Good week for

Country Life

A stellar night at the PPA Awards (the magazine Oscars) saw COUNTRY LIFE

remotely walk away with 3rd place in the Magazine of the Year category (to be fair, they couldn’t let us win two years in a row) and 2nd place in the Cover of the Year category (with the entry pictured)

Fans of the apocalypse

Those used to watching films about the collapse of civilisation, whether at the hands of aliens, zombies or anything in between, are more suited to lockdown life, say psychologists at the University of Chicago

Rosy starlings

The gorgeous rosy starling has been seen in all four countries of the UK this year, says the RSPB. The birds, named for their pink ‘vests’ on their front and back, rarely travel this far west; the RSPB believes the warm spring may be the cause

Bad week for Puppies

The formula of seven years for a dog per one year for a human is wrong, say scientists, and your oneactually year-old puppy is 30. By analysing the genes of labrador puppies, scientists discovered that dogs age at different speeds during their lives; a one-year-old dog is about 30 in human years, but by the age of 14, dogs are in their seventies in human years. The new formula is very simple: it’s Human Age = 16ln(dog_age) + 31

Hipster sparrows

What started off as a song sung by a few white-throated sparrows in Canada has spread to become immensely popular in the population. The phenomenon offers insight into how birds learn; the song grew too quickly to be taught by parents, so it must have been ‘catchy’