Curated playlist
Fauna of the Holarctic realm
- Red foxThe red fox, Vulpes vulpes, occupies a range of nearly 70 million square kilometres that stretches north as far as the Arctic Circle. It is the largest of the true foxes. It is also among the most widely distributed members of the order…
- MooseA bull moose regrows its antlers from nothing in three to five months.
- ElkEarly English colonists gave the elk a name that belonged to the European moose. Shawnee and Cree called it wapiti.
- Polar bearUnder its white fur, the polar bear has black skin. The hairs are clear and only look white as they scatter light.
- WolfWolves have been driven from the British Isles entirely. Their range is now about one-third of its historic size.
- Brown bearThe brown bear can run down a moose, yet 90% of its food comes from plants. Adults can weigh up to 600 kg.
- Beluga whaleIn 1849, railroad crews laying the first line between Rutland and Burlington in Vermont dug up the bones of a beluga whale in the town of Charlotte. The workers did not know that, of course. They only knew that nearly ten feet below the…
- ReindeerA walking reindeer clicks, and the sound can be heard from several hundred metres away. The noise comes from small tendons in the legs slipping over bony knobs called sesamoid bones. It happens as the full weight of a foot lands, or just…
- WalrusAt the Tierpark Hagenbeck, walruses easily pulled a five-pound metal plug out of the bottom of their pool, even though it sat under 1.1 metres of water. The animal behind that feat is the walrus, Odobenus rosmarus, a large marine mammal…
- WolverineThe wolverine known as M-56 began his famous journey as a young male, tagged by Wildlife Conservation Society officials in Wyoming near Grand Teton National Park. Researchers tracked him south for almost three months. In June 2009 the…
- StoatThe stoat, known to science as Mustela erminea, is a small meat-eating member of the mustelid family. By 2024, the Orkney Native Wildlife Project had spent £7.9m trapping more than 6,300 of them. Stoats have lived on that archipelago north…
- NarwhalThe narwhal, Monodon monoceros, is a toothed whale of the Arctic, and the males carry a spiralled tusk that can stretch three metres. Why would a whale grow such a thing, and what is it for? The narwhal also spends much of its life in…
- SalmonSalmon from central Idaho, Chinook and sockeye alike, travel over 900 miles from the Pacific and climb nearly 7,000 feet to spawn. Each of these fish is going home, to the freshwater stream where it hatched before heading out to live in…
- Sea otterThe sea otter, Enhydra lutris, carries up to 150,000 strands of fur on a single square centimetre of its body. That is the densest coat of any animal. The sea otter is a marine mammal native to the coasts of the northern and eastern North…
- BisonIn 1889, an estimated 1,091 American bison were left alive, counting both wild animals and captive ones. The bison is a large, shaggy grazer, and that figure marked the low point of its modern history. How did a continent's most familiar…
- Woolly mammothThe woolly mammoth, Mammuthus primigenius, still walked on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean around 4,000 years ago, close to 2000 BCE. That was centuries after the dawn of human civilization and the building of the Great Pyramid and…
- BeaverThe beaver, a large semiaquatic rodent of the Northern Hemisphere, starts building a dam the moment it hears running water. The sound of a leak sends it straight back to patch the damage. That reflex ties together the two living species,…