Dear reader, a very happy new year!

The beginning of the year is good for taking stock. We examine the year past: how was it for us? Did we do the important things? Or was the year consumed by the unimportant yet necessary tasks? It is a time to ask what we want to be and where we want to go, to set our goals for the year and to look back at the road we travelled. 

At the same time, experts and critics give us the "best" of everything from the past year – the best movies, books, music, and so on. Sometimes this becomes ridiculous, like the list of the most "cringeable" moments of 2015 that I saw on television.

But this year I was touched by a list that my friend Lori Simpson shared on Facebook. It was the twenty things she loved most about 2015.

This got me thinking about how I had spent the year. In the same spirit as Lori, I asked myself about my memorable experiences in 2015 and what I had learned from them. Here is a list of some of the lessons I found most interesting.

1.  The column or spout you see blowing from a whale's nose is actually moisture condensing on the warm air it has exhaled with great force. The whale does not blow out steam.

2.  The reason that the tokkhok (tokay lizard) stares unblinking at you forever is because it is one of those lizards with no eyelids. It lubricates its eyes by licking them frequently.

3.  For every person on this planet, there are 200 million insects; for every pound of humanity, 300 pounds of insects.

4.  Puffins make their nest in burrows that they dig with their beak. The holes can be up to four feet deep. They shovel out the soil with their feet. When they feel threatened inside the nest they fly out with great speed like a cannonball.

5.  The reason our farmers sometimes burn grass in open land is to keep away cows that would attack their vegetable patch.

6.  Bamboos grow faster than almost any other plant. In fact, a bamboo tree can grow many inches in a day in the rainy season.

7.  Woodpeckers have one toe growing from the back of their feet to help them maintain balance while walking vertically up and down tree trunks.

8.  Almost all "pelagic" birds – those that live on the open ocean – have very little colour. I am not sure why that is so, and I find most of these black-and-white birds unattractive.

9.  Just like America, we have the tick – a small insect – in our forests, and they bite. Unlike American ticks, however, our ticks do not transmit deadly Lyme disease. That's because Lyme disease comes to ticks from deer which we have so few of. Nonetheless our tick bites leave red welts that itch for days.

10.  The Bengal bushlark (bangla jharbhorot), a bird of the fields, can camouflage itself so well in dry grass that it can be three feet in front of me and I will miss it. Unless it moves, of course.

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