Focusing on the natural history of the British Isles, Mr. Eatherley takes up the search for the stories behind some of the “endless succession of animals, plants, fungi and other alien lifeforms” that have taken to calling the Isles home over the past centuries, and indeed, facing up to the reality that it’s now “often hard to work out what actually is native, and what is foreign.” (There’s a larger metaphor in there somewhere…)
Perhaps its because I’m getting older and more reflective about the world and the life I’ve lived in it. Perhaps it’s because I’ve been paying closer attention to the news reported by Hounds Off about their struggles to stop illegal hunting practices in Britain. Perhaps it’s because of the loss of our beloved little Bebe this past year. Whatever the reason, I’ve been giving much more thought lately than I can ever recall doing before to the relationship between humans and non-human animals.
I recently received an email message from a reader who introduced himself as one to whom Dr. T.R. Shankar Raman was a much-respected mentor, enthusiastically recommending that I should consider Dr. Shankar Raman’s recently published book “The Wild Heart of India” for review. This being the first I had heard of the book’s publication, I began enquiries about it.
There had never before been anything like the 1870s voyage of the H.M.S. Challenger. From late 1872 to 1876, with the full support of the British navy, and specially refitted as a floating scientific laboratory staffed by some of the empire’s finest naturalists, it sailed the oceans of the planet solely for the purpose of discovering more about what was in them and how the systems they contain function and inter-relate with one another.