Plants Change Near the Coast
The closer to the coast we get, the tougher it is for plants. Once you can smell the sea only maritime species thrive in the…
Tag: senses
A History of Seeing in Eleven Inventions
I have written a short foreword for this excellent book. I start some of my talks with this line, ‘I’m going to try to change…
Can You Spot the Roe Deer?
Can you spot the roe deer in the picture above? The enlarged picture below makes it much easier – it’s the exact same photo, blown…
How to Smell Rain
A wonderful guest article today by Milo Carnegie Mee. Of the plethora of smells that greet our noses when we are outdoors, the redolence of…
How to Find Your Way with Scents and Smell
Wildflowers help us to navigate in so many ways. Look at the wild marjoram, Origanum vulgare, above. You may have noticed that the stems are…
Temperature Inversion in Yellowstone
My thanks to George Bumann for sending over this great pic of a temperature inversion in Yellowstone Park. During temperature inversions cool air becomes trapped…
Sounds during a temperature inversion
Normally, air gets cooler with altitude and this is what we expect to experience. We see snow at the tops of mountains, but none in…
Have you lost your senses?
I have written a guest blog for Waterstones: In the past second your senses have picked up eleven million pieces of information. If you thought…
The Tombolo
 A tombolo is a thin strip of sand or shingle that is formed by wave action around an island. The new thin strip of…
Soundscapes and Smellscