FRIDAY LAZY? No, I have SEX 40 times a day! BOOKS

Lusty pandas, frogs in underpants, pigeons on LSD . . . the astounding secret lives of animals

BOOK OF THE WEEK THE UNEXPECTED TRUTH ABOUT ANIMALS: A MENAGERIE OF THE MISUNDERSTOOD by Lucy Cooke (Doubleday £16.99) JAMES WALTON

Why do so many birds disappear in the winter? these days, it’s a question the average eightyear-old could probably answer. For centuries, though, it was one of the great unsolved scientific mysteries. in the mid- 1600s, an Oxford- educated academic did suggest that birds migrated — but, less impressively, he thought their destination was the Moon.

Otherwise, the consensus was that the birds hibernated, and that the reason we didn’t see them doing it was because they slept at the bottom of rivers and lakes. As late as 1801, an American scientist sought to prove this once and for all by the simple process of throwing some weighted-down swallows into a nearby river.

sadly, after he’d pulled them back up, he was forced to report that they were ‘reduced, not to a state of suspended animation, but of absolute death’.

then, one spring morning in 1822, the real solution emerged when a German hunter shot down a stork. he was astonished to find that sticking through part of its neck was a spear which a local professor told him was African . . .

Now, of course, we can track migrating birds with devices that tell us precisely where they go. this is how we know the Arctic tern clocks up around 100,000 kilometres (62,000 miles) a year — or, as Lucy Cooke puts it, ‘ twice the circumference of the planet from a bird that weighs less than an iPhone’.

And, on the whole, that’s how each chapter in this endlessly fascinating book works. First, Cooke — a trained zoologist, as well as a natural history tV presenter — explains some of the extraordinary myths and theories that have surrounded a particular type of animal. then, she reveals the equally extraordinary truth.

FOR a harder question than the disappearing birds one, how about this: what animal has been known to have sex 40 times in an afternoon? the answer, amazingly enough, is the giant panda.

in captivity, pandas may be famously coy when it comes to breeding. But that’s only because an intimate one-on-one encounter is not the way they like to do it. in the wild, the female prefers to have several males compete for her favours — by the trusty method of seeing who can urinate highest on the bark of a tree. (some of the swankier males have perfected a handstand technique.) the winner is rewarded with a ‘rough-and-tumble affair with plenty of barking and biting’.

still, if it’s properly outrageous sexual behaviour you want, there’s always the deceptively cute Adelie penguin.

the females, Cooke informs us, are ‘one of the few animals on the planet to have turned to prostitution’ — indulging in a swift and business-like spot of mating with the bachelors on the edge of the colony in exchange for pebbles to reinforce the family nest.

As for the males, the penguin expert on scott’s Antarctic expedition could barely contain his horror at their ‘constant acts of depravity’ — acts that Cooke neatly summarises as ‘having sex with basically anything that moves. And quite a few things that don’t. Like dead penguins’.

Nonetheless, it’s often the scientists themselves who come across as the oddest creatures of the lot. When not drowning swallows, over the years they have made

underpants for frogs, fed LSD to pigeons, put bats on a treadmill, got elephants drunk, whipped sloths to make them go faster (unsuccessfully) and tried to breed chimpanzees with humans (ditto). All, naturally, in the name of research.

For sheer cruelty, however, it’s hard to beat the experiments carried out by an 18th- century Italian priest called Lazzaro Spallanzani. His aim was to determine the answer to another great scientific mystery — how bats navigate in the dark — and he certainly can’t be accused of failing to be systematic.

Realising that one of the bats’ senses must be involved, Spallanzani began by stabbing out their eyes with scissors. He then covered their bodies with veneer, blocked up their nostrils with stuffing and cut out their tongues. Yet none of this had any effect.

As he recorded, his victims continued — rather heroically, in the circumstances — to fly ‘with the speed and sureness of an uninjured bat’. It was only when he chopped their ears off that they became disorientated.

Unfortunately for bats, the fact that they apparently made no noise when flying meant that nobody, Spallanzani included, knew what to make of his findings. Similar experiments were therefore performed for the next 120 years, until the sinking of the Titanic prompted the development of sonar location, and with it the understanding that bats may have got there first.

Even so, it took further advances in the science of sound before we knew that flying bats are screaming about 20 decibels louder than speakers at a Black Sabbath concert. It’s merely that their cries are outside the range of human hearing.

BYNOW, it might seem as if I’m cunningly plucking out the juicy parts of the book for your delectation. But actually, almost every page contains something just as startling. Did you know, for example, that the ‘oily brown anal secretions’ from a beaver are used to add vanilla flavour to ice cream? (And are you glad you do now?)

Or that in Fifties Britain, the most reliable pregnancy test consisted of injecting a small toad with a woman’s urine? If she was pregnant, the toad would squirt out eggs a few hours later. Cooke even speaks to a woman who once did the injecting in a lab at Watford hospital — and enjoyed everything about the job, except explaining what she did for a living at parties.

In bringing us all this information, Cooke has clearly done her homework — travelling the world to see the animals for herself, and consulting many obscure books: among them Willem Bosman’s A New And Accurate Description Of The Coast of Guinea (1704) and Felix de Azara’s The Natural History Of The Quadrupeds Of Paraguay (1838).

And yet, of course, it would have been possible to do all that swotting and still end up with a book of strictly limited appeal.

Instead, we get a winning combination of thorough knowledge, lots of good jokes and a passionate love of animals that means Cooke can even mount convincing defences of such despised creatures as vultures — who, she points out, have saved countless human lives by disposing of rotten animal corpses.

The result is an often eye-popping, occasionally hair- raising, but ultimately joyous reminder of just how strange our world is.