Richard Collins: How storks know when the grass is cut

It's not just humans who enjoy a freshly mowed lawn

Storks normally return to Spain early February after wintering in warm Africa. AP Photo

Tennison wrote: ‘Into the jaws of Death, into the mouth of Hell, rode the six hundred’, in The Examiner (not our Irish one) in December 1854. Light cavalry, 114 of them Irish, had charged the Russian guns head-on in a monumental cock-up during the Battle of Balaclava two months earlier.

Afterwards, hordes of scavenging birds descended on the field. Units were ordered to shoot them to protect the wounded. Ravens and hooded crows know the bonanzas battlefields have to offer, but vultures are the supreme carrion gourmets. Confrontations between armies, even in the 19th Century, were rare events. So how did the vultures discover so quickly that one had taken place?