The Learned Pig

Art – Thinking – Nature – Writing

Category: Nature

  • Murmuration of Starlings

    Murmuration of Starlings

    A huge mass of black sweeps across the sky; surging, swirling and constantly changing form. This is a murmuration of starlings, an extraordinary natural phenomenon seen in the autumn and winter months. Such spectacular sights used to be more common when the birds flocked in greater numbers – in 1799, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge…

  • Bloom

    Bloom

    Where to do plants belong? At the bottom of the food chain? At the centre of the world? In a pot? In the garden? Growing wild across moors and mountains, railways and roads… In Ben Cave’s book Bloom, plants are depicted both in states of careful order, neatly aligned in vases or jugs, and out…

  • The Undomesticated Chanterelle

    The Undomesticated Chanterelle

    The Cantharellus cibarius, most commonly known as chanterelle, is one of the most celebrated wild edible mushroom in the world. You would think by now that this prized fungus, which can be collected in the hundreds in certain wooded areas, would be commercially cultivated. But it is not. In fact, only twenty edible fungal species…

  • The Decomposition of Cetaceans

    The Decomposition of Cetaceans

    Working as a whale-watching guide offers many perks. I get to see live whales regularly, photograph them, and share the joy of encountering these giants. Over the last two years I have dedicated much time to working with cetaceans in Húsavík, northern Iceland. But there is one thing that can dampen the experience for many…

  • Hvalreki

    Hvalreki

    Hvalreki is an installation piece, which explores and interrogates human relationships with whales through their residual bones. The work began through a personal interest in the history that links us humans to the mammals that inhabit the sea. It came about after spending four months in Húsavík, Northern Iceland; exploring the research done by whale…

  • Connswater

    Connswater

      Our river wasn’t a clean river, a mountain stream, a babbling brook, or a silver girl. It was a filthy river, a city river, forsaken, neglected. Long gone, the glory days, when it was thick with trout and where, according to my father, King Billy watered his horses on his way to the Boyne;…

  • Inca Doves

    Inca Doves

      Is it odd to say I thought of you as I pulled a dead dove from the swimming pool? Spine up to God, floating lightly with its bright beak face down. Streams of red outlined the strange sight. I gently scooped him up, ignorant of sex, his eyes closed so gently as if in…

  • Eating Meat

    Eating Meat

    In nearly every case, something died for you to go on living. Even a vegan or raw food diet requires suppressing some forms of life. With no exception, the lives of microbes, insects, plants, and indeed, a great many animals, are at stake each time we take a bite. Whether we like it or not,…

  • Open Call: Clean Unclean

    Open Call: Clean Unclean

    Cleanliness, they say, is close to godliness. And the pig has long resided in the realm of the unclean. Even today: “It’s like a pigsty in here!” – as if the pig has much choice in how he lives… More than ever do we feel the urgency of cleanliness: clean hands, clean homes, clean minds….

  • A Field Guide to East London Wildlife

    A Field Guide to East London Wildlife

    Humans are not the only species undergoing a process of urbanisation. It is well documented that we have made a mess of this planet, and – depending on who you speak to – it may be too late to do anything about it. But as the world gradually turns to concrete, and species extinction continues…

  • Modern Naturalism

    Modern Naturalism

    In 1958, the great Austrian artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser published the Mould Manifesto against Rationalism in Architecture. In it he declared, with characteristic chutzpah, that: “Only the engineers and scientists who are capable of living in mould and producing mould creatively will be the masters of tomorrow.” As far as we’re aware, few have taken up…