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...
Category: Stories
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...
Spokesbirds for the Spokesbirds
by Katie Fallon I sat cross-legged on the pea-gravel floor of the enclosure, as still as stone, half of a dead mouse resting in my outstretched palm. Lew th...
Brave Bird
by Isaac Yuen While doing laps at the pool one day, I came to the conclusion that the penguin is the most courageous and admirable of birds, because swimming is...
Warts and All
by Jessica Groenendijk I am passionate about cats. I admire their fluid grace and their shape pleases me. Not for me the slavish neediness of dogs, I prefer the...
Bees, our Much-needed Friends
by Gill McEvoy It is quite common to see bumble bees out foraging quite late in the evening, even in cooler weather, long after the honey bee has retired to the...
Eavesdropping on Nature
by Amy Fletcher Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf. – Aldo Leopold, 1949 The twentieth century could be exubera...
Hushed, arthritic tread: The Peregrine and health
by Miranda Cichy I remember precisely what drew to me to J. A. Baker’s The Peregrine (1967), in an undergraduate lecture over a decade ago. The lecturer w...
Shallow Names
by David Lukas When we look out at the natural world around us it might feel like everything is known, or at the very least that everything is named. And while ...