Strange Things Animals Do What might look like a strange action to us, might be something an animal has a good reason for doing. We just may not understand that reason. Take crows for example. You might see a crow on the ground covered with ants moving all around and feel sorry for it thinking it is in some kind of stress and maybe the ants are trying to eat the crow. It certainly looks this way. For some strange reasons, sometimes crows try and cover themselves in ants. They even spread out their wings and try and get them completely covered. Science doesn’t know the reason for this, but I am sure the crow does. How would you like to be a farmer with chickens and one day you notice your chickens become roosters? Chickens can change their sex and this happens more often when there are no roosters around. Mother nature can really pull off some incredible tricks. The Turkey Vulture would seem like a bird with a strange practice to us. That practice is it urinates on itself. Why would an animal do this? Scientists think they have found the answer to this question. They feel the Turkey Vulture is doing this to cool itself. Thank goodness people haven’t adapted this practice. The Sea Cucumber is a strange creature indeed. It does something to protect itself which would kill us if we could do it. Its defense mechanism when being attacked is to projectile vomit and when it does this it fires its guts at the attacker. Most predators flee when this happens. Why doesn’t this kill the animal? The reason is it can regenerate its organs. To bad we can’t somehow figure out the regeneration process and apply it to us. A man drove to a nature preserve with his girlfriend or wife and he was driving one of those cars which had a sunroof and it was open. They decided to stop and look at the giraffes. As they watched one of them came over to the car and stuck its head into the car through the sunroof. Giraffes have a long tongue and this giraffe tried to stick his tongue into the lady’s drink. Finally, they had to give it to him. Butterflies are probably one of the most beloved of insects. They float through the air, are mostly beautiful and look totally harmless. There is a little known fact about them which might surprise you. While they love to such the fluid out of flowers, if they can’t get it, they resort to drinking blood. It doesn’t happen much, but it does happen. Think about this the next time you allow a butterfly to land on your hand. We all know about parrots imitating our words, but did you know it is the starling which does the best job. Most people don’t know this or more people would have starlings instead of parrots. You have to wonder how the starling got this ability. Speaking of parrots, years ago my beloved wife and myself went to a parrot jungle. One of the birds did something which made my wife laugh out loud. When she did, hundreds of parrots imitated her laugh and she got embarrassed as everyone there killed themselves laughing. When you think of killer animals, what do you think of? Could it be lions or tigers? Maybe it is bears or poison snakes? It turns out the hippopotamus is credited with killing at least twice the number of people every year than any other animal. Something which scientists thought was very strange happened which they watched. A seal on Marion Island in the Antarctic tried to mate with a king penguin. They decided it was some kind of mistake until they noticed it happening over an over again and in at least one instance the seal killed and ate the penguin. The song of the blue whale has been studied for decades and it never changes, that is until recently. The whales voices are changing and they are getting deeper which changes the pitch of the whale song. This is happening to whales all over the world not just in certain whale communities. There has not been any solution to this. Perhaps ocean pollution has something to do with it, or the noise in the ocean picking up. There is a fish which can swim like most other fish, but it likes to walk on the ocean bottom. Its fins look like hands. Appropriately the name of the fish is the red handfish. You have to wonder why walk when you can swim? Kiwis have very bad vision. Because of this their nose has become the main method of finding their food. This has increased the sensitivity of their sense of smell and allowed them to locate insects more easily. The Rip Van Winkle of the sea world is the snail. Scientists don’t know how it can do it, but the animal is able to sleep for up to three years at a time. One would think it would run out of nutrients and die, but it wakes up just fine. Talk about being well rested. There is data all over the internet stating bats always turn left when leaving a cave. It turns out this is not true; they sometimes turn right and sometimes left. You have to wonder how these stories get started. There is a very strange fact about scorpions. No, I am not talking about their lineage which shows they are related to the lobster, I am talking about the fact where they are exposed to the light of a full moon they sometime glow in the dark if the light is strong enough. This alerts animals that prey on them of their presence. Owls for example eat them and the glow makes them easier to find. So why do they glow? The answer is unknown, but some think it makes it easier for them to see each other. There is an animal which has been caught acting in a very unusual way for its species. It is a genet which is a cat like animal which is on the small side. They are usually solitary creatures, but this one which lives in a Park in South Africa has made friends with other animals and it is said almost every night it hops up on the back of some of the animals and goes for a ride. It has been seen riding on rhinos and buffaloes. People say this is an incredible site and the animal seems to be doing this for fun.
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