QI: The Book of General Ignorance - the Noticeably Stouter Edition (29 page)

In nests.

These large, muscular primates build new nests every
evening (and sometimes after a heavy lunch) either on the ground or in the lower branches of trees.

Aside from the very young, it’s strictly one gorilla, one nest.

They aren’t works of art – bent branches woven together, with softer foliage as a mattress – and usually take ten minutes to make. Females and young animals prefer to sleep in trees; males or ‘silverbacks’ sleep on the ground.

According to some accounts, lowland gorillas are hygienic and houseproud, whereas mountain gorillas regularly foul their nests and sleep on a mound of their own dung.

Gorillas cannot swim. They have forty-eight chromosomes, two more than people.

More gorillas are eaten by people in the form of ‘bushmeat’ every year than there are in all the zoos in the world.

The chicken, by miles.

There are about 52 billion chickens in the world: that’s almost nine for every human. Seventy-five per cent of them will be eaten but, for almost 3,000 years, they were farmed primarily for their eggs. Until the Romans came to Britain it had never occurred to anyone to eat the bird itself.

All the chickens in the world are descended from a kind of pheasant called the Red Jungle Fowl (
Gallus gallus gallus
), native to Thailand. Its nearest modern relative is the gamecock used in cockfighting.

Mass production of chickens and eggs started in about 1800. Eating chicken began as a by-product of egg production. Only chickens too old to produce enough eggs were killed and sold for meat. In 1963, chicken meat was still a
luxury. It wasn’t until the 1970s that it became the meat of choice for most families. Today it accounts for almost half of all meat eaten in the UK.

As a result of selective breeding and hormone treatment, it now takes less than forty days to grow a chicken to maturity, which is twice as fast as allowing nature to take its course.

Ninety-eight per cent of all chickens raised anywhere in the world – even organic ones – come from breeds developed by three American companies. Over half the world’s ‘broilers’ (eating chickens) are Cobb 500s, developed in the 1970s by the Cobb Breeding Co.

There were no chickens at all in the Americas before 1500. They were introduced by the Spanish.

More than a third of all UK chicken is produced by one Scottish company, the Grampian Country Foods Group. They supply all the major supermarket chains, and are a major donor to the Conservative Party. They process 3.8 million chickens a week through their eight vast Integrated Chicken Units, one of which is in Thailand. Their motto is ‘Traditional Goodness’.

Most chickens sold for eating are female. Male ones for eating are castrated cocks and are called capons. Nowadays castration is done chemically with hormones that cause the testicles to atrophy.

The industry term for chicken feet is ‘paws’. Most of America’s ‘paws’ get exported to China even though three billion chickens already live there.

Danish chickens go
gok-gok
; German chickens go
gak gak
; Thai chickens go
gook gook
; Dutch chickens go
tok tok
; Finnish and Hungarian chickens go kot kot. The rather superior French hen goes
cotcotcodet
.

At various times this phrase has been applied to chariot racing, jousting, falconry, bowls, polo, and, most recently, horse-racing.

However, for the best part of 2,000 years there was one ‘sport’ which earned the ‘royal’ tag above all others: cockfighting.

Until it was banned in 1835 it was Britain’s national sport, with every village boasting at least one cockpit. Everyone from royalty to schoolboys joined in: there were even cockpits in the palace of Westminster and on Downing Street. On Shrove Tuesday, for a fee of one ‘cock-penny’, boys could bring their gamecocks to school and fight them for the day.

No one knows how or when the Old English Game fowl (OEG) arrived in Britain. There is a legend that Phoenician tradesmen introduced them but it seems likely they were carried here by Iron Age tribes migrating from the East. In 54
BC
Julius Caesar was impressed that the ancient Britons bred birds for fighting rather than meat.

OEGs are universally acknowledged as the most aggressive of all fowl. A good gamecock will fight to the death with no special encouragement, hence their pre-eminence as fighting birds.

Competition among their breeders was intense. Recipes for special bread to ‘build courage’ were jealously guarded, though the practice of soaking it in warm urine was universal.
The cock had his comb and wattles removed (dubbed) and steel spurs (gavelocks) attached.

A good cocker would think nothing of cleaning his cock’s wounded head by sticking it in his mouth and sucking it clean. Racing and cockfighting often took place together, as both involved gambling.

Some bloodlines were legendary; the White Piles bred by Dr Bellsye near Chester were famous for the ‘Chesire drop’, a sudden burst of murderous violence just when the cock looked finished.

Cockfighting is still legal in Louisiana and New Mexico, and only classed as a ‘misdemeanour’ in sixteen other states such as Tennessee and Arkansas.

A cock is a male bird over a year old; under a year he’s a cockerel, or ‘stag’ in cocker-speak. Other words and phrases deriving from the ‘sport of kings’ include ‘game’ (i.e. up for it), ‘pitted against’, ‘turn tail’, ‘show the white feather’ (cowardice), ‘show a clean pair of heels’, ‘well-heeled’ (which originally meant possessing sharp natural spurs), ‘cocksure’ and ‘cock-eyed’ (to squint).

The goldcrest and the firecrest tie for the title of the smallest bird in Britain. Both are a mere 9 cm (3.5 inches) long, whereas the wren measures in at 9.5–10 cm (3.75–4 inches), making it the
third
smallest British bird.

However, the wren is Britain’s commonest wild bird and can be found in every kind of habitat. There are currently ten million breeding pairs.

Its name,
Troglodytes troglodytes
, means ‘cave dweller’. Wrens
build their dome-like nest in the most unlikely places: caves, burrows, inside the carcasses of dead animals, the folds of church curtains, watering cans.

