The Oak Tree Is Running a Hotel It Never Asked to Build
Stand next to a decent oak – one of the old ones, with bark you could lose your fist in…
Nature
The Bird That Never Forgets Your Face (And Will Tell Everyone)
There is a crow in Seattle that hates a specific scientist. Not crows in general, not humans broadly – this…
The Living Skin of a Very Old Corpse
Lean against an oak sometime – really lean on it, put your full weight against the bark – and you…
The Oak’s Excess Is the Whole Point
An oak tree is, by any reasonable measure, a catastrophic over-producer. It starts dropping acorns somewhere around its twentieth year…
The Forest’s Secret Post Office
Somewhere under your feet, right now, there is a postal system running. Not Royal Mail – something considerably older and…
The Snail That Ran the Roman Empire
Somewhere on the coast of ancient Phoenicia, a person was crushing snails. Thousands of them. Small, unremarkable sea snails called…
The Bluebell Wood That Isn’t Actually Blue
Stand at the edge of a bluebell wood in late April and something slightly uncanny happens. The colour seems to…