For all that the toads that I wrote about in this column a few weeks back have thick warty skins, amphibians in general are thin-skinned and very sensitive. That sensitivity is proving their undoing, and we should be paying much more attention to their ...

The many seed-bearing plants of the temperate region, the grasses and the herbs, the trees and the shrubs, produce an enormous volume of seed each year. Typically of the natural world, a vast amount of effort is rewarded by very few successes. In the ...

It is amazing what one can see out of the corner of an eye. Peripheral vision is a godsend for naturalists because so often creatures are not where (or even what) one expects. This was brought home to me this afternoon driving home from ...

I have a friend, an exceptional naturalist, who has traveled this country widely from Iriomote-jima to Hokkaido, yet who swears that he will never visit the Ogasawara Islands. Now that is a strange aversion for a naturalist, because those particular islands, 1,000 km or ...

An ethereal mist, hanging over the Chukchi Sea, lent a magical air to a seemingly endless expanse of broken sea ice making it difficult to judge sizes. A distant gull seemed huge; a dark lump on the edge of an ice floe seemed like ...

One of the most fascinating crossroads on earth lies to the northeast of Japan. The ancient Bering land bridge used to span the current Bering Straits, connecting the land masses of Siberia and Alaska into one vast continent and enabling a traffic of plants, ...

One of the basic rules of biodiversity is that species diversity increases toward the tropics and decreases toward the poles. An extension of this is that species in the tropics tend to have very small ranges compared with species in the boreal or tundra ...

A reflexologist will tell you that feet reveal a great deal about a person’s physical state, and that cures can be administered via the feet. A podiatrist will be able to determine from your feet how you walk, and will note any distinctive characteristics ...

Among the smaller waterfowl, there are basically two types: There are ducks that dive, and there are those that dabble. Diving ducks, such as the tufted duck, scaup, scoter, harlequin and long-tailed duck, are birds of open, deep water, birds of lakes, coasts and ...

The red fox is a familiar creature here in Japan, but travel northward and it is soon replaced by another species. At higher latitudes, the arctic or polar fox is the ubiquitous hardy scavenger and predator. It is better adapted to the colder conditions, ...

As the typhoon season cuts between summer and autumn, many species are on the move. This is the season of migration for land birds and seabirds. While the land birds island-hop between Northeast and Southeast Asia, some of the seabirds are embarking on journeys ...

The mammals of the Nansei Shoto may be inconspicuous and difficult to observe, but their distribution, and the relationships between the different species and populations in these islands, provides insight into the past history of the archipelago. This interesting mixture of animals has links ...