When Bay Weekly last checked in on Canine Companions for Independence trainee Eaton, the golden retriever/Lab mix had just stepped on the path to becoming a service dog. Paired with first-time puppy trainers Emerson and Donna Davis, Eaton spent 18 months getting socialized and learning obedience [www.bayweekly. com/articles/features/article/good-dogs].

Calvert Marine Museum’s most popular residents, river otters Bubbles and Squeak, are throwing parties to subsidize their enriched lifestyle.     The parties invite up to six guests over for breakfast. Bubbles and Squeak eat while guests look on and learn from estuarine biologist David Moyer. During breakfast, the otters paint, and after the party-goers collectively choose an authentic otter artwork that is clear-coated, named and authenticated.

Is the Easter Bunny a cottontail or a snowshoe hare?     Both are native to North America, unlike domesticated rabbits, which are elaborately bred descendents of European wild rabbits.

Spring has sprung.         Spring peepers are wide awake and calling out loud.     These tiny frogs are among the first to call and breed. Only the males sing. They’re calling for mates.     Competition’s tough.     Females choose a mate by the quality of his call.     You can tell a peeper by a prominent dark X mark on its back.

Sam Born began selling Peeps in the early 1920s, in a small Pennsylvania grocery store he owned, under a sign that read Just Born.     Nowadays March brings Peeps madness.     The craze took off in 1953 as cellophane selections of packaged Peeps flew off neighborhood grocery shelves.     In my childhood Easter basket, I found one color and one flavor of Peeps: yellow chicks with black, beady eyes.

Betsy Kehne had been waiting for three decades for the bird perched a stone’s throw from her window.     At five years old, she’d grieved at learning that the pesticide DDT was pushing bald eagles to extinction.     DDT was banned in 1972. By the end of the century, the number of nesting eagles in Maryland had increased sixfold to 260 pairs. Today, more than 2,000 bald eagles make their homes in the Chesapeake region, so that seeing them soaring overhead is no longer rare.

The great blue heron’s return to Chesapeake Country and consequent mating occurs mid-February, bestowing these majestic birds the nickname, lovebirds.     “Their local nickname, along with love birds, is Johnny Crane,” said Mike Callahan, president of Southern Maryland Audubon Society.

This Valentine’s Day, woo your love with chocolate, flowers and a critter cupid. That’s the advice of the Smithsonian National Zoo in Washington, D.C., whose animals are lending their images to a loveable fundraising campaign.     Playing cupid this year are cuddling pandas, kissing seals, a Sumatran tiger, a red panda and a whole family of otters. Choose your Critter Cupid for $10 at www.subscribe.smithsonianmag.com/zoo.

The wise guys and gals of the world of sports gave Super Bowl XLVII to the San Francisco 49ers. The chimpanzee tribe of the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore, however, got it right.     On Purple Friday, February 1, the zoo’s 11 chimps emerged from their night quarters into a dayroom decked out with footballs and two team banners: a red one for the 49ers and a purple one for the Ravens.     Zookeepers had set the stage for prognostication.

February 2 is halfway through winter, so what better time to gather with friends and neighbors to eat good food, drink heartily and look ahead to the coming spring?     The Pennsylvania Dutch descendants of German immigrants did just that. Among the first celebrants of Groundhog Day, they partied hardy in Punxsutawney, Penn., as far back as 1887.