A  twitcher-friendly theme today - and not one of my personal strong suits, so I was relieved that the thematic examples used were generally common or garden varieties.  I did have to confirm 9A (the most plausible guess, given the obvious wordplay) and 24A (felt vaguely familiar for some unknown reason) post-solving.

Across
1 PARROT - (raptor)*
4 BANTAM - probably the most curiously-named of the various weight categories in boxing?
8 TA,NAGER - (Regan)rev.  Lear’s daughters never seem to be too far from the surface in most setters’ bran tub of Shakespearean characters.
11 KING,F(ISH)ER - “Man”= some chess-piece is one of those devices which can often stymie inexperienced solvers, given the wealth of other alternatives (firstnames, Isle…).  Fer (Iron) as in Chemin de Fer.
13 HERON - hidden.
14 NIGHT,JAR - a touch of 13D about this one?
16 PA(RAKE)ET - (peat)*
18 ROBIN’
21 SONGTHRUSH - (shorn thugs)*.  An amusing surface reading, albeit in a slightly cartoony way.
23 K(ESTRE)L - no idea, how densely forested Kirkwall is in actuality. Any Orcadians care to weigh in as to whether this could be deemed an &lit?
24 PO(CHAR)D - a type of duck.  Pod is one of the lesser lights in the crosswording realm of “container”s.
25 SH,R,IKE - ref. Dwight D Ironworker

Down
1 PI,AN,I - pretty cute; the kind of clue more likely to be encountered in an advanced/barred puzzle.
2 REAL,GAR
3 O(BE,DIE)NCE - an opportunity well-seized, although I’m probably not for the first time.
5 AM,[-h]OUR - Unusually here, “almost” indicates a letter removal at the beginning rather than the end of a word.
7 MARK TWAIN - the nom de plume chosen by Samuel Clemens, derived from a plumb-line method of water depth measurement for boats (pre-Plimsoll lines). Mark One, Mark Twain (=Two) etc. (With thanks to my father, who instilled this factoid in me as a kid; I never imagined it coming in useful!).
10 THINK TANK - “design”=think seems to be wandering into far-fetched territory.
13 HOARINESS - I had heaviness here initially, before figuring out that it was merely a double def’n.
17 AG,IST,ER - a word that I was lucky to recognise.  It dates back to the heydays of working class cattle-ownership and medieval serfdom.
19 BURG,HER - (grub)rev.
22 SPRAY - double (or maybe triple) def’n.

Apologies for a brief and slightly belated blog. A nice theme involving various hominids, starting with the first three across clues. I needed to look up a few of the synonyms to check details, but apart from that this was not too troublesome,

dd = double definition
cd = cryptic definition
* = anagram
< = reverse

Silly me, I forgot that I’d be nowhere near a PC all day today, so I set about solving this one online at midnight in a bid to get it blogged before bed. As I write/post this, I’ve no idea who the setter is, but it was done and dusted by 12.20am, with no major probs along the way. There’s no Nina that I can see, so I’m guessing it might be Dac. There are some fairly odd/obscure answers in the bottom half though, which always makes me wary, so I’ll have an each-way side bet on it being a Virgilius special that’s gone over my head.