There is a strong temptation to explain organised-looking animal behaviour by assuming somebody is organising it.
An ant trail invites exactly that. A line of insects moving purposefully between a…
Most rock is worn away mechanically. Limestone is removed chemically, taken into solution and carried off in the water, and a landscape shaped by dissolving behaves unlike anywhere else. Here…
There is a process going on beneath almost every lawn, field and garden that is too slow to see and large enough to reshape the ground.
Earthworms eat their way…
There is a category of everyday observation that everybody has seen and that turns out to have no settled explanation, and moths around a light are among the clearest examples.…
Coarse material behaves completely differently from sand under waves - it drains, it rolls, it stacks and it sorts - and almost everything distinctive about a shingle beach follows from…
There is a way of looking at a pond that changes it from a fixed feature into a process with a direction.
The ordinary view treats a pond as a…