Richard Dawkins delights in his own invective
The late Derek Ratcliffe, arguably Britain’s greatest naturalist since Charles Darwin, once explained how he cultivated a technique for finding…
A hymn to the hummingbird — one of the most astonishing organisms on Earth
Along with coral reefs and their fish, tropical butterflies and birds of paradise, hummingbirds must be among the most beautiful…
Bird migration is no longer a mystery — but it will always seem a miracle
Bird migration was once one of those unassailable mysteries that had baffled humankind since Aristotle. A strange hypothesis, genuinely advanced…
Where time stands still: a Himalayan pilgrimage
The region of Dolpo in Nepal forms part of a border zone between that country and China in the central…
The world’s largest, rarest owl is used for target practice in Siberia
The montane forests of far-eastern Russia have given rise to one of the finest nature books of recent years, The…
Where did birds first learn to sing?
Fieldwork can move the most rigorous scientist to lyricism, as Mark Cocker discovers
Mother nature is finally getting the art she deserves
Exhibitions about fungi, bugs and trees illustrate the depth, range and vitality of a growing field of art, says Mark Cocker
Dangerously desirable: the white-morph gyr falcon commands sky-high prices
The art of falconry is more than 3,000 years old and possibly as popular now as at any time. Its…
In the high Himalayas
In my twenties I once visited a lonely spot among the western Himalayas called Zhuldok in the Suru valley. Politically…
Spooky stories for Halloween
It is surely significant that Ed Parnell’s first novel The Listeners was an updated examination of themes latent in Walter…
Head to Berlin to hear nightingales sing
In a sense, the song of the bird in the title of this short, hugely thoughtful and fascinating book is…
For a passionate ecologist, Barry Lopez burns a lot of oil
It is more than a generation since the appearance of Barry Lopez’s classic Arctic Dreams. That book’s effortless integration of…
In (vain) search of the snow leopard
Alex Dehgan is clearly someone with a penchant for hazardous jobs. Even in the first few pages we find him…
![Let there be light: the Atlantic footballfish dwells 3,000 feet below the surface of the ocean. [Paulo Oliveira / Alamy Stock Photo]](https://spectatorau.imgix.net/content/uploads/2018/08/18augartslead.jpg?auto=compress,enhance,format&crop=faces,entropy,edges&fit=crop&w=410&h=275)
How to live in a world without light: Life in the Dark at the Natural History Museum reviewed
Like most of our ape ancestors, we have really had only one response to the fall of night. We have…
The selective breeding of pets: how far should we go?
It was in his play Back to Methuselah that George Bernard Shaw honoured a lesser known aspect of Charles Darwin’s…
The lovely curlew is wading into extinction
Mary Colwell, a producer at the BBC natural history unit, is on a mission: to save the British curlew from…
The sacred chickens that ruled the roost in ancient Rome
Even the most cursory glance at the classical period reveals the central place that birds played in the religious and…
Richard Jefferies: a naturalist under the microscope
Alan Bennett once defined a classic as ‘a book everyone is assumed to have read and forgets if they have…
Animals make us human
There was a time when biologists so scorned the attribution of human qualities to other animals that anthropomorphism was seen…
Kathmandu — or don’t
Although Nepal’s earthquake last April visited our television screens with images of seismic devastation, the disaster has probably had little…
Tracking the great Siberian tiger
Of all charismatic animals, tigers are surely the most filmed, televised, documented, noisily cherished and, paradoxically, the most persecuted on…
Green is the colour of happiness
According to this wonderfully thought-provoking book, human attachment to plants was much more evident in the 19th century than it…
We all love butterflies — so why are we wiping them out?
Last month, at Edinburgh School of Art, I was interested to come across a student who’d chosen Marlowe’s Dr Faustus…
New ways to destroy the world
Despite the offer of joy proposed in the subtitle, this is a deeply troubling book by one of Britain’s foremost…
Why the cheating cuckoo may finally be getting its comeuppance
In recent years there has been a fashion for so-called ‘new nature writing’, where the works are invariably heavy with…
