Myth busters! - myths and facts about animals

MYTHBUSTER: Porcupine quills can kill - but not by shooting. When porcupines are attacked by enemies such as dogs or lions, the prickly animals defend themselves by fighting back. How? Some kinds run backdward or sideways right into the enemy. A few kinds of porcupines also whack their enemies with their quill-covered tails!

By running or whacking, a porcupine jabs its sharp quills into the enemy. The Gills easily come out of the porcupine. If the quills stick in an enemy, they can make a nasty wound. And sometimes the quills work their way in farther and hurt the animal's insides. Also, the wound sometimes gets infected. Then the enemy may die.

MYTH: You can tell how old a rattlesnake is by counting the sections on its rattle.

BUSTER: The sections of a rattlesnake's rattle are like birthday candies. When a rattlesnake is born, it already has t first section of its rattle. Every time the snake sheds its skin, a new section is added. A rattler sheds its skin any time it needs to - not on its birthday. And sometimes sections of the rattle break off.

So what do you learn by counting the sections of a snake's rattle? Not much.

MYTH: Raccoons wash their food before eating it.

MYTHBUSTER: Raccoons find some of their prey in streams, ponds, and lakes. And they often move their paws around in the water, feeling for crayfish, frogs, and fish. It may look as if they're washing their food, but they're not. They're catching it!

Raccoons also eat fruit, acorns, corn, worms, bird eggs, and even garbage without washing them.

MYTH: Bats get tangled in people's hair.

MYTHBUSTER: Sounds like a nightmare, doesn't it? But don't worry - bats don't want to get in your hair any more than you want them to. And bats are great at avoiding things. They have a special way of finding out, or detecting, whether an object is in front of them. They can even detect something as thin as a human hair! So they're not going to get into yours.

MYTH: Birds go south in the winter so they can keep warm.

MYTHBUSTER: You may want to go south in the winter to escape the cold. But most birds go because they're looking for something else - food. For example, birds that eat flying insects need to move to where it stays warm in winter. That's because cold weather kills most flying insects.

Most water birds leave cold places before the ponds and streams freeze over. The birds would be in trouble if they waited. The water creatures and plants they eat would be out of reach under the ice.