24 May 2012 12:00 AM
Butterflies are back. For me the greatest blessing of the return of the warm weather this week, after that sodden April and that glacial most-of-May, has been that butterflies are once more on the wing and visible. I walked out of the house on Tuesday morning and bumped into a holly blue almost immediately. What a boost to the spirits that was.
17 May 2012 12:00 AM
I grew up with a whacking great hawthorn hedge at the end of the garden
10 May 2012 12:00 AM
Ask your child what a tyrannosaurus is, or a velociraptor, and you'll probably get an intelligible answer. Movies have made dinosaurs familiar to millions. But ask them what a rotifer is, or a tardigrade, and you'll get a blank stare.
03 May 2012 12:00 AM
Giving names to Clement and the other four birds was a masterstroke
19 April 2012 12:00 AM
In nature's collective voice, we can locate the origins of human music, even language
12 April 2012 12:00 AM
When exactly is spring? Using the ancient, astronomical calendar you can say it begins at the vernal equinox, the moment when day and night are of equal length (as the tilt of the earth's axis is inclined neither towards the sun nor away from it). That occurs in March, usually on the 20th of the month; spring can then be said to run until the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, usually on 21 June.
29 March 2012 12:00 AM
I can clearly remember the moment I first saw a ring ouzel. I was 17. It was in the Easter holidays and I had gone hiking in Snowdonia with my friend Chris, and one bright morning we left Bala and tramped along the side of Llyn Celyn, at that time a controversial new reservoir, and then struck upwards into the hills, over the open moorland to Ysbyty Ifan.
22 March 2012 12:00 AM
One of the most fascinating things we have learned about life in the past 50 years is that the principle purpose of all living things, in so far as they have a purpose at all, is to reproduce. It's an insight from evolutionary biology (if you want to explore it further, pick up Richard Dawkins's bestseller, The Selfish Gene).
15 March 2012 12:00 AM
It sometimes seems a pity that there are only four official seasons. Golden October is a world away from sodden November, but they're still lumped together in autumn. And this period at the moment, mid-March, is a sort of in-between time, with winter officially gone and spring officially here, but it doesn't really feel like either. It's a waiting time, when things are coming, but haven't yet arrived.
08 March 2012 12:00 AM
You think you know the world, at least the general shape of it, the way it works, yet sometimes you are struck by just how far you are from truly comprehending it in all its glorious peculiarity.
01 March 2012 12:00 AM
Are we divided by the same language? There is no doubt that the British Isles – that is, Britain and Ireland combined – constitute a geographical entity. We have the same climate (temperate, moist, and 10 degrees Celsius warmer than it should be, because of the Gulf Stream), the same topography of low mountains, small lakes and relatively short rivers, and the same wildlife. But so ingrained are the social and political differences between the two countries that they are rarely considered together (the Lions rugby team being a rare exception).
16 February 2012 12:00 AM
The idea of a river dying is not a common one. If we were to categorise how people feel about rivers, in so far as they do so at all, we might suppose that feelings generally focus on power and permanence. T S Eliot, contemplating the Mississippi pounding past St Louis where he grew up, thought of it as "a strong brown God". Oscar Hammerstein portrayed it as eternal: "Ol' Man River, he jes' keeps rolling along".
09 February 2012 12:00 AM
Over six months, the mystery of where cuckoos winter has revealed itself
02 February 2012 12:00 AM
26 January 2012 12:00 AM
Why do we laugh at ducks? Why do we find them funny? Did Walt Disney choose Donald Duck as a cartoon character because ducks are inherently comic, or do ducks seem all the more comical because of the creation of Donald Duck? In English, we have developed specific, mocking words to describe their actions. Ducks do not walk or hop, they waddle. They do not call or cry to each other, they quack. These are loaded, non-neutral verbs, waddling and quacking. They predispose to derision.
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