Alpine Ibex
Alpine ibex have been photographed climbing an almost vertical dam wall in Italy to lick minerals from the stone.
Europe
Arctic Fox
A young female Arctic fox walked 3,506 km across sea ice from Svalbard to Greenland in just 76 days, one of the longest journeys ever recorded for the species.
Atlantic Cod
The collapse of the cod stocks off Newfoundland in 1992 put about 40,000 people out of work and became a global warning about overfishing.
Atlantic Puffin
A puffin can carry a dozen or more small fish crosswise in its bill at once, holding them in place with a spiny tongue.
Atlantic Salmon
Atlantic salmon find their way back to the exact river where they hatched, years later, largely by recognising its smell.
Bearded Vulture
The bearded vulture lives mainly on bones: it drops large bones onto rocks from a height to smash them, then swallows the pieces.
Beluga Sturgeon
The beluga sturgeon is one of the largest bony fish ever recorded; a female caught in the Volga in 1827 was reported at over 7 metres and about 1.5 tonnes.
Beluga Whale
Belugas are nicknamed ‘canaries of the sea’ because they produce a huge variety of whistles, chirps, clicks and squeals.
Brown Bear
Before hibernating, a brown bear can gain more than a kilogram of fat a day, then survive for months without eating, drinking or passing waste.
Common Cuckoo
The cuckoo lays its eggs in other birds’ nests, and within hours of hatching, the cuckoo chick pushes the host’s eggs out of the nest.
Common Cuttlefish
Cuttlefish can change colour and skin texture in under a second, yet they are thought to be colourblind.
Common Kingfisher
The kingfisher’s streamlined beak inspired engineers who redesigned the nose of Japan’s bullet train to reduce the noise it made leaving tunnels.
Common Nightingale
A male nightingale can sing around 200 different song phrases, and unpaired males sing through the night to attract females arriving from Africa.
Common Raven
In experiments, ravens planned for the future as well as great apes, saving tools and tokens they would need later.
Common Starling
On winter evenings, starlings gather in murmurations of tens of thousands, or even over a million birds, swirling in perfectly coordinated shapes before settling to roost.
Common Toad
Common toads return year after year to the pond where they were born, crossing roads in their thousands on spring nights, where volunteers help them across.
Crested Porcupine
Porcupines cannot shoot their quills, but they charge backwards into attackers, and quills lodged in lions and leopards can cause serious injuries.
Eurasian Beaver
Eurasian beavers were hunted down to about 1,200 animals in the early 1900s; today there are well over a million across Europe and Asia.
Eurasian Eagle-owl
The Eurasian eagle-owl is one of the largest owls in the world, strong enough to catch prey as big as a fox.
Eurasian Hoopoe
To defend themselves, hoopoe chicks squirt foul-smelling droppings at intruders, and nesting females produce a smelly secretion containing bacteria that help protect the eggs.
Eurasian Lynx
A Eurasian lynx can kill prey three to four times its own weight, such as an adult red deer or reindeer.
Eurasian Otter
Otters mark their territories with droppings called spraints, which smell sweet, often compared to jasmine tea.
European Badger
Badgers live in underground ‘setts’ that can be used by the same family for many generations, some with dozens of entrances and hundreds of metres of tunnels.