"Entertainment" is very much the key word here: John Downer has gathered together a cabinet of natural curiosities to delight, horrify and fascinate a broad audience. The material is arranged into the usual categories: breeding, feeding, fighting and the rest. The final chapter, on the uses animals make of drugs, herbs and perfumes, is more unusual, and it best points up the serious point on which this frothy and fantastic entertainment rests. We think animals "weird" when they behave in ways very different to us. But animals whose behaviour is all-too-familiar can seem even more bizarre.

This seeming contradiction has no basis in nature. Rather, it's an artefact of our anthropomorphism--our tendency to read human thoughts and emotions into the behaviour of other animals. Instead of dismissing our anthropomorphism as a rather childish "mistake", Downer argues that "the similarity between our behaviour and that of the rest of the animal kingdom is more than mere coincidence". Because we are animals ourselves, we cannot shed our own natures and look at nature "objectively", however much we would like to. We have to factor in our own reactions: indeed we can learn from them. "As we consider what defines Weird Nature, we in some way define ourselves." It's an interesting argument, only briefly sketched here. More, please! --Simon Ings

Synopsis
Weird Nature brings readers a completely new experience of natural history. Written by the author and producer of Supersense and Supernatural, John Downer, it is an astonishing exploration of nature's strangest behaviour. Weird Nature takes us on a journey into a surprising and magical natural world inhabited by animals with real characters, distinct personalities, and the oddest of behaviours. Welcome to the world of flattened snakes, flying fish and otters making snow-slides. From social interactions and feeding techniques, to home-building and devious defences, Weird Nature reveals the extraordinary array of different ways of behaving. From the fantastic ways nature has devised for finding food, including worms that eat themselves and dolphins that use sponges to protect their beaks when feeding in the sand, to the animal architects that create an assortment of bizarre buildings Weird Nature explores the most fantastic and unusual natural behaviours in the animal world.