Last week we learned about the smallest species of animals not typically thought of as small, like snakes and cetaceans. This week let's look at some of the tiniest animals in the world, the smallest of the small! Further watching: A short video about jerboas. Really interesting and well-made! A button quail: Baby button quails are the size of BEES: Kinglets are teeny birds even when grown up. Left, the golden-crowned kinglet. Right, the goldcrest. These birds MAY BE RELATED, you think? The pale-billed flowerpecker, also teeny and with a cute name: Moving on from birds, the pygmy jerboa is one of the smallest rodents in the world: The Etruscan pygmy shrew is even tinier, probably the smallest known mammal alive today. Shown here with friend/lunch: The Western pygmy blue butterfly is probably the smallest butterfly known: But the pygmy sorrel moth is even smaller. Right: red marks left behind on a sorrel leaf eaten by its larvae: One of the world's teeniest frogs: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Last week we learned about the smallest species of animals that aren’t typically thought of as small. But this week let’s learn about the smallest of the small animals. It’s like saying they’re the cutest of the cute animals. We’ll start with the bigger ones and get smaller and smaller as we go. Let’s start with a bird. The smallest bird is the bee hummingbird, which we’ve talked about before. But there’s another bird that’s really small, the button quail. It’s about the size of a sparrow. The button quail isn’t actually a quail, but it looks like one due to convergent evolution. There are a number of species in parts of Asia and Africa and throughout Australia. It generally lives in grasslands and is actually more closely related to shore and ocean birds like sandpipers and gulls than to actual quails, but it’s not very closely related to any other living birds. It can fly but it mostly doesn’t. Instead it depends on its coloring to hide it in the grass where it lives. It’s mostly brown with darker and lighter speckled markings, relatively large feet, and a little stubby nothing of a tail. It mostly eats seeds and other plant parts as well as insects and other invertebrates. The button quail is especially interesting because the female is more brightly colored than the male, although not by much. In some species the female may have bright white markings, in some their speckled markings are crisper than the males. The female is the one who calls to attract a male and who defends her territory from other females. The female even has a special bulb in her throat that she can inflate with air to make a loud booming call. The male incubates the eggs and takes care of the chicks when they hatch. Baby button quails are fuzzy and active like domestic chicken babies but they’re only about the size of a bumblebee. In many species, as soon as the female has laid her eggs, she leaves them and the male and goes on to attract another male for her next clutch of eggs. People sometimes keep button quails as pets, specifically a species called the painted buttonquail or the Chinese painted quail. It’s about five inches long, or 12 cm. The female has black and white stripes on her face and throat. The birds can become quite tame and can live several years. Button quails make a lot of different noises. This is what a button quail sounds like: [button quail calls] One of the smallest birds in the world that isn’t a hummingbird is the kinglet, with several species that live in North America and Eurasia. The goldcrest is a type of kinglet and the smallest European bird. It’s only 3.3 inches long, or 8.5 cm, although some individuals are larger. It looks a lot like the North American bird the golden-crowned kinglet, which is just a shade smaller at 3.1 inches, or 8 cm.