I watch the way you want to reach the end before you’ve begun. Here there is only this egg and our sitting in shifts to keep it warm, at the mercy of weather, another bird’s hunger. Trust me, you must go to unknown places and stay inside your body while you try. […]
I watch them for a long while, the pair rising and courting the field in daylight, the strange geometry of their faces funneling the air, and everything – their whiteness, their sense of having slipped through from another world, their focus on the hunt – in the end it all comes down to […]
It was the Prussian polymath, scientist and writer Alexander von Humboldt (1767-1835) who paved the way for biogeography – the study of species and ecosystems across space and time – becoming established as an empirical science. The publications that emerged from his many expeditions are recognised as foundational to our present understanding of nature as a single great […]
Migration seasonal migration has lost its language. birds commence reverse flight. head for land that does not exist. island holds breath, throws up sick. human limbs made tides rogue whip. birds circle, cry. swansong is choking sob. our talk is famous. when lunged with death you were brick. a witness […]
Feathers & Bones There are many carcasses, hundreds of thousands falling out of the sky in a two-mile stretch inland, just in front of my house. Over a dozen flycatchers, swallows and warblers, a volume of deaths both common and sensitive, inexplicable. Before dying to reach winter grounds three billion […]
On the last day before the hospitality sector in England locked down, my wife and I sat in a hotel garden in Cumbria watching the comings and goings at a bird feeder. The occasion was my birthday and the dinner had been booked for months. It just happened to fall on the last day […]