In Britain, lions, snow leopards, and tigers were playing with discarded Christmas trees, Danish scurvy grass was growing in salty verges, titpox was hitting great tits hardest (the red squirrels of Jersey, meanwhile, suffered no squirrelpox), heavy rains were washing Scottish hedgehogs from their nests, a flock of sheep adopted a young deer at Dunwich Heath, two dragons hatched in Cambridgeshire, and two men were charged with hare coursing in Lincolnshire, where the feet and heads of swans were being found without their bodies. “It is quite clear,” said a local police constable, “that something is not quite right.”…