Animals That Start With N

The narwhal is probably the best-known animal beginning with N, followed by the newt, the nightingale and the numbat. Unlike some letters, N is well supplied: 252 of the 11,227 bird species in the IOC World Bird List have English names starting with N, and 326 of the 6,871 mammals in the Mammal Diversity Database do.

Here are around 35 of them, organised by group, with a line on each.

Mammals

• Narwhal — Arctic whale whose males grow a spiralled tusk up to about three metres long. The tusk is an overgrown left canine tooth, not a horn.
• Numbat — small striped Australian marsupial that eats termites almost exclusively. It is one of very few marsupials active by day.
• Naked mole-rat — nearly hairless East African rodent that lives in eusocial colonies with a single breeding queen, like an insect. Exceptionally long-lived for its size.
• Nyala — southern African antelope with dramatic sexual dimorphism: males are shaggy and slate-grey with spiral horns, females chestnut and hornless.
• Nilgai — the largest antelope in Asia, native to the Indian subcontinent. Bulls turn blue-grey with age, which is where the name comes from.
• Nubian ibex — desert wild goat of the mountains around the Red Sea, with long backward-sweeping ridged horns.
• Northern elephant seal — Pacific seal in which bulls reach several tonnes and dive well over a kilometre deep.
• Northern fur seal — dense-furred North Pacific seal that spends most of the year at sea.
• North American beaver — the continent's largest rodent and its most effective non-human landscape engineer.
• Nutria — also called the coypu, a large semi-aquatic South American rodent now invasive across parts of North America, Europe and Asia.
• Night monkey — ten species in the genus Aotus, the only truly nocturnal monkeys, all from Central and South America.
• Noctule — a group of fast, high-flying European and Asian bats. The common noctule is among the largest bats in Europe.
• Nabarlek — a small rock-wallaby from northern Australia, unusual for growing replacement molars throughout life.
• Northern tamandua — a Central American anteater, roughly cat-sized, that climbs well and forages in trees.
• Nilgiri langur — a glossy black leaf-eating monkey restricted to the Western Ghats of southern India.
• Northern muriqui — a critically endangered Brazilian woolly spider monkey, the largest primate in the Americas.

Our random mammal generator draws from the full list of living mammal species if you want a wider sample.

Birds

• Nene — the Hawaiian goose, Hawaii's state bird, recovered from a low of around 30 individuals in the 1950s.
• Nightingale — a plain brown European songbird with an outsized reputation, and a repertoire that runs to hundreds of phrase types.
• Northern cardinal — the bright red crested songbird of eastern North America.
• Nicobar pigeon — an iridescent island pigeon of the Indo-Pacific, often described as the closest living relative of the dodo, though the genetic evidence for that is thinner than the claim suggests.
• Northern gannet — a large North Atlantic seabird that plunge-dives from height into the sea.
• Northern mockingbird — a North American mimic that strings together imitations of other birds and mechanical sounds.
• Northern lapwing — a crested green-and-white wader of European farmland with a distinctive floppy flight.
• Northern bald ibis — a bare-headed ibis, once widespread across North Africa and Europe, now the subject of intensive reintroduction work.
• Narina trogon — a green and crimson African forest bird, named after a Khoikhoi woman known to the naturalist François Levaillant.
• Northern flicker — a woodpecker that feeds heavily on ants at ground level.
• Noisy miner — an aggressive native Australian honeyeater that drives smaller birds out of its territory.
• Nightjar, nighthawk and night heron — three separate groups, all named for hunting at dusk or after dark.

Our random bird generator covers all of these and the rest of the class.

Reptiles and amphibians

• Nile crocodile — Africa's largest crocodilian and one of the few animals that regularly preys on large mammals.
• Nile monitor — a big semi-aquatic African lizard, now established as an invasive species in parts of Florida.
• Newt — semi-aquatic salamanders in the family Salamandridae, found across Europe, Asia and North America. Many can regenerate lost limbs and even parts of the eye and heart.
• Natterjack toad — a short-legged European toad with a yellow stripe down its back that runs rather than hops, and whose call carries for a considerable distance.

Newts are worth a note on naming: all newts are salamanders, but not all salamanders are newts. The distinction is largely about lifestyle rather than lineage.

Fish

• Nurse shark — a slow bottom-dwelling shark of warm shallow waters that sucks prey out of crevices rather than chasing it.
• Northern pike — a long-bodied freshwater ambush predator of the northern hemisphere, patterned for cover in weed beds.
• Neon tetra — a small Amazonian fish with a blue-green stripe and red flank, one of the most widely kept aquarium species in the world.
• Needlefish — slender surface-dwelling fish with elongated beaked jaws, capable of leaping clear of the water at speed.

Invertebrates

• Nautilus — a shelled cephalopod of the Indo-Pacific with dozens of tentacles and simple pinhole eyes. The shell's chambers work as a buoyancy device.
• Nudibranch — sea slugs, often extravagantly coloured. Some species store stinging cells taken from the prey they eat and reuse them in their own defence.
• Norway lobster — the small clawed lobster sold as langoustine or scampi, common in the northeast Atlantic.

Why N does well

N is a common initial letter in English, which is half the answer. The other half is that four productive naming patterns all happen to feed it: compass directions ("northern" prefixes a large share of bird and mammal names), place names such as the Nile, the Nilgiri Hills and Nicobar, the word "night" for nocturnal animals, and native names borrowed into English — numbat, nyala, nilgai and nabarlek all come from local languages.

Compare that with X, where almost nothing in English begins with the letter and animal lists struggle to find five genuine entries.

The short version

For a single answer, narwhal. For a school list, narwhal, newt, nightingale, numbat, nutria and nurse shark will cover mammals, amphibians, birds and fish between them.

To pull species at random across every group rather than one letter, use the random animal generator.