Ornithology

The great auk was a large seabird of the family Alcidae, a group which includes the razorbill, guillemot and puffin, breeding species of North Atlantic cliffs, islands and skerries. Before it was hunted to extinction in the 1840s, the great auk inhabited an ecological niche equivalent to that of penguins in the southern hemisphere. Flightless, and able to nest only on low-lying shorelines, it was nonetheless perfectly adapted to life at sea. Short, flipper-like wings enabled it to dive to prodigious depths for food; soft down and oily flesh kept it warm. Smartly attired in black and white, and with a massive bill, it stood nearly 3ft tall. The same

It happens usually in the second week of May, between about the 8th and 12th (this year it was earlier, the 2nd): a distant sound, building as it approaches, and then the doppler dip as the first of the returning swifts screeches past the roof of our Cornish farmhouse. It’s the opening bracket of the summer months, one that closes with their departure just 12 weeks later. But it is a reminder, too, that while we might think of our house as home to two adult humans, two teenagers and a dog, it is also the habitat for several nesting swifts, swallows, house sparrows, pipistrelle bats, mice, occasional winter rodents

Bird migration was once one of those unassailable mysteries that had baffled humankind since Aristotle. A strange hypothesis, genuinely advanced in the early modern period, was that birds flew to the Moon for winter, and barely more credible was a notion, which haunted the patron saint of British naturalists Gilbert White, that swallows buried themselves in mud. A modern understanding really began in the 20th century, when ornithologists started to place numbered metal rings on birds’ legs. Scott Weidensaul is one of many researchers worldwide who have helped to map this avian story. He then captured the findings in his Pulitzer-nominated Living on the Wind (2003). Yet he was also