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Slowly stalking down the snowy hillside, the Amur leopard watches its prey through the trees. In the clearing below, a sika deer munches on tree bark, one of its few remaining food sources during the cold Russian winter. The leopard crouches, its body so low to the ground that its belly fur brushes the snow. Suddenly it bounds and springs forward, tackling the deer from 10 feet away. It’s dinnertime.
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This is one cat that doesn’t need any help getting down from a tree. The leopard is so comfortable up there that it often stalks prey and even hauls its kills up into the branches. Leopards are powerful big cats closely related to lions, tigers, and jaguars. They live in sub-Saharan Africa, northeast Africa, Central Asia, India, and China. However, many of their populations are endangered, especially outside of Africa. You can identify most leopards by their light color and distinctive dark spots. Those spots are called rosettes, because they resemble the shape of a rose. These patterns camouflage their bodies as they move through the grass and trees. Black leopards, which appear to be almost solid in color because their spots are hard to distinguish, are commonly called black panthers. Unlike lions, leopards are solitary creatures. Males are almost entirely solitary and females only break their solitude when they are raising cubs. But, like lions, leopards roar. Male leopards defend their territory by roaring and scent marking, while females use their roar to attract mates and call their cubs. A leopard roar is a rough rasp, like a handsaw cutting wood. Leopard cubs are born with barely visible spots. The mother hides her cubs and moves them from one safe location to the next until they are old enough to begin playing and learning to hunt. When the cubs are about two years old, they live on their own. But the maternal bonds are strong, and offspring sometimes have reunions with their mothers.
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Hooray for summer! Find out why this sunny season deserves a warm welcome.
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Swoosh! A peregrine falcon can dive up to 200 miles (323 kilometers) an hour to capture prey in flight, striking in midair with its outstretched talons, or claws. Peregrines usually hunt with either a swift chase or a fast dive. Starlings, pigeons, and doves are among their favorite meals. A common bird of prey (a group of hunting birds that includes such birds as hawks and eagles), the peregrine is an adaptable falcon that can be found in almost any habitat. Peregrines live from cold tundra to hot deserts, from sea level to high in the mountains. Their adaptability even allows them to thrive in cities. They live in a greater variety of habitats than almost any other bird of prey. Some peregrine falcons migrate in the winter from their nesting grounds in the Arctic all the way to South America—a round-trip distance of up to 15,500 miles (24,945 kilometers). They make the return trip north when it’s time to mate and lay eggs. Peregrines don’t build nests. They usually just find a shallow dip in some rocks or scrape a depression in the soil on the ledge of a cliff, or even use the ledge of a building. Female peregrines lay two to four eggs at a time. Parents incubate the eggs for about a month until the eggs hatch. Peregrine chicks stay in the nest for up to six weeks, by which time they’ve learned to fly. Peregrine falcons in the United States were listed as an endangered species after their numbers dropped dangerously low between the 1950s and the 1970s. Certain pesticides used by farmers—including DDT—harmed the peregrines by causing their eggshells to be dangerously thin—so fragile that they broke when the parents tried to incubate them. Laws were enacted to ban DDT and, fortunately the ban, along with other conservation efforts, led to the recovery of the species. In fact, scientists think there now may be more peregrines in some parts of their range than there ever used to be!
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Flamingos are famous for their bright pink feathers, stilt-like legs, and S-shaped neck. When a flamingo spots potential dinner—favorite foods include shrimp, snails, and plantlike water organisms called algae—it plunges its head into the water, twists it upside down, and scoops the fish using its upper beak like a shovel. They are able to „run“ on water, thanks to their webbed feet, to gain speed before lifting up into the sky. Flamingos build nests that look like mounds of mud along waterways. At the top of the mound, in a shallow hole, the female lays one egg. The parents take turns sitting on the egg to keep it warm. After about 30 days, the egg hatches. Flamingo young are born white, with soft, downy feathers and a straight bill. The bill gradually curves downward as the flamingo matures. Both parents take care of the newborn flamingo, feeding it a fluid produced in their digestive systems. The young leave the nest after about five days to join other young flamingos in small groups, returning to the parents for food. The parents identify their chick by its voice. After about three weeks, the adults herd young flamingos into large groups called crèches where they start to look for food on their own. Most flamingo species are not endangered, although the Andean flamingo is listed as Vulnerable, and the Chilean, Lesser, and Puna flamingos are Near Threatened.
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The guitar is one of the most popular instruments around the world, and different cultures have different variations. The Russian version called is the balalaika. In India it’s called the sitar, and in Polynesia it’s known as a ukulele. Even though the designs are somewhat different, all the versions make music the same way: by plucking or strumming strings, which creates sound vibrations. Try it for yourself!
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There are more than 200 species of squirrels living all around the world, including kinds of tree, ground, and flying squirrels. You may have seen the eastern gray squirrel in parks, your backyard, or in a forest in the eastern half of the United States. Eastern gray squirrels forage for nuts, seeds, buds, and flowers of trees. Like other tree squirrels, the eastern gray squirrel plays an important role in what’s known as seed dispersal. As winter approaches, squirrels carry their food and bury it in several locations. They hide more food than they will recover or eat. The buried seeds and nuts sprout and begin to grow in these locations the following spring. Eastern gray squirrels have an excellent sense of smell, which they use to help locate food that they’ve hidden away. They can also pick up information about their fellow squirrels by smelling them. They communicate with each other by making sounds and body movements, such as tail flicking. When predators such as red foxes and red-tailed hawks are nearby, eastern gray squirrels will sound warning calls to alert other squirrels. Female eastern gray squirrels may start having babies at as young as five and a half months old. Females can have litters twice a year, each usually consisting of two to four babies. They gather leaves and twigs and build nests high in the trees to house their young offspring, or use tree cavities as dens. Newborn eastern gray squirrels don’t have fur when they are born and are not able to see. They often weigh as little as half an ounce (14 grams). They leave the nest by around ten to twelve weeks old and they become fully grown by around nine months.
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Space explorers go above and beyond on the job. Here are five cool things about these pioneers.
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Scorpions are arachnids and have eight legs like their cousins—spiders, mites, and ticks. They can quickly grab an insect with their pincers and whip their telson, the poisonous tip of their tail forward and sting their prey. They use their poison to kill prey and to defend against predators. Scorpions look like small lobsters and may be the first animals to move from water to land hundreds of millions of years ago. They have been around since before the age of the dinosaurs. Fossils of scorpions from Scotland hundreds of millions of years ago show that their appearance hasn’t changed over the millennia, but they are now half the size of their ancient ancestors. Only 30 or 40 species around the world have strong enough poison to kill a person. Each species has a special type of venom that works well against a chosen prey. Scorpions typically eat insects, but when food is scarce, they can slow their metabolism to as little as one-third the typical rate for arthropods. This technique enables some species to use little oxygen and live on only one insect per year. Such survival skills allow scorpions to live in some of the planet’s toughest environments. Researchers have even frozen scorpions overnight, only to put them in the sun the next day and watch them thaw out and walk away. However, they are burrowing animals, so in areas of permafrost or heavy grasses, where loose soil is not available, scorpions may not be able to survive.
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