We were in adjacent seats as we flew back from a World Land Trust project in Borneo. In Economy, naturally. As usual Bill Oddie and I adopted different strategies: I read, fidgeted and dozed; Bill hid behind his headphones and sank into a musical trance that took him from the South China Sea to the English Channel.
This is the latest entry of the Barnes’s Bestiary series, written by journalist, author, World Land Trust (WLT) ambassador and member of the WLT council Simon Barnes. See here to read all of Simon’s other entries so far. How many domestic sheep are there in the world? The answer is 1.266 billion...
This is the latest entry of the Barnes’s Bestiary series, written by journalist, author, World Land Trust (WLT) ambassador and member of the WLT council Simon Barnes. See here to read all of Simon’s other entries so far. The dramatic places of the world tend to have beasts to match: lammergeiers...
Simon Barnes is perplexed by the elusive but over-the-top Crested Argus. There are a lot of pretty funky beasts out there, and mostly we are perfectly able to accept them. After all, life’s like that. Nature will come up with some pretty crazy ideas every so often, and that’s fine. And then another...
Simon Barnes recalls an encounter with a Red-shanked Douc during his visit to Vietnam. Our brains are trained to read faces: so much so that we see meaningful faces in clouds, in cracks on the ceiling and in the folds of the curtain at night. So obviously we are going to read human expressions on...
Simon Barnes considers the distinctive traits of the Golden-rumped elephant shrew in his latest post in his blog series, Barnes’s Bestiary. There’s a wild and wacky chunk of forest in Kenya where nature has gone a bit nuts. Instead of being content with the usual run of species that you find all...
