Dead Owls and Blue Bottle Flies
Heather Swan, author of Where Honeybees Thrive, explores the taxidermy art of Claire Morgan alongside her own encounters with owls and death.
taxidermy
Museum: Ursus americanus
On birches, bears, and the birth of farm animals: three new poems by Todd Davis.
The monstrous body
Scary Monsters II: global greed and the gluttonous dodo Monsters are not just things that lurk under the bed. They are powerful images that have always been used to represent…
Foxing
Slip like quiet fire through woods on velvet feet (bad fairies gave foxes their foxgloves to transform them into silent hunters)i. I hear a mouse think under a foot of…
A New Map of Berlin
Anton Newcombe, leader of the psych-rock band The Brian Jonestown Massacre, is one of my more unlikely acquaintances in Berlin. His recording studio is just a few blocks from my…
Furry Attractions: Polar Bears in the Zoo
In the western hemisphere, polar bears have lived in our midst since the Middle Ages, a result of our fascination with these charismatic carnivores. Already in 1252, Henry III of…
Hello, World: Making Nature at Wellcome Collection
Karl Reich’s 1913 recording of a nightingale – among the world’s earliest extant recordings of bird song – feels like a bottled metaphor for modernity. Trapped in shellac, this sweet…
Plant Migrations
With human civilisation comes ecological engineering. Over 10,000 years we have changed the world in increasingly dramatic ways. Many of these changes have been deliberate. Many have been the unintended…
(Re)Imagining the Insect
54 million years before humans appeared on earth, there was once upon a time an insect that died, its cadaver is still visible and intact, the cadaver of someone who…
The Beast is not only the Tiger
The top floor of a modernist apartment block seems an unlikely location for the studio of an artist best-known for his engagement with botany. Nonetheless this is where we find…