A pair of limpid brown eyes stares down from behind bare branches. Their owner’s thick winter coat, covered with a mantle of snow, hides a female monkey as she huddles to avoid the wind. Snuggling into her body warmth is her youngster. The Japanese ...

Recently, and for the first time, I flew right across Australia. Heading northwest from New Zealand, I crossed Australia’s southeast coast somewhere south of Sydney and traversed the country northwest to the coast near Broome. For hour after hour the scenery rolled beneath the ...

The fact that young animals and birds not only start off small, but remain smaller than their parents for a long time, seems to be a dominant rule of life. Think of fox or badger cubs, think of young sparrows or bulbuls — from ...

Graceful and agile in the air, the terns are the slender cousins of the gulls. Where the gulls typically lumber and flap, the terns flutter and dash. Terns may hover, and with the sun behind them, shining through their translucent wing feathers, they appear ...

Wheesh! Crack! Something furious hit me on the back of the head. Even as I turned to see whom I had upset, the perpetrator was already hovering, brilliant white against the blue sky, ready for another attack as soon as I turned my back ...

An hour and a half west of the small harbor town of Haboro, which is just three hours north of Sapporo, lie two small islands: Teuri and Yagishiri. Teuri is easy to visit and has fascinating seabird colonies and good walking. There is a ...

The fine red sand of the Kalahari, dampened by the early morning dew, reveals the tracks of nocturnal and early morning wanderers. The heat of the rising sun soon turns the sand powder dry and the tracks blow away on the slightest breeze, but ...

It is a rare occasion, in a busy schedule, that allows me to spend a whole morning doing almost nothing, but this is one of those times. As I write, I am enjoying the sunshine and the view from the roof of a stone ...

“Wildlife,” “natural,” “wild” and “free” are terms that are loaded with meaning, redolent with atmosphere. They are words that may transport you mentally to the tundra, patrolled by polar bears, to the acacia-dotted African savanna across which herds of buffalo, gazelle, elephant and giraffe ...

For most of our planet’s mind-numbingly long history of around 4.6 billion years, the most complex life form on Earth was the prokaryotic cell. The ghostly signatures of these simple cells without nuclei first appear in rocks dated to about 3.75 billion years ago. ...

Think of the automobile and which country comes to mind first? America, of course. Strange then, to find that there is one part of that country that officially lists its only mode of land transport as “walking.” If you have ever seen the place ...

We may think of America as the land of the automobile, but for a place that both produces them and is constantly involved in road works for them, we need look no further than Japan. Automobiles clog the narrow streets and winding roads. Many ...