Strange but True

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

• Female cricket frogs know they’re in love when things start to click - literally. To attract a mate, male cricket frogs produce a call - glick, glick, glick - that sounds like two pebbles being clicked rapidly together.
• Mama mia! Each little brown bat baby has a distinct call. This helps mama bats find the right pup among the hundreds crowded together on the walls of a nursery cave.
• Most birds won’t eat furry worms - after all, who likes to find a hair in their supper? But yellow-billed cuckoos are so cuckoo for caterpillars, they even eat the bristly ones.
• Many caddisflies piece together pebbles, sand, and twigs to build cases that protect their soft, squirmy bodies. The baby insects live in the cases at the bottom of streams until they turn into air-breathing, moth-like adults.
• Rough greensnakes hang out in low-growing branches, relying on their green scales to blend in with the leaves. The sneaky snakes sometimes take camouflage a slither further and sway like a vine being blown by the breeze.
• Oh, snap! When threatened, click beetles bend their bodies into a “U” then straighten out suddenly with a loud CLICK! This catapults the insect into the air and startles any critter that was hoping for a beetle snack.
• Dizzy diners: Phalaropes swim around and around in tight circles to rustle up supper. This creates a mini whirlpool that brings insects to the surface where the hungry birds can snatch them up.
• You wouldn’t need a scuba tank if you had lungs like a muskrat. To hide from predators, the furry, buck-toothed divers can stay underwater for up to 17 minutes.