There’s more to the lives of wild things than survival and death.
Tag: wildlife
The Guardian Country Diary: Ears strained for a mad Highland grouse
To me, at least, the Highlands dishes up its treats in small portions.
TLS commentary: How British Is It?
“For centuries we have prized the same prejudices”, the vicar of an isolated Warwickshire village told H. V. Morton in 1926, “and we have grown up as naturally as my currant bushes out there. We were, you see, locked up here together with our fields and our imaginations.”
TLS commentary: Man-made Wilderness
Wildcat and pine marten roam the forests; hawthorn and rosebay willowherb choke the country pathways. Fox and falcon flourish, flocks of rooks darken the fields, and beaver build in the upland waterways.
New Statesman review: ‘The Great Soul Of Siberia’, Sooyong Park, trans. Jamie Chang (William Collins, 2016)
There is more than one way to lose yourself in a forest. Keeping still – “as still and quiet as a tree” – will do the job as surely as stumbling mapless into the wild, to judge from Sooyong Park’s deceptively intense account of filming endangered Amur tigers in south-eastern Siberia.
The Guardian Country Diary: Nest raids by feral mink take their toll
The moorhen had tried again. My passing-by startled her out of her nest – a cup at the foot of a stand of fading yellow flag irises, not two metres from the lakeshore. Before I made an apologetic retreat, I took note of a single soft-spotted pale egg resting in the hollow. All being well, another five or six would follow.
Richard Smyth 