Strange But True

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

• American kestrels, like many birds, can see ultraviolet light. Voles — small rodents that kestrels love to gobble — mark their grassy trails with urine. To humans, the urine is invisible. But because a kestrel can see ultraviolet light, the urine glows like a neon sign pointing to dinner.
• White Bass hunt together in large, tight schools. The bass swim fast, chasing scads of shad to the surface, where the water boils with shad jumping to avoid being chomped. Unfortunately for shad, what goes up, must come down.
• Flower mites are too tiny to travel far by walking. So how do they get from flower to flower? They ride the beak bus. When a hummingbird sticks its snoot in a flower, the mites make a mad dash up the bird’s beak and hunker down in the hummer’s nostril.
• Badgers and coyotes sometimes hunt together. These toothy teammates spell trouble for ground squirrels. If a squirrel scurries from its burrow, the crafty coyote pounces on it. If a squirrel stays put, the burly badger digs it up for dinner.
• Spin cycle: Black-andyellow garden spiders usually eat their webs at night and re-spin new ones before morning. This is no easy feat. Large webs may often contain 60 feet of silk.
• Cattle egrets follow herds of cattle to snap up insects stirred up by the lumbering livestock. Plucky egrets occasionally perch on top of a cow to pick yummy ticks off the cow’s back.
• To a hungry frog, a baby Copperhead’s wiggling green tail looks like a tasty caterpillar. But when the frog approaches, the sneaky snake strikes, and the frog becomes a meal instead of eating one.