Hippo's Wild World of Animals - Random Animal Facts

sure, why not?

I'm thinking so too, not sure how I missed the markings.

Yep but it's not going to be interesting because turns out, they're not interesting but yes, a week-long extravaganza with a tapir in the middle of it all.

The grey partridge (also known as the Hungarian partridge) is native to Europe and Asia. It was introduced to many other areas, because they are tasty, and are now common across the Canadian prairies and most of the northern states. Meanwhile, in the British Isles they are having difficulty, mostly due to habitat loss.

The genus name Perdix is the name of Daedalus' nephew, who was thrown off Athena's sacred hill in a fit of jealous rage. Athena, who admired Perdix's ingenuity, saved him by turning him into a partridge. The fall apparently gave him quite the fright however, and the partridge still avoids heights and builds its nest on the ground. It is thought that the "in a pear tree" part of the Christmas song is a corruption from this name. In French, one partridge would be "une perdrix".

I know nothing at all about the paleontological history of the partridge, though. The pheasants in general trace back to the Oligocene (about 30 million years ago).

Final animal of this year, the tapir! Hard to think that for 18 weeks I've been doing this, huh? Anyway, let's keep doing it but it can't be done without you, suggest your animals for next year or I probably won't make it to 52 weeks. 12 6 Days of Birdmas continues tomorrow!

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Tapirs live in the jungles of South America and parts of Asia, there are 5 species within the Tapir genus and is within the order of odd-toed ungulates so has relations with pigs, giraffes and even rhinos. We're in danger of losing these pig-aardvarks as four of them are classed as endangered with one classed as vulnerable.


As ungulates, it's all shoots and leaves all the time and like a few animals covered here, have a poor digestive system which allows seeds within their dung to successfully grow into plants making them a keystone species much like the otters.


The purpose of their elongated prehensile snouts is to sniff as a lot of the tapir's navigation is down to scent in a practice known as the flehmen response (you might have seen it in horses) and to wrap around high branches or leaves to strip them.


The tapir is not a huge creature, standing at a metre tall, 2 metres in length and a weight of 200kg but does live a decent length of time, living upto 30 years even in the wild.


Though shy and timid creatures, they can also attack humans quite viciously due to their powerful jaws and there are many documented incidents. However, even though they may seem like dangerous beasts they generally will just hide in the water until the threat passes or lacking water just run into the jungle.

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So we finish with pictures as usual, please donate suggestions and make them good.

She could.  Or she could engage in even further calumny.  There's only one way to find out!

Oooh, replies!

@cub : Foxes are upcoming, I moved them way way down into season three earlier today but clearly that was a mistake so it's back to being around six weeks from now.

@patrickbatman , songstarliner , Lord Lucan : Hyenas were actually on the subs bench for a while but got booted off at the last moment when I started arranging the slots for each week but I'll move them up seeing as they've kinda been on the list a while now. As for that long list of animals, they're all on the list with red pandas up in two weeks. I may also be dabbling in light calumny for some birds in the next few days.

Chickens in general are descended from several species of jungle fowl from Southeast Asia - mostly the red jungle fowl (Gallus gallus gallus), but with genetic contributions by several other jungle fowl species as well. These jungle fowl have been around for a long time, diverging from the quails, partridge and other ground fowl about 32-38 million years ago, and being pretty recognizably chickens since then.

Domestication probably occurred in the area around Vietnam by at least 8000 years ago. Archaeological sites that old with chicken bones have been found in China and India - indicating that domestication must have taken place before then. Oddly, the genetic distance between red jungle fowl and modern domesticated chickens suggest that domestication may have occurred as long as 58,000 years ago - but the genetic history is muddled due to both wild populations of other jungle fowl interjecting their own genetic material into the domestic chicken pool over the ages, but also the pools of all of the wild species have been muddled with imported domestic chicken genes over the last several thousand years.

For most of the history of domestic chickens, they were raised for eggs and cockfighting more than for meat. Eating was more or less incidental, and cockfighting in particular was more influential in their selective breeding. Roman legions brought chickens with them whereever they went, but more for their use in divination than as food. Sometimes they were sacrificed and the entrails read, but more commonly their behaviour while feeding was seen as an auger of upcoming events. If the chickens didn't feed, it was seen as a bad omen, and plans were abandoned.

It wasn't until modern times that factory farming has produced enough chicken meat that it is now our most consumed animal protein. The global popularity of chicken as food is helped by the fact that pretty much all of the major religions are able to eat chickens. Hindu, Mormon, Moslem, Jew and Christian can all settle down and share a nice big bucket of KFC.

Just putting the hens on the new page for you.

And I'm going to hypothesize that the steady increase in chicken consumption is due to the advent of nuggets.

speaking of the Colonel, haysoos , Gallus gallus gallus is my favorite Elvis movie.