Today is a depressing day history-wise (Gandhi’s assassination, The Beatles’ last public performance, Dick Cheney’s birthday) so instead I am sharing some of my favourite bits of trivia: collective nouns for animal groups!

Delightful examples include

• • A shrewdness of apes
  • A sloth of bears (and yet,  a group of sloths is a bed)
  • A clowder of cats
    • (although a group of wild or feral cats is a “destruction”)
  • A skulk of foxes

    

  • A troubling of goldfish
  • An array of hedgehogs
  • A parliament of owls
  • A pandemonium of parrots
  • An unkindness of ravens
  • A crash of rhinoceros
  • a mutation of thrush
  • A zeal of zebras