Did you know that barn swallows bury themselves in the mud at the bottom of ponds and hibernate? Really, you didn’t? Well, it was common knowledge until the 1700s.

Fortunately we now know better (or unfortunately if the thought of swallows hibernating at the bottom of ponds entertains you as much as it entertains me). Swallows, in fact, migrate over 10,000 kilometers between their summer breeding grounds in northern Europe to their wintering grounds in southern Africa and back again.

Barn swallows will begin to leave the UK in August with the last having left by September – and young become independent from their parents roughly 1 month after birth. This means that fledgling swallows cannot be learning the migrational routes from their parents. So how do they do it?

The urge to migrate (also called zugunruhe) is triggerd by an internal ‘body clock’ which is synchronised by day length. This ability to track day length is something chicks inherit from their parents along with an instinctive knowlege of the rough direction they must head in. Of course anyone lost in a big city will tell you a ‘rough direction’ wont get you to your chosen restaurant in time for your reservation. These birds need to get to a precise location and their mapping system is pretty extraordinary. Despite their size, these birds tiny brains can use information obtained from the sun, stars, magnetic force fields, polarized light and from land marks to find their way along with their instinctive knowledge of direction and distance. Fortunately for the swallows, It all gets a lot easier second time around – these migratory birds have excellent memories and use land marks to guide their way.

I’ve watched countless documentaries on bird migration, and they are always fascinating – The lastest set of documentaries worth a watch for any bird lover are the BBC Earthflight series. Available on BBC iPlayer for a short while and with clips available after the series is taken down.

Our interactions with animals are one of the things which mould and develop our understanding of the world around us. I have always believed that without pets, zoos and petting farms (the ethics of those aside) there would be far fewer people interested in the envrionment. Connecting with an animal - a non human being -  gives us the opportunity to connect with our environment. Photographer Ola Bilski has always loved dogs, and has found them to be one of her favourite subjects.

Q. Can you tell me your earliest memory to do with dogs?
A. It was when I went to Poland for the first time to visit family, we went to Warsaw where my Mum is from. We stayed with her friends who had a crossbreed dog called Nero. I always used to tell people that he was my dog...

Q. When did you start photographing dogs, and why?
A. I think photographing was a natural process and development in my own work. I only really noticed how often I photographed dogs when I was photographing a lot during my holiday in Portugal where there are a lot of stray dogs. I also realised that I mostly make portraits; I think I got bored of people, so turned to dogs. This became one of my major photographic projects so far.

Q. They say "never work with children or animals" - what would you say to that?
A. Who's 'they'?

Q. What is your favourite photo, and why?
A. Oh. Um. I don't have a favourite photo, but a favourite moment with the salukie [above] he was just so regal, had a real aura to him... Just so beautiful.

Q. Could you tell me the happiest moment you have shared with a dog?
A. I could never really 'sleep-in' as a kid, so I was awake by the break of dawn, so in Poland I used to go outside to the veranda at the house with a bread roll, sit and feed Nero the dog and play fetch, have cuddles for hours and hours.

Q. And the worst?
A. Looking after a Bulgarian Spaniel called Rocky as extended research as part of my photography project. I'm used to looking after small dogs and puppies, so this was a huge challenge for me as he was stubborn and aggressive; understandably it was out of confusion and fear. He also had aggravated epilepsy, and seeing him having a severe fits, really broke my heart that I actually cried as I felt so helpless.

I love Ola's honest representations of man's best friend - an animal to which I owe my own love of nature. I believe the connection man shares with dogs is our greatest and most powerful window into the inner minds of all animals. Minds that experience pain, pleasure, and every emotion in between. I've always felt that anyone who takes the time to get to know a dog, could never honestly deny the true brilliance and sentience  of the animal mind.

For more of Ola's beautiful photographs, you can visit her Flickr site or her B.Log.

I love this lecture by Joshua Klein. I saw it last year and it suddenly popped into my head again after I posted about the snow boarding crow. After a long amateur study of corvid behavior, Klein has come up with an elegant machine that may form a new bond between animal and human.

This video absolutely made my day. I've read about this in a couple of books about animal behaviour, but I've never seen any footage of it. Just fabulous. How can anyone say that animals dont experience a full range of feelings and emotions, this fellow is deffinately a thrill seeker!

Animals were recognised as ‘sentient beings’ by the European Union in 1997 but there are still so many people who don’t realise the vast range of emotions and feelings animals are capable of experiencing.

As neurobiologist Jaak Panskepp (whose theories are central to Temple Grandin’s ‘Making Animals Happy’ reviewed here) points out, empathy is considered by many to be a human trait – why should a rat value the life of another unrelated rat? Its survival of the fittest, right? Wrong.

Scientists have shown that many animals such as chickens and primates and most recently, rats, are capable of feeling empathy towards one another. The scientists found that rats would actively work to release a captive rat and that they even did this when the captive rat was released into another container and there was no reward of social interaction. “There is nothing in it for them except for whatever feeling they get from helping another individual,” said Peggy Mason, the neurobiologist who conducted the experiment.

Even greater still, when a captive rat was given 5 chocolate drops at the start of the experiment it would save and share on average 1.5 of those drops with the captive rat once it had released it. “To actually share food — this is a big deal to a rat,” Mason said. “I didn’t think they would do that.”

A rat having the ability to display empathy shows that they not only have emotions of their own, but also the ability to understand that others have emotions too. This ability is known as theory of mind – a level of intelligence even human children lack for the first couple of years of their lives.