NATURE’S A MOTHER in this warm and fuzzy New York Times article, which arrives just in time to brighten everyone’s Mother’s Day:

Researchers long viewed infanticide and similar acts of maternal skulduggery as pathological, a result of the mother’s being under extreme stress. A farmer’s child pokes around in a rabbit’s nest, for example, and the mother rabbit responds by methodically consuming every one of her eight baby bunnies. By standard reckoning, it made little genetic sense for a mother to destroy her young, and maternal nurturing was assumed to be a hard-wired affair.

More recently, scientists have accrued abundant evidence that “bad” mothering is common in nature and that it is often a centerpiece of the reproductive game plan.

Along with a bunch of other fun-filled examples of mothers from hell, the author also sneaks in a reference to birds called “blue-footed boobies”. So, basically, the whole article is a non-stop laugh-fest.