927-2014) but television personalities were used as ‘influencers’ then as now, and the film maker Armand Denis was listed as Editor-in-Chief. For those not around then, Armand and Michaela Denis produced and presented On Safari, a hugely popular programme on BBC television in the 1950s. Not content with a celebrity editor-in-chief, Chancellor assembled  a collection of well-known naturalists and scientists as ‘patrons’ and ‘advisory editors’ (Julian Huxley, Soll ..read more