On a recent rainy morning in Brooklyn, Tom Stephenson, smiling and serious, dressed in khaki quick dry and a baseball cap with a Cerulean warbler insignia, stepped into Prospect Park,…

Suppose you wanted to build the perfect dog from scratch. What would be the key ingredients in the recipe? Loyalty and smarts would be musts. Cuteness would be as well, perhaps with…

A little more than a decade ago, Mike Mendl developed a new test for gauging a laboratory rat’s level of happiness. Mendl, an animal welfare researcher in the veterinary school at…

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…