Rural: The Lives of the Working Class Countryside by Rebecca Smith; Shaping the Wild: Wisdom From a Welsh Hill Farm by David Elias

In the 1870s, the Manchester Corporation Waterworks made plans to buy two small Cumbrian lakes, Wythburn Water and Leathes Water, and the surrounding land, to build a reservoir. The city desperately needed access to clean water for its burgeoning industrial population. But it met with virulent opposition: Octavia Hill, later co-founder of the National Trust,... Continue Reading →

October 8, 2023 1

Something new out of Africa: Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer and the coelacanth’s return

It was the morning of 22 December 1938 and the phone was ringing at the newly established museum in East London, in South Africa’s Eastern Cape. The call was for Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, a young curator, then busy reconstructing a fossil dinosaur. Latimer had asked the local trawlermen to alert her to anything unusual in their... Continue Reading →

September 21, 2023 0

Landscapes of Silence: From Childhood to the Arctic by Hugh Brody

One night in the winter of 1961–2, the anthropologist Hugh Brody sat on the bed in his attic room in his parents’ house, placed a cartridge in his shotgun, leaned the shotgun barrel against his head and pulled the trigger. ‘My sense of having no future was so complete that it obscured the possibility of... Continue Reading →

August 8, 2022 2

Sounds Wild and Broken by David George Haskell

Humanity has always been a noisy animal. As long ago as 1700 BC, a Babylonian god was complaining that the “noise of mankind has become too much./I am losing sleep over their racket.” Cities, where more than half of us now live, have only got louder. A New York subway train clocks in at 98... Continue Reading →

August 5, 2022 1

Islands of Abandonment by Cal Flyn

Cloud islands, they are called. The peaks of the Usumbara Mountains in Tanzania rise so high that fogs form on their slopes where the cool mountain air meets warmer currents rising off the sea. The climate has created a unique ecosystem, as real islands do, and much of the wildlife is unique to the area.... Continue Reading →

June 24, 2021 0

The Musical Human by Michael Spitzer; The Life of Music by Nicholas Kenyon

The first note known to have sounded on Earth was an E natural. It was produced some 165 million years ago by a katydid, a kind of cricket, rubbing its wings together – a fact deduced by scientists from the insect’s remains, preserved in amber. Consider too the love life of the mosquito. When a male... Continue Reading →

June 3, 2021 0

Mary Anning: Britain’s greatest fossil hunter

Extinction is an old fact but a new idea. In the early 19th century its certainty was barely established. How many people, then, had the anatomical knowledge and geological expertise to identify extinct species – that is, creatures whose final form was largely unknown – and pull their fossils out of the rock whole? In... Continue Reading →

March 9, 2021 0

Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald

It is like a scene from a Hayao Miyazaki anime: a French WWI pilot, gliding down at twilight over enemy lines, finds himself surrounded by a flock of swifts seemingly motionless in the air. They are asleep on the wing, so close by he might reach out and touch them. The phenomenon was largely unknown... Continue Reading →

November 30, 2020 2

An Indifference of Birds by Richard Smyth

Every winter, white storks – so elegant in the air, so rickety on land – make the long flight south from Europe to what we assume to be ancestral wetlands in sub-Saharan Africa. At least, that’s what most of them do. These days there’s one who disdains the long-haul option, preferring to hop across from... Continue Reading →

July 18, 2020 1

Birds in the Ancient World by Jeremy Mynott

Pity the wryneck – a species of long-tongued woodpecker – in ancient Greece: it had the great misfortune to be considered an essential part of a sex toy. The poor bird was spread-eagled and bound to the four spokes of a wheel, which, when spun, whistled in a way thought sure to arouse desire in... Continue Reading →

January 31, 2019 0

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