NYT Strands #916: Animal Nicknames Puzzle Guide

Each day, the New York Times Strands puzzle offers a small ritual of pattern recognition and linguistic memory — a quiet contest between the words we know and the ones we've forgotten we know. On September 5th, 2026, the theme is animal nicknames: the informal, affectionate shorthand humans have long used to name the creatures they share the world with. It is a puzzle built not on obscure knowledge, but on the familiar — the words that live in casual speech rather than field guides.