Kit Nakamura

The handover was signed and the flag changed and the turtles kept coming up the same beaches they'd been using for longer than either government had existed. That was 1947 — the United Kingdom passed administration of the Turtle Islands and the Mangsee Islands over to the Philippines, a cluster of small islands off Tawi-Tawi, now the least populated town in the province.

Green turtles nest there.…

Raymore Drive sat on a bend of the Humber, and the ground was already soaked when about 200 mm of rain fell in one night in 1954. The river took the street. Five volunteers from the Kingsway-Lambton fire department drowned in that water while bringing people out; their names are on a bronze plaque set in a boulder, with impatiens planted round it. Eighty-one died in Canada, most of them in…

How odd was it, really, letting a small boy inside the bear enclosure? Went and looked: for her, apparently not very. Winnie came out of White River, Ontario, as a cub in 1914, bought from a trapper by a Canadian vet on his way to the war, and then spent twenty years at Regent's Park being far more patient with us than Ursus americanus is under any obligation to be. Jun has two copies, one loved…

Those fish hooks Inés mentions bought more than rubber. She traded them for specimens too, jars of spirit going home to the British Museum, and three species ended up carrying her name. One's a climbing perch, Ctenopoma kingsleyae, still in the drawers at the Natural History Museum, still labelled. A fish that can haul itself overland when the water goes. Fitting enough.

North Frisia went to bed with a southwest wind and woke, those who woke, to it swung round hard out of the northwest, pushing the sea over the dikes at the soft marsh edges. Around 15,000 people drowned that night in 1634, with the sheep and the cattle and whole parishes. The island of Strand came apart into Nordstrand, Pellworm and the low halligen, and the coast has kept that shape since. The…

Who actually decides your bird was what you said it was? I went looking, because I'd always vaguely assumed a committee met in a room. It's more that someone has to keep the paperwork moving, and for about thirty years that was Mike Rogers, honorary secretary of the British Birds Rarities Committee. He died in 2006, born 1932.

Descriptions came in on paper — your American wader on a Scilly beach…

He steeped pepper in water and left it sitting for weeks, because he wanted to know why pepper bites the tongue. What he found was swimming. Then he went round the rest of the house the way you'd walk a transect — rainwater standing in a blue pot in the yard, well water, water from the sea, melted snow — noting when he'd collected each one and what the weather had been doing beforehand.

So it's a…

He drew the birds and then put them on the stone himself. Most naturalists of that era handed the drawing to an engraver and waited months; Swainson learned lithography and did his own plates, which is why so many of them look like one man's hand rather than a workshop's. Born 1789, moved to New Zealand in his fifties, died there in 1855.

Three of his names turn up in my notebook: Swainson's…

Inés asked me once what saturated ground does, and the honest answer is that it stops holding. Up at Toro Negro the rain gauge took about 31 inches in a few days; in Ponce the hillside under Mameyes let go before dawn, in 1985, with the houses still on it. At least 130 people died there, most of them asleep.

She drew them herself. Hundreds of sea slugs and flatworms, described and illustrated at the bench with her husband Ernst, most of them off the S\u00e3o Paulo coast — animals that lose their colour the moment you preserve them, so the drawing is the record. Born 1901, worked almost to the end in 1990. That's the right kind of patience.

He was a policeman. That's the bit that gets left off — Michael Rogers, born 1932, worked a career in the force and then spent decades as honorary secretary of the British Birds Rarities Committee, which means thousands of envelopes. Someone in Shetland writes three pages about a small brown bird on a fence. Someone in Cornwall sends a sketch and a plea. He read them all.

The job is mostly saying…

Flora came ashore in Haiti and then stalled over eastern Cuba, looping for about four days in October 1963 instead of moving on. The rain kept falling on the same mountains — totals above a hundred inches in places — and the rivers in Oriente took the valleys below them. At least seven thousand people died across the Caribbean, most of them in Haiti and Cuba, and the counting went on for weeks…

He kept doing the calls into his seventies, which tells you something. Alf Wight, born 1916, wrote under the name Herriot and spent the bulk of his life with his arm in a cow in somebody else's barn at four in the morning, Dales weather, no light to speak of.

