It was during a walk near Radley Lakes with my friends Jo and Chris that I first suddenly took notice of the isolated curious brown stalks with the odd curling bits all around their tops. We had been stooping our way through what was once a water meadow but of more recent use as a […]
To anyone who has ever stumbled across one while strolling through a woodland, vernal pools seem to border right on the edge of magical. Disconnected as they are from other water sources, there’s something so remarkably serene about them that they almost beggar belief. And when the dappled light filtering through the trees is added to the experience, one wouldn’t be entirely surprised should one of the faerie folk suddenly appear out of the greenery just across the pond.
As with so many things in life, “it’s the little things” that so often make it all possible. And when it comes to the life in the the Earth’s oceans, the little things that in fact do make it all possible are the tiny crustaceans we commonly know as krill. However despite how readily to many of us the image may come to mind of these tiny creatures being essentially ubiquitous free-range whale chow, most of us actually don’t know nearly as much about them as we might think we do.
For those already familiar with the British Wildlife collection published by Bloomsbury, the appearance on book shop shelves of a new volume in the series is more or less an instinctive purchase – if you’ve read previous volumes, you’ll buy the next one as well. However for those who might not yet have discovered this remarkable series, relatively recent addition to the great tradition of British natural history writing that it is, Mark comes to the rescue with his most recent Sunday Book Review essay of Trevor Beebee’s “Climate Change and British Wildlife,” the sixth volume in the series.