Robert Krulwich

If you've ever had to raise a noisy, fussy, crying baby, consider this alternative: I know a bunch of moms who produce newborns that stay blissfully, totally silent (and still!) for w...

If only ... if only, instead of that noisy, bawling, crying little person, you could have produced an antelope baby — and oh, the quiet! The blissful, total silence. When pronghorn antelopes have babies, nobody hears anything for weeks and weeks — which is the whole point.

Let's be one ...

You can cuddle them, live with them, protect them, but when animals look at you — even when they're purring or licking your face — what's really going on in their heads? In yours? A c...

What happens if you are the last (the very, very last) of your species and you die — and humans notice?

We live, increasingly, at a time when extinctions are recorded, remembered, and the last animal (or plant) in its line, by virtue of its being last, becomes a kind ...

When "Benjamin," the world's last captive Tasmanian Tiger, died in 1936, a 23-million-year run of marsupial (pouch-bearing), doglike animals very likely disappeared from the planet. B...

There are different ways to think about animals. One way is to imagine them totally separate, not attaching to us, ever. "They are not brethren," wrote the great naturalist Henry Beston, "they are not underlings. They are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and ...

They came, they fished, then snap! They posed. Right in front of their Big Catch — and thereby hangs a tale.

For generations, tour boats have been collecting fishing enthusiasts in Key West, Fla.: taking them for a day of deep sea casting; providing them rods, bait, companionship; and then, ...

She found them in the Key West library: an old stash of "Look at What I Caught!" photos, proud fishermen showing off their big catch of the day back in the 1950s, '60s, '80s. As she...

Living with a pet is usually a pleasure, but now and again, it isn't. Fate hands you the wrong animal, but it's your animal, so what can you do? You try to love it. This tale of a boy...

The Inmans had a parrot. Grump (that was his name) was horrible, angry, scheming and nasty. But he was their parrot so they couldn't shoot him. Instead he lived in their house, soiled their mail, stole their fried chicken and, every so often, bit. Then, finally, he died.

Sort ...

Passenger pigeons went. Dodos went. Buffalo nearly went. But here's the surprise. Three of the weediest, everywhere-ist animals we know (the common pigeon, the white-tailed deer and C...

Go back 150 years and ask yourself, what was there a lot of?

We all know the answer ...

There were lots of buffalo, lots of passenger pigeons, lots of oysters. And then, poof! Hardly any. Or none ...

OK, let's flip the question: What were there precious few of ...

There they are, up on the power line, side by side by side by side by side. Starlings, each one like the other — rubber-stamped birds, a mob (or murmuration) of indecipherably similar...

It begins with a growl. Then there's a crack — a slurpy, sucky, crunchy noise. A guy is on the phone, and his pal interrupts him and says, "It's starting, Adam, I think. Adam? It's starting ..." The two are up on a bluff, overlooking a giant ice field. They ...

It's been there for thousands, maybe tens of thousands of years — a huge, solid, endless mass of white ice. Then, all of sudden ("It's starting, Adam," says an onlooker) there's a cra...

You've seen them. We've all seen them.

Hundreds of starlings are sitting side by side by side — up on a power line yakking, preening — when all of a sudden, boom! Up they go, all of them. What happened? A sudden noise? A falcon in the neighborhood? Whatever it ...

You drop a ball. You drop a key. You drop a piece of lead. They each slip from your hand and tumble to the ground. But you have an orderly mind (you're a physicist) and, to you, falling things don't seem haphazard — they seem neat. The unruly world has ...

Alice had this problem when she went through the looking glass: You start in a known place. You advance, step by steady step. Nothing is amiss, nothing misplaced. But when you land, e...

We're only a few Sundays shy of the big game, so here's a Super Bowl warm-up video, a "What if ... ?"

What if a sportscaster from Britain who knows absolutely nothing about American football — whose only expertise is in rugby — were thrown on the air during an ...

It's getting close to Super Bowl time, so here's a little fantasy. What would happen if a British sports announcer who has no idea how American football works (not a clue) were sudden...