One morning in the Serengeti a tawny eagle was sitting on an acacia tree. The sun had risen a few hours earlier and the bird had used most of the daylight for gathering twigs to assemble into a nest. The acacia’s wicked thorns were almost as sharp as the eagle’s talons –..

The smartest animal in the savannah, at least in evolutionary terms, is the waterbuck. It doesn’t have the best eyesight, nor the quickest reactions; its horns are not particularly lethal, its muscles not especially well developed. But in nature’s endless game of who eats whom, billions of evolutionary choices and..