The male usually builds six nests in his territory for the female to choose from, although there are records of them building five times that number.

Despite their size, the piercing ‘squitter’ of the wren can carry for half a mile and is one of the few bird songs that can be heard all year round. Wrens are susceptible to cold, and communal roosts of anything up to thirty birds can be found, as they huddle together for warmth.

The word wren comes from the Old English
wrenna
, which also meant ‘horny’, perhaps referring to the bird’s cocked tail. The wren is still called a ‘stag’ in Norfolk, from the Danish
stag
meaning ‘spike’.

On St Stephen’s Day (26 December) in the west of Britain and Ireland, ‘Hunting the Wren’ was an important Hallowe’ enstyle custom. A wren was captured, nailed to a pole, and paraded from door to door by children and adults wearing masks. In return for a song and a feather from the bird, householders offered food and drink, preferably beer.

The goldcrest’s Latin name,
Regulus regulus
, means ‘little king’, presumably because of its ‘crowning’ gold stripe. A fully grown c weighs about the same as a five-pence piece (5 g, less than a fifth of an ounce). There are stories of hungry goldcrests latching on to dragonflies and being ‘towed’ by the heavier insect.

Goldcrests are tough, regularly migrating across the North Sea to overwinter in Britain. They nest in conifers and the spread of British conifer plantations over the last fifty years means they are much less rare than they used to be.

The firecrest, on the other hand, remains elusive. It was only added to the list of British breeding birds in 1962 and there are still probably fewer than 100 breeding pairs.

Dogs. Canary birds are named after the islands (where they are indigenous), not the other way round.

The archipelago gets its name from the Latin name for the largest of the islands, which the Romans named ‘Isle of Dogs’ (
Insula Canaria
) after the large numbers of dogs there, both wild and domesticated.

The volcano on La Palma in the Canaries is said to have the potential to cause a catastrophic collapse of the western half of the island, creating a tsunami that could cross the Atlantic and hit the eastern seaboard of the United States of America eight hours later with a wave as high as thirty metres.

In ‘Canarian Wrestling’ the participants confront each other in a sand circle called a
terrero
; the aim is to make your opponent touch the sand with any part of his body other than the feet. No hitting is permitted. The sport originated with the Guanches, the islands’ pre-Spanish indigenous people.

The
Silbo Gomero
(‘Gomeran Whistle’) is a whistled language used in the Canary island of La Gomera to communicate across its deep valleys. Its speakers are called ‘silbadors’. Although it was originally a Guanche language, it has been adapted so that modern silbadors are, effectively, whistling in Spanish. It’s a compulsory subject for Gomeran schoolchildren.

Canaries are a kind of finch. For centuries, British mining regulations required the keeping of a small bird for gas detection. They were used in this way until 1986, and the wording wasn’t removed from the regulations until 1995. The idea was that toxic gases like carbon monoxide and methane killed the birds before they injured the miners. Canaries were favoured because they sing a lot, so it’s noticeable when they go quiet and fall over.

Only the male canaries sing; they can also mimic telephones
and other household devices. ‘Tweety’ in the Warner cartoons is a canary.

Canaries were originally a mottled greeny-brown, but 400 years of cross-breeding by human beings produced their familiar yellow colour. No one has ever bred a red canary but a diet of red peppers turns them orange.

London’s Isle of Dogs was first so-called on a map dated 1588: perhaps because it was home to the royal kennels, though it may simply have been a term of abuse. It’s an odd coincidence that Canary Wharf is located there.

The smallest dog on record was a Yorkshire terrier owned by Arthur Marples of Blackburn. It was 6.5 cm (2.5 inches) high at the shoulder, 9.5 cm (3.75 inches) long from the tip of its nose to the root of its tail, weighed 113 g (4 oz), and died in 1945.

The world’s smallest breed of dog is usually said to be the chihuahua. Nonetheless, according to the
Guinness Book of World Records
, the record for today’s smallest living dog is not necessarily held by one.

It depends what you mean by ‘smallest’. The current record is shared by a chihuahua (shortest in length) and a Yorkshire terrier (shortest in height).

Whitney, the Yorkshire terrier, lives in Shoeburyness, Essex and is 7.3 cm (3 inches) tall at the shoulder. The chihuahua, called Danka Kordak Slovakia, is 18.8 cm (7.4 inches) long and lives in Slovakia.

There are more than 400 breeds of dog and all are members of the same species. Any dog can breed with any other. No other creature in the world comes in such a wide range of shapes and sizes. No one know why this is.

The unique variety amongst dogs owes a lot to human intervention, but the puzzle is that all dog breeds are originally descended from grey wolves.

Doberman pinschers were created from German pinschers, Rottweilers, Manchester terriers, and possibly pointers, in just thirty-five years, apparently flying in the face of the Darwinian evolution of species, a process thought to operate over thousands or even millions of years.

For some unknown reason, when dogs are cross-bred, instead of getting an average between the two types you quite often get something totally unexpected. This new ‘breed’ also retains the ability to interbreed.

The chihuahua is named after a state in Mexico, because it was believed (on the basis of Toltec and Aztec art) that the breed was indigenous there. However, there are no archaeological remains to support this belief; and it is now thought that the animal depicted is most probably a variety of rodent.

It is much more likely that the ancestors of the breed were brought by Spanish merchants from China, where the practice of dwarfing both plants and animals has had a long history.

Chihuahua cheese is popular in Mexico but it comes from the state, not from the dog.