Skip to content

Richard Smyth

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn

Writer for hire. Reviews, essays, features.

  • Home
  • About
  • Contact

Tag: wildlife

BBC Wildlife feature: Happy Planet?

There’s more to the lives of wild things than survival and death.

biology, conservation, ecology, stress, 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.

birds, birdsong, nature, Scotland, wildlife

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.”

Brexit, Britain, EU, Europe, nature, Nature writing, wildlife

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.

essay, literature, longread, rewilding, TLS, wilderness, wildlife

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.

books, nature, wildlife

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.

ecology, invasive species, mink, wildlife, yorkshire

Search

Blog at WordPress.com.
  • Follow Following
    • Richard Smyth
    • Join 66 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Richard Smyth
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar