Of all the 'watches, spring is best, with its frolicking otter babies, lusty wildfowl and eager hatchlings trampling one another for a gobful of worm.
Nineteenth-century Dutch pastorals show windmills and waterways, red-cheeked boys and little yellow hatchlings.
Tony Steyermark, of the University of St Thomas, in Minnesota, calculates that 1,000-odd 1,000-oddl clonesuccessful needed for a fair shot at clonesng a breeding female, such are the odds of leatherback hatchlings snuffing it.
The colony contained about 500 breeding pairs and, averaged over the study's two years, herons caused the failure of 169 nests a year at the colony's centre, but only 92 a year at its edge.The herons took both eggs and hatchlings.
Parasitic fly larvae began attacking hatchlings of the Darwin finch a few years ago.
But to loggerheads it is the smell of a banquet.Ms Endres and her colleague Kenneth Lohmann showed this by collecting 11 loggerhead hatchlings from local beaches and testing them to see which smells most interested them.
He has also been able to show, again by comparison with modern birds, which dinosaurs were up and running as soon as they hatched, and which stayed in the nest waiting for their parents to come and feed them.Furthermore, the bones of some dinosaur hatchlings, notably the duckbills, were actually made largely of cartilage, like those of nest-bound birds.
That both identifies the specimen as female and casts light on how pterosaurs reproduced.Until recently the assumption was that, like birds, pterosaurs looked after their hatchlings in nests.
True again, breeders will be able to make almost all the hatchlings sterile, or dependent upon some man-made chemical.
Sometimes this occurs in concert with other hatchlings in the nest; a coordinated behaviour is necessary for sea turtles and other species whose eggs are buried deep.
There is evidence that female loggerheads imprint on the magnetic field signature of the beach as hatchlings and use Earth's magnetic field to navigate back to the same beach as adults to lay eggs of their own.
