Strange But True

Your guide to all the unusual, unique, and unbelievable stuff that goes on in nature.

• You’ve heard of couch potatoes, but how about pouch potatoes? Minutes after they’re born, baby opossums crawl into their mother’s pouch — and stay there for the next 70 days!
• Great blue herons usually grab fish between the top and bottom parts of their beaks. But sometimes the leggy birds stab fish with their knife-shaped beaks. Fish kabobs, anyone?
• Great horned owls don’t give a hoot about cold weather. The hardy hooters start nesting in January, earlier than any other bird in Missouri. Their eggs can survive temperatures of 10 degrees below zero.
• Double-crested cormorants produce less oil than most other water birds. Without oil to coat their feathers, cormorants get waterlogged easily and must spend lots of time drying their feathers in the sun.
• Least shrews are tiny animals with enormous appetites. The 3-inch predators eat nearly their weight in insects, worms, and snails every day. An average-sized 4th grader would need to snarf down 200 apples daily to keep up.
• No bones about it. Paddlefish don’t have a single bone in their fishy bodies. Instead, their skeletons are made of cartilage, the same sort-ofbendy, sort-of-stiff tissue that’s found in your ears and the tip of your nose.
• Flying squirrels don’t really fly, but, wow, can they glide! With a tall-enough tree to launch from, these squirrelly skydivers can glide 190 feet — about as far as five school buses parked end to end.