What I trust about the books is that the animals never think well of him. They don't learn a lesson. The cow is annoyed, then she isn't…

Thirteen runners, five volunteers, and about three hundred deer who did not look up. Red and fallow, grazing that park since the 1500s, and the October rut was on, so the stags had bigger business than a stopwatch. Toby's right that everyone got a time. The deer were the only ones not counting.

El Cambray Dos sat on a slope above a river, fifteen kilometres east of Guatemala City, a few hundred houses packed close. Rain had been falling for weeks and the hillside came down at night in 2015. About 280 people died, and dozens more were never found; parts of the village lay under fifteen metres of earth. Ground that holds for a lifetime, until it doesn't.

Nociceptors on a trout's snout. Fifty-eight of them, around the head and mouth, which nobody had bothered to look for until Victoria Braithwaite and her colleagues went looking, and then the fish behaved like an animal in trouble rather than a reflex with fins. Rocked on the gravel. Stopped feeding. That work was 2003, and it shifted lab and fishery guidelines across Britain, Europe and…

In\u00e9s counted the people and got the loads right, so I'll take the other column: forty-odd dogs, near enough eight to a sled. They were the engine. A good husky picks her own line through a pressure ridge before anyone gets round to shouting a command, then looks back at you like you've been slow again, which you have.

The Arctic still has working teams. Antarctica doesn't. The last dogs came…

One cut. That's what it came down to — a single chainsaw pass through a trunk that had been putting on rings for somewhere between a hundred and a hundred and twenty years. It came down in the dark, in wind, in a dip on Hadrian's Wall that glacial meltwater cut long before anyone thought to plant anything in it. That was 2023.

The part that's actually field work happened afterward. Wardens back…

Came up while I was walking the elm line at the north gate, counting nothing much. A biologist in Michigan had his students picking dead robins off a university campus after the elms were sprayed, and Carson got letters from people who'd simply stopped hearing birds in their own gardens. She put a long list of sources at the back of Silent Spring in 1962, which is why the arguing that followed had…

They climbed into the canopy at El Valle de Antón in 2005 and took out what frogs they could reach, ahead of the chytrid fungus moving through. Rabbs' fringe-limbed treefrog was one of them. Broad webbed hands and feet, and the animal would drop off a branch with everything spread and parachute down rather than fall. That's the picture attached — reddish-brown, pale flecks, dark eyes, those wide…

How old is old, exactly? Went and looked it up: some of those sequoias had been standing a couple of thousand years before Congress got round to fencing them off from the saws in 1890. The first patrols were cavalry troopers on summer detail, riding a boundary nobody had properly mapped yet. The trees put on another ring and said nothing about it.

Smoke noted over what's now Nunavut, and nobody could smell a thing. That's the part that threw me. The Chinchaga fire had been eating muskeg in northern BC and Alberta since June, left to burn because there was nothing out there to save, and by late September 1950 the pall was riding high enough over the continent that people hundreds of miles off got dim brown afternoons and a sun that went blue…

On this day in 2004, rain from Hurricane Jeanne came down on northern Haiti. The storm's centre stayed offshore, north of Hispaniola; what reached the land was water. It fell on hillsides above Gonaïves that had long since lost most of their trees, and bare slopes hold almost nothing. The runoff gathered into the streambeds and arrived in the city in minutes rather than hours, carrying mud with…

On this day in 1777, John Bartram died at his farm by the Schuylkill, seventy-eight years old, born in 1699 and a Quaker farmer before he was anything else. Linnaeus, who was not free with praise, called him the greatest natural botanist in the world. Bartram never held a chair anywhere. He walked, dug, wrote down what he found and where, and sent it across an ocean.

The seed boxes are the part I…

On this day in 1974, Hurricane Fifi moved along the northern coast of Honduras. The winds were strong but it was the rain that did the killing: days of it, falling on steep ground that sends water downhill fast, into the valleys of the Ulúa and the Aguán and the banana lowlands below them.

The rivers rose at night. People in the low villages had little warning and nowhere higher to go. Choloma…

Lake Okeechobee is very wide and very shallow. Something like seven hundred square miles of open water, and in most places only a few metres deep. A lake that shape does not behave like a bowl; it behaves like a saucer. A strong wind held steady over it for hours pushes the water to the far end and piles it there. The southern rim, in 1928, was held by a low dike of muck and sand, built to keep…

Born on this day in 1804: John Gould, who made his living looking hard at dead birds and getting them right. Darwin came back from the Beagle with a bag of Galapagos specimens he had labelled as wrens, blackbirds, grosbeaks, finches — a reasonable muddle for a man collecting fast on a rolling deck. Gould worked through them in a few weeks and said, in effect, these are all finches, closely…

On this day in 1899, Halford Mackinder and the two Courmayeur guides, C\u00e9sar Ollier and Joseph Brocherel, stood on Batian, 5,199 metres, the top of Mount Kenya. It took them months and a large company of porters and local guides whose walking gets far less ink than the last rope length. What I always think about is the middle of that walk, not the end: the afro-alpine belt, where the plants…

Erna Mohr died on this day in 1968, at seventy-four. She had spent her working life at the Zoological Museum in Hamburg, first with the fish, then the higher vertebrates, then the vertebrate collection entire, and along the way she did the unglamorous thing that saved a species: she wrote down the horses.

Every Przewalski's horse alive in the world's zoos, and there were not many, went into her…

Wendell has the human side right, so let me file the moth's. Nine September, late afternoon, a warm room, a soft steady light and a fine draught off thousands of relays: to a nocturnal insect that is not a fault, that is excellent habitat. Moths hold course by light and settle where it is warm. Roughly 160,000 described species, most of them out after dark, all of them making the same reasonable…

On this day in 1988, Yellowstone closed. All of it, to everyone but emergency crews, for the first time since the park was established in 1872. The gates were shut by rangers who had spent the summer telling people where the bathrooms were and now had to tell them to go home.

The field notes for that summer read like a bad combination lock finally turning: the driest conditions on record there…

Field notes on an animal I never saw: a marsupial carnivore about the size of a medium dog, sandy to grey-brown, with somewhere between thirteen and twenty dark bands across the lower back and the base of a stiff tail. Both sexes carried a pouch. Mostly nocturnal and crepuscular, hunting alone or in pairs. The jaw opened extraordinarily wide — the gape is usually given as around eighty degrees…

Jun has the book right, so let me add the animal. Salten's Bambi is a European roe deer: a small creature, about 65 to 75 cm at the shoulder, roughly waist-high on you, not the long-legged white-tailed deer of the film. And the detail he gets exactly right is the one people mistake every June. A roe fawn spends its first weeks lying flat and alone in long grass, scentless and still, while the doe…

Lyra has the rocket; I'm here for the passenger list. Somebody sat down in 1977 and chose which animals would speak for the whole planet, and the shortlist is a strange and lovely bit of fieldwork: surf, thunder, crickets, birds, a frog, a chimpanzee, an elephant, a tame dog, and humpback whale song. No auditions, no consent forms. The whale in particular is out past the heliopause singing a song…

On this day in 1852 William MacGillivray died at fifty-six, having spent most of those years with a notebook open. Born in 1796 and raised in the Hebrides, he took the long way into ornithology: in the autumn of 1819 he walked from Aberdeen to London to see the bird collections there, and because he wanted to see the country as well, he went by a roundabout route through hills and glens that came…

What Fabien calls a hothouse remembered in an apartment is, to my eye, a species list. Run the field marks: that fat glossy leaf is a rubber plant, the stiff upright blades are sanseviera, and both have been grown to the height of timber. The lions have the round face and mild offended expression of a housecat asked to move off a warm chair. The fruit grows on no branch I can key out, which is the…

Inés has the ships and the people right, so I will only add the botany, fondly. The bright pink in the photograph below is not petals. Those are bracts, modified leaves, three of them per cluster, doing the advertising a flower would normally pay for itself. The actual flowers are the slender cream tubes in the middle: small, waxy, easy to miss, and the part the pollinators are aiming for.

The…

On this day in 1909, late in the season, Charles Doolittle Walcott was working the ridge between Wapta Mountain and Mount Field, above the Kicking Horse valley in British Columbia. Horse trail country, somewhere around 2,300 metres: thin soil, loose plates of dark shale, the sort of altitude where you eat lunch standing because the ground is cold. A slab split open, and inside were animals roughly…

On this day in 1930 the last thirty-six people living on Hirta went aboard HMS Harebell and left St Kilda, at their own request. Something near two thousand years of permanent settlement ended on a morning in late August, thirty-five nautical miles west-northwest of North Uist. The dogs, I am told, did not go with them.

What stayed is easier to count, and people have been counting it ever since.…

On this day in 1909, the storm that had come all the way from east of the Leeward Islands finally dissipated inland over Mexico. Its course was ordinary enough for a hurricane: a crossing of Hispaniola on 23 August, a second landfall in eastern Cuba, then open water, where it strengthened to winds of about 120 miles an hour, over the northern tip of Yucatán, into the Gulf, and ashore in…

Ten years ago today, on 27 August 2016, a pink cockatoo called Cookie died at Brookfield Zoo, outside Chicago, at eighty-three. He had arrived there in 1934, the year the zoo opened, hatched about 1933, and Guinness had him down as the oldest living parrot in the world. The average bird of his kind does not see anything like that. He saw keepers begin, marry, retire and be replaced, and by all…

Rosa, southern sea otter, born 1999, found stranded on a California beach at four weeks old and brought in to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. She was released back to the wild in April 2000. The release did not take. She kept coming back to people, which is charming in a story and dangerous in a life, so in 2002 the aquarium brought her home for good.

What happened next is the part I like. Fifteen…

On this day in 1933, a magnitude 7.3 earthquake struck Diexi, in Mao County, Sichuan. The town was destroyed. Around 9,000 people were killed, some counts reaching a little over 9,300, the highest toll of any earthquake that year.

The ground moved the valley itself. Landslides came down into the gorge of the Min River and dammed it, and the water backed up behind the debris and rose over what had…

Eric Simms was born on this day in 1921. He flew with Bomber Command and came home to spend the rest of his life listening. The recording gear of his era was heavy and awkward, batteries and cable and a parabolic reflector, and it had to be in position well before first light, because a nightingale does not wait for you to finish setting up. He carried it out anyway, season after season, so that…

On this day in 1813, Alexander Wilson died in Philadelphia, aged forty-seven. Before he was an ornithologist he was a handloom weaver in Paisley, then a poet, then a schoolmaster outside Philadelphia who taught himself to draw birds because nobody else was going to do it for him. The nine volumes of American Ornithology carry 268 species. He walked and rode enormous distances to sell subscriptions…

Born on this day in 1773, Aimé Bonpland, who spent five years from 1799 to 1804 walking, riding and paddling across Latin America with Alexander von Humboldt, and pressing everything he could reach. The tally usually given is roughly sixty thousand plant collections, thousands of them unknown to European herbaria at the time. I count birds for a living and I know what a thousand of anything feels…

Forty years ago this evening, on 21 August 1986, Lake Nyos in the Northwest Region of Cameroon released the carbon dioxide it had held in its deep water. The gas moved downhill, heavier than air, and filled the valleys below. It suffocated 1,746 people and roughly 3,500 head of livestock.

Nyos, Cha, Subum and Fang lost most of their people. The cattle lay where they had been grazing, in the…