Clare Balding is celebrating the world’s most extraordinary animals
TV presenter and bestselling author Clare Balding has written a fascinating book that can be dipped in and out of.
THIS book’s subtitle is 100 Amazing Creatures Great and Small and it includes stories about a huge variety from rats to pigs, ducks to dolphins, and many dogs, horses, cats, even a giraffe. Written by the TV presenter and bestselling author Clare Balding, who is familiar to us mainly from her coverage of sports for decades, it is a delight, the sort of book you dip in and out of, rather than read from cover to cover.
The stories include Unsinkable Sam, the cat who survived three shipwrecks during World War II; Hoover the seal who learned to talk; Dylan, a cockatiel, who saved his owner from a fire; and Siwash the duck who (unofficially) joined the US Marine Corps and fought in the Pacific.
A personal favourite is Greyfriars Bobby – the loyal dog who kept vigil at his beloved master’s grave in the Edinburgh kirkyard for 14 years, only leaving it for an hour a day to eat. After he died in 1872, the Skye terrier was commemorated with a statue erected above a drinking fountain, the upper fountain for humans and the lower one for dogs, which remains popular with visitors to the Scottish capital.
Among the many heart-warming tales told by Balding is the one about Christian the lion, bought from Harrods by two young Australians, John Rendall and Anthony Bourke, in 1969 – before the Endangered Species Act of 1976 stopped shops selling all sorts of exotic creatures. They managed to keep the cub for a year before giving him to conservationist George Adamson who, along with his wife Joy, were famous from the 1950s for having raised Elsa the lioness and successfully releasing her into the wild.
Rendall and Bourke took Christian to Kenya where Adamson was rehabilitating captured lions and, when they returned for a visit a year later, they were warned that he probably wouldn’t remember them. But he did and the home movie has been uploaded to YouTube and, as Balding records, been seen by 100 million people. In it you see the lion run towards them, put his giant paws on their shoulders and rub his head against theirs.
While starlings are not popular with pilots, as they can cause birdstrikes, or farmers – Balding reports that they cost an estimated $800 million damage to farms in the US - they are very intelligent and great mimics. Mozart was amazed when he heard a caged starling singing part of his Piano Concerto No 17 in G and bought him, naming him Vogelstar (not very imaginative, as it’s the German for starling). When Mozart’s father passed away, he didn’t attend his funeral, but when Vogelstar died shortly afterwards he organised a ceremony and made those attending wear velvet capes in his honour. The composer erected a gravestone in his garden and wrote an elegy in tribute to the bird.
As you dip in and out of the book you pick up interesting facts about creatures – for instance that a dog’s sense of smell is 50 times better than any human’s; that pigs have no sweat glands, which is why they wallow in mud to cool themselves down; and elephants’ brains are four times the size of a human brain.
The index is in alphabetical order with species beside each name, so you can choose which you want to read about next. Among the more unusual are Thandi the rhinoceros, Mr Magoo the mongoose, Wojtek the bear, Alex the parrot, and eagles Aramis and Brothers.
