100 free Groups of Animals trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
What do you call a group of owls, flamingos, ferrets or jellyfish? This groups of animals trivia quiz is built entirely around collective nouns, the odd and often beautiful words English uses for animals in company. It runs from the ones almost everyone knows (a pride of lions, a gaggle of geese) through the crowd-pleasers (a murder of crows, a parliament of owls, a crash of rhinos) to the genuinely obscure: the word for cardinals, toucans, lapwings and skunks. A handful of questions flip the format and ask which animal a term belongs to, and a few cover where the words came from, including the 15th-century hunting book that invented most of them and why modern scientists rarely use them. It suits a family game night, a classroom vocabulary round or a pub quiz picture-free round, with easy openers and some real stumpers at the end. Every answer is checked against the documented lists of collective nouns rather than social-media graphics, and the same list is used throughout so alternative terms are noted in the explanations.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is a group of crows called?
A murder
The term dates back centuries but ornithologists rarely use it; a big flock of crows roosting together can number in the tens of thousands.
Q 02What is a group of owls called?
A parliament
Owls are mostly solitary hunters, so a real 'parliament' is a rare sight outside the breeding season.
Q 03What is a group of lions called?
A pride
A pride is built around related females; the same list also gives the much older term 'sawt'.
Q 04What is a group of geese on the ground called?
A gaggle
The word changes once they take off, when a whole different set of flight terms applies.
Q 05What is a group of geese in flight called?
A skein
Skein originally meant a length of coiled yarn, a nod to the long trailing lines geese fly in.
Q 06What is a group of flamingos called?
A flamboyance
The alternative, duller term is simply a stand; wild flocks in East Africa can exceed a million birds.
Q 07What is a group of ravens called?
An unkindness
The list gives ravens a second, equally sinister term too, both reflecting the bird's dark reputation in folklore.
Q 08What is a group of larks called?
An exaltation
The phrase appears in a 15th-century hunting treatise and was borrowed as the title of James Lipton's 1968 book on collective nouns.
Q 09What is a group of ferrets called?
A business
The older spelling 'busyness' makes the sense clearer: ferrets are relentlessly active when awake.
Q 10What is a group of rhinoceroses called?
A crash
Adult rhinos are largely solitary, so a crash is usually a mother with calves or a loose group at a waterhole.
Q 11What is a group of hippopotamuses called?
A bloat
Hippos spend their days packed together in rivers and lakes and come ashore at night to graze.
Q 12What is a group of giraffes called?
A tower
Giraffe groups are loose and change membership constantly, which is why 'herd' is used just as often.
Q 13What is a group of zebras called?
A dazzle
The name plays on the theory that massed stripes make it hard for a predator to pick out one animal; 'zeal' is another option.
Q 14What is a group of jellyfish called?
Q 21What is a group of cockroaches called?
An intrusion
The word fits: cockroaches are among the most common household pests on every inhabited continent.
Q 22What is a group of ladybugs called?
A loveliness
Ladybugs cluster in huge numbers to overwinter, sometimes coating whole walls and tree trunks.
Q 23What is a group of turkeys called?
A rafter
Rafter is the traditional term, though 'flock' is what most farmers actually say.
Q 24What is a group of turtles called?
A smack
Marine biologists tend to say bloom for a sudden population explosion; smack, fluther and smuth are the folk terms.
Q 15What is a group of porcupines called?
A prickle
Porcupines are mostly solitary, so a prickle is usually a family sharing a den in winter.
Q 16What is a group of hedgehogs called?
An array
Hedgehogs are solitary too, so the term gets far more use in quizzes than in hedgerows.
Q 17What is a group of penguins on land called?
A waddle
In the water the same birds become a raft; emperor penguins famously huddle to survive Antarctic winds.
Q 18What is a group of wombats called?
A wisdom
A birding-magazine writer who interviewed wombat researchers found none of them had ever heard the term used at work.
Q 19What is a group of cheetah males called?
A coalition
Male cheetahs, often brothers, band together for life to hold territory; females are solitary.
Q 20What is a group of tigers called?
An ambush
Tigers are solitary, so the term is almost purely literary; the alternative is a streak.
A bale
Sea turtles gather in numbers only at nesting beaches, where thousands of females can come ashore at once.
Q 25What is a group of toads called?
A knot
Toads gather in writhing tangles during spring breeding, which is exactly what the term describes.
Q 26What is a group of foxes called?
A skulk
Skulk captures the fox's reputation for slinking; leash and earth are the other listed terms.
Q 27What is a group of hyenas called?
A cackle
Spotted hyenas really do produce a laughing call, and their social groups are also called clans.
Q 28What is a group of lemurs called?
A conspiracy
Ring-tailed lemur groups can number more than 20 and are dominated by females.
Q 29What is a group of apes called?
A shrewdness
Gorillas specifically get their own extra term, a whoop, alongside band and troop.
Q 30What is a group of otters called?
A romp
Sea otters, however, are described as a raft when they float together holding paws.