bramblings · wheatears · Mary Beard · Beaker folk · Meera Sodha · recipes · John Tyndall · Eunice Foote · religion · Ben Myers · Austin Kleon · Walter Benjamin · giant sloths · Shetland · Neil Ansell · Charles Darwin
Newsletter No. 13: Bramblings!
birds
High tides and volant voles
An unplanned visit to the flooded Dee Marshes is rewarded with a wildlife spectacle.
Newsletter No. 9: Teaser or spoiler?
On the Moor · Zanzibar · container ships · giant ground sloth · Barry Lopez · indigenous people · Cambrian Explosion · Little Toller · Iain Sinclair
Newsletter No. 6: A borrowed dog
woodpeckers · ambrotype portraits · W.G. Sebald · a deserted hamlet · mission creep · prime meridians · W.H. Hudson · podcasts · street photography · bonkers · tapirs · coiners
Newsletter No. 5: Incongruous owl
dawn chorus · Simon Armitage · the invention of the telescope · huge, sprawling collaborations · Withnail & I · book smells · re-assembling Darwin’s research notes · converting walks into words · Daniel Dennett · writing letters · humanist politics · dentistry with stone tools · analysing penguin poo · Melissa Harrison · Robert Macfarlane · swallows
The joy of the familiar—and the unfamiliar—on a local patch
Getting to know a place well means knowing what to look forward to, and appreciating when something unusual happens.
An irrelevance in the landscape
On the humbling, comforting realisation that the natural world gets on perfectly well without us.
Newsletter No. 1: Kudos to youdos
Patti Smith · W.G. Sebald · Sexual Selection · Roman chicken · Robert Graves · Swallows & Amazons · Thames Estuary · James Brindley · Spoonbills
Spoonbill identification: harder than you might think
Struggling to identify a species is the best way to learn.
Wren visit
In which I find myself face-to-beak with Troglodites troglodites.