Ladders to Heaven – an extract
Bernard Dupont CC BY-SA 2.0 By Mike Shanahan On a moonlit night in southern Africa, a reproductive race is about to begin. The stakes are high but so are the ri...
Category: Essays
Water Mammals
by Emily Hasler I enter the water on the wide stage of Carbis Bay. I swim out slowly beyond my depth, stop and float on my back as is my habit. It is then I rea...
Requiem for an American Mink
by Bethan Wood As I stepped out of my car onto my drive, I stood on something that softly cracked and squelched. Looking down I saw the bottom half of a frog – ...
Reconnection: Spring migration in the Cairngorms
by Andrew Painting 2/4/2018 “They’ve made it again, Which means the globe’s still working” Ted Hughes, ‘Swifts’ Six days until the wheatears come ba...
Held by the River
by Katy Ewing 1st December 2017 Tim holds her strongly safe, her struggling surely an instinctual response to being out of her element. She’s already been calme...
A Sahara Camp
by Elizabeth Bernays I am in Gao, Mali, as the only woman member of a British-sponsored interdisciplinary team studying night migration of grasshoppers. From th...
Outnumbered by an Albatross
by Kim Steutermann Rogers With their slender wings longer than I am tall, Laysan albatross clock an average of 74,000 air miles a year soaring over the North Pa...
The Pull Of The River: Escape Routes – an extract
by Matt Gaw We head out straight, the canoe’s nose pointing towards the river’s first bend. The wind, the first taste of a storm that is forecast to hit tomorro...
White Bears
by Eloise Shepherd You see your first polar bear thousands of miles away from any actual bears. Going north, Oslo to Tromsø, they spring out at you in ever-incr...
The Chetwode Grey
by Tom Jeffreys Sitting on a low stone wall outside the parish church of Chetwode, about four miles south-west of Buckingham, I wonder how close I have just com...