From RSPB Nature’s Home – 5 ways to help hedgehogs right now
The official first day of summer, and in my part of the world it is living up to its billing. The year shuffles smoothly on, and growth and greenness reign.…
Category: nature writing
First Known When Lost on Spring and mortality, with Herrick, Wallace Stevens, and Epictetus
Original here Spring beautifully — and gently — counsels us to be mindful of our mortality. This is sound advice. In fact, we are well-advised to consider our mortality on…
From “The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate – Discoveries From a Hidden World”, Peter Wohlieben
Scent as a means of communication? The concept is not totally unfamiliar to us. Why else would we use deodorants and perfumes? And even when we’re not using these products,…
From “The Long, Long Life of Trees”, Fiona Stafford
In spring, you can feel life stirring in the barest twigs and the silhouetted catkins look as if a diminutive duck has run across the sky. One day the…
George Orwell and the “process of life”
From Dan Hitchens, Orwell and Contraception In all of Evelyn Waugh’s novels up to Brideshead Revisited, Orwell detected a consistent theme: Waugh’s “private ideal” of “a middle-sized country house.” In each…
“sound as a way of sense-making”
Sound Artist Lawrence English on the Power of Radical Listening From Observer.com Interview here How did you become interested in working with sound as a creative medium? When I…
Matthews Oates on butterfly watching, from “In Pursuit of Butterflies”
Butterflying, and Emperoring in particular, does not entail hours of walking, but eternities of standing about, watching and waiting. Patience is everything, and those of us who have spent our…
Ernest P. Walker’s dedication “Walker’s Mammals of the World”
To the MAMMALS, GREAT AND SMALL, who contribute so much to the welfare and happiness of man, another mammal, but receive so little in return, except blame, abuse, and extermination.
Séamus Sweeney 