natural history
A pretty kettle of fish
The other day a friend asked me what a lascar was. Fair enough: it’s not a word you come across…
A small miracle
Along with coral reefs and their fish, tropical butterflies and birds of paradise, hummingbirds must be among the most beautiful…
Fish out of water
In the Pacific Northwest, Native Americans paint images of salmon on to stones. They say that if you rub those…
Return of the native
Conservationists are frequently criticised for focusing on glamorous species at the expense of others equally important but unluckily uglier —…
The magic of mushrooms
The biologist Merlin Sheldrake is an intriguing character. In a video promoting the publication of his book Entangled Life, which…
Rare beauty
The montane forests of far-eastern Russia have given rise to one of the finest nature books of recent years, The…
How do they do it?
Wendy Williams is an enthusiast, and enthusiasm is infectious. Lepidoptery is for her a new fascination, and it shows. On…
Playing tag and Pooh sticks
We live in an urban world. It’s a statistical fact. The great outdoors for most of us is a thing…
Child of nature
Dara McAnulty is a teenage naturalist from Northern Ireland. He has autism; so do his brother, sister and mother —…
Flights of fancy
Fieldwork can move the most rigorous scientist to lyricism, as Mark Cocker discovers
Born to be wild
Where to turn in anxious and febrile times? One answer is to nature, or the ‘non-human living world’, which, despite…
The prize of the skies
The art of falconry is more than 3,000 years old and possibly as popular now as at any time. Its…
From pets to pests: cats, rabbits and now raccoons
I was shocked some years ago to discover, as I scratched bites on my ankles on holiday on Maui, that…
Pigeons are plucky and loyal — so don’t go poisoning them in the park
Growing up as a rootless army brat in bases home and abroad, I would listen in appalled delight to my…
Busy beavers: in praise of man’s natural ally
The British experience of beavers is somewhat limited. Most of us haven’t been lucky enough to have spied an immigrant…
Wonder is all around
Different people find different things impressive. Some claim, for instance, to experience a sense of wonder at the fact of…
Swine fever
‘Rightly is they called pigs,’ says a farmworker in Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow as he watches porkers grunt and squelch.…
Cathedral of creation
Sometimes, it pays to rediscover what’s already under your nose. I’ve been umpteen times to the Natural History Museum but…
Formidable black talons…
I often feel slightly sorry for the British nature writer. It’s not an attractive emotion — it sounds patronising —…
Burrowed wisdom
Being a Beast is an impassioned and proselytising work of philosophy based on a spectacular approach to nature writing. That…
Not so happy valley
Simon Barnes opens with a presumably true idea, that we are all in search of our own versions of paradise…
The farm that went wild
A piece of ancient England is being reborn around a castle in Sussex
Bitten by the bug
‘Good night, sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite,’ my mother used to say when she tucked me in at…
Three men in the Basin
John Hemming is our greatest living scholar-explorer. He is best known for his extraordinary first book The Conquest of the…
Walking the same walk
Mark Cocker is the naturalist writer of the moment, with birds his special subject. His previous book, Birds and People,…
