Odd things, knees, when you think about it. At some point in evolutionary history, nature decided that instead of walking on a single, rigid stick, life would be better if we broke the stick in the middle and made it floppy, and then had to have a complicated system of muscle and tendons and ligaments to make it all go straight again. Why? If a straight leg was too long, surely the answer was just to make it shorter. But …
Tag: bird
I hope that I’m someone who never takes the natural world for granted, but a recent experience underlined its importance for me. I’ve been silent on my blog for quite a while. Partly due to working on my latest book, but mainly due to an accident. But while I’m fine now, twelve hours in A&E, and some emergency surgery left me stuck in a chair for several weeks recuperating, with only the TV and a narrow view of my garden …
Recently I was in the Wiltshire riverside town of Bradford-on-Avon. It’s a pleasant place to visit, and I can recommend it, but I was there not the see the town’s attractions, but rather a rare visitor to our shores, a bird called a ‘dusky warbler’. Despite breeding in the Taiga of Eastern Russia and the palearctic, this diminutive little bird – smaller than a sparrow, bigger than a wren – migrates substantial distances south to overwinter in South and Southeast …
What links Homer, Shelley, Coleridge and Keats, and also Shakespeare and Chaucer and T.S. Eliot? It would have to be something pretty special, wouldn’t it, to inspire many of the greatest writers in history? It is something special. I know, because after four years of trying, I have finally both heard it, and seen it. I’m standing on a grassy track that weaves through a dense, scrubby woodland, home to coppiced willow and hazel, laced through with bramble and other …
Even the name ‘Osprey’ sounds somehow exotic. These large, fish-eating raptors are truly unique, truly one of a kind, the sole species of their genus, and their genus is the sole one in their family. Or to put it another way, osprey sit alone at the very end of a very bare single branch of the family of life. They may look a little like eagles, they may behave a little like eagles, but they are as different to eagles …
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