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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
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Helen Pilcher

Wild animals are great gift givers – and there’s one present in particular I’d love to receive for Christmas

A penguin, wings extended, walks across chopped-up ground with a pebble in its mouth and other penguins in the distance
An Adélie penguin in Antarctica collecting a pebble. Photograph: Rebecca Yale/Getty Images

This Christmas morning, are you worried you didn’t choose quite the right gift for that someone special? I always try my hardest, but everywhere I turn I’m bombarded with unhelpful suggestions. No, I don’t want a candle that smells like turkey, because, well, we’ll be cooking turkey. Nor do I want a sunrise alarm clock that mimics natural light, because I can leave the curtains open. And I definitely don’t want a salmon DNA pink collagen jelly mask (Good Housekeeping’s Best for Beauty Lovers), because said DNA comes from milt. AKA semen. If I wanted fish sperm on my face, I would tickle some pollocks.

So if, like me, you’re always looking for inspiration, my advice is: learn from the animal kingdom. Humans didn’t invent gifting. The practice has been around for at least 100m years, long before our species evolved. With a little help from natural selection, this has given wild animals ample time to perfect the art of giving. Hell, some spiders even gift-wrap!

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