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Birds took possession of Tim Dee's imagination at an early age. As a three-year-old he saw a blue-backed swallow flit out of the summer light to its nest in a dark garden shed and his obsession was born. Since then he has watched more than 40 swallow springs and autumns and is unable to remember a birdless day.

In this poetic memoir he traces a year of birds, from one summer to the next. He mines stories from his lifetime of encounters with them: in their nests, in the palms of his hands, flying free, dead in collections and in the literature of Pliny, Bede, Keats, Clare and Joyce.

He begins in Shetland, where terns and blackbirds keep up their mix of scream and serenade, harangue and consolation and gannets mutter their homely, rubbery conversation. From there he takes the reader to the huge square yawn of the Wash, to the Avon Gorge at Bristol and farther afield to California and Zambia.
Adding depth to his travels is his bubbling passion for birds. Millions of oily starlings gather to roost from a freezing winter sky. Redstarts, only weeks old, set off on their thousands of miles to Africa. A peregrine bolts overhead and a tawny owl flies in its brown field of gathered quiet.  read more »

Slate has dedicated its considerable resources to a "series on revolting creatures". And why not? We spend so much time considering what's revolting about humanity, so let's just indulge in a bit of species schadenfreude. Consider the ickiness of the slug:

The slug physique is not appealing—one broad muscular foot topped with a gut (thus the class name gastropod). But what makes slugs so uniquely unattractive is their slime—a soft, slippery mucous coating that allows the animals to undulate along the ground with wavelike contractions...

In a recently published volume of Samuel Beckett's letters, the glum playwright remarks, "I'm depressed the way a slug-ridden cabbage might be expected to be."

Yes, we've all been there. It's Monday, after all, and I've got the blues like slug-glossed arugula. And now there's this:

It can take a while for two slugs in heat to find each other, but once that happens, the pair might engage in foreplay for hours, sampling chemical secretions on each other's surfaces. The nibbling often leads to biting and tail lashing. Most slugs mate on the ground, but Limax maximus, aka the leopard slug, produces a strong cable of slime by which the two lovers dangle from a tree. In most kinds of slug, the penis is about half the length of its body.  read more »

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It is always humbling to recognise our own yearnings and desires in species so much further down on the food chain. I do believe I saw a man try to pull this same move on New Year's Eve--with the same effect.