Which owl says 'Tu-whit, tu-who'?

William Shakespeare first used the phrase 'tu-whit, tu-who' in his song 'Winter' from Love's Labour's Lost:

Then nightly sings the staring owl,
Tu-who;
Tu-whit, tu-who: a merry tune,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

No single owl has ever gone 'tu-whit, tu-who'.

Barn owl screech.  Short-eared owls are largely silent.  A long-eared owl makes an extended low pitched 'oo-oo-oo' noise.

The owl noise that most resembles 'tu-whit. tu-who' is made by Tawny owls.  Two of them.

The male Tawny - also known as a Brown Owl - calls with a hooting 'hooo-hoo-hooo', and the female replies with a boarser 'kew-wick'.

What did Darwin do to dead owls?

He ate them, although only once.

Charles Darwin was driven by gastronomic, as well as scientific, curiosity.  While half-heartedly reading Divinity at Cambridge University, he became a member of the 'Glutton' or 'Gourmet Club' which met once a week and actively sought to eat animals not normally found on menus.

Darwin's son, Francis, commenting on his father's letters, noted that the Gourmet Club enjoyed, among other things, hawk and bittern, but that 'their zeal broke down over an old brown owl,' which they found 'indescribable

Over the years, Darwin sharpened up considerably in the academic arena and lost his faith in God, but he never lost his taste for the allure of an interesting menu.

During the voyage of the Beagle, he ate armadillos which, he said, 'taste and look like duck' and a chocolate-coloured rodent that was 'the best meat I ever tasted' - probably an agouti, whose family name is Dasyproctidae, Greek for 'hairy bum'.  In Patagonia, he tucked into a plate of puma (the mountain lion Felis concolor) and thought it tasted rather like veal.

Later, after exhaustively searching Patagonia for the Lesser Rhea, Darwin realised he had already eaten one for his Christmas dinner, while moored off Port Desire in 1833.  The bird had been shot by Conrad Martens, the ship's artist.

Darwin assumed it was one of the common Greater Rhea, or 'ostriches', as he called them, and only realised his mistake when plates were being cleared: "It was cooked and eaten before my memory returned.  Fortunately the head, neck, legs, wings, many of the larger feathers, and a large part of the skin, had been preserved."  He sent the bits back to the Zoological Society in London and the Rhea darwinii was named after him.

In the Galapagos, Darwin lived on iguana (Conolophus subcrisatus) and, on James Island, wolfed down a few helpings of giant tortoise.  Not realising the importance of giant tortoises to his later evolutionary theory, forty-eight specimens were loaded aboard the Beagle.  Darwin and his shipmates proceeded to eat them, throwing the sells overboard as they finished.

A Phylum Feast is a shared meal using as many different species as possible, eaten by biologists on 12th February to celebrate Darwin's birthday.

What does a St Bernard carry round its neck?

St Bernards have never, ever carried brandy barrels.

The dog's mission is entirely teetotal - apart from anything else giving brandy to someone with hypothermia is a disastrous mistake - but tourists have always loved the idea, so they still pose wearing them.

Before they were trained as mountain rescue dogs, they were used my the monks at the hospice in the Great St Bernard Pass - the Alpine route that links Switzerland to Italy - to carry food, as their large size and docile temperament make them good pack animals.

The brandy barrel was the idea of a young English artist named Sir Edwin Landseer (1802-73), who was much favoured by Queen Victoria.  He was a renowned painter of landscapes and animals, best known for his painting The Monarch of the Glen and for sculpting the lions around the base of Nelson's Column.

In 1831, he painted a scene called Alpine Mastiffs Reanimating a Distressed Traveller featuring two St Bernards, one of them carrying a miniature brandy barrel around its neck, which he added 'for interest'.  St Bernard have been saddled with the association ever since.  Landseer is also credited with popularising the name St Bernard (rather than Alpine Mastiff) for the breed.

Originally St Bernards were known as Barry hounds, a corruption of the German bären, meaning 'bears'.  One of the first lifesavers was known as 'Barry the Great', who rescued forty people between 1800 and 1814 but was unfortunately killed by the forty-first, who mistook him for a wolf.

Barry was stuffed and now has pride of place in the Natural History Museum in Berne.  In his honour, the best male pup from each litter at the St Bernard's Hospice is named Barry.

Sometimes the Hospice's duty to provide food and shelter for all who ask can prove troublesome.  On night in 1708, Canon Vincent Camox had to provide food for over 400 travellers.  To save manpower, he had a device built like a large hamster-wheel attached to a spit.  Inside a St Bernard trotted along turning the meat skewer.

It's estimated the dogs have made over 2,500 rescues since 1800, though none at all in the last fifty years.  As a result, the monastery has decided to sell them off and replace them with helicopters.