July 2026 Bird Quiz Answers
1. Hedgehogs can swim. True. Hedgehogs are surprisingly capable swimmers and will cross streams and ponds in search of food. The catch is getting out again: steep-sided garden ponds are a real drowning risk, so a sloping edge, some stones or a small ramp can be genuinely life-saving.
2. A silent fledgling sitting alone on the ground has almost certainly been abandoned. False. A still, quiet fledgling is usually doing exactly the right thing. Staying silent and motionless is how it avoids predators while it finishes learning to fly, and a parent is almost always close by. Best to leave it be and keep cats indoors.
3. Great tits have been recorded hunting, killing and eating bats. True. In one cave system in Hungary, great tits learned to listen for hibernating pipistrelle bats, then hunt and kill them, but only in deep winter when other food had run out. It seems confined to that one population rather than something British great tits do.
4. If you touch a baby bird, its parents will smell your scent and reject it. False. One of the most persistent garden myths. Most birds have a poor sense of smell and recognise their young by sight and sound. Briefly handling a chick to return it to the nest won’t make its parents abandon it.
5. The painted lady butterfly travels further on migration than the barn swallow. True. Painted lady butterflies may look delicate, but they undertake one of the longest migrations in the natural world. The annual journey between tropical Africa and northern Europe can exceed 14,000km (9,000 miles) and takes several generations to complete. Barn swallows travel thousands of miles between Britain and Africa each year, but the painted lady's epic multi-generational migration is even longer. It's an extraordinary feat for an insect weighing less than a gram.
6. Daddy longlegs (the crane fly) are among the most venomous creatures in Britain but can’t bite us. False. A much-loved myth with no truth in it. Crane flies have no venom and no means of biting or stinging anyone. They’re entirely harmless, if a little chaotic around a lampshade.
7. A robin going bald around the head in late summer is seriously ill. False. A temporarily bald-headed robin in late summer is usually just mid-moult, sometimes with a few feather mites taking advantage while the bird is too busy to preen. The feathers grow back. It looks alarming and almost never is.
8. All bats are blind. False. No British bat is blind. They see perfectly well, but on a dark night their extraordinary echolocation, listening to the echoes of their own calls, is simply a better tool for catching insects than eyesight would be.
9. Foxes use the Earth’s magnetic field to help them pounce on prey. True. Strange as it sounds, the evidence suggests foxes do exactly this. When a fox “mouses,” leaping up to pounce down on hidden prey, it tends to aim in a north-easterly direction, and it’s far more successful when it does. Researchers think it’s lining its jump up against the Earth’s magnetic field to judge the distance, a sort of built-in rangefinder.
10. Earwigs crawl into people’s ears to burrow into the brain and lay eggs. False. The myth is old enough to be baked into the name, from the Old English for “ear insect,” but it isn’t true. Earwigs have no interest in ears, can’t burrow into anything, and don’t lay eggs in people. They lay them in the soil, where the females are unusually devoted mothers. The very rare cases of any insect ending up in an ear are accidental, and usually not even an earwig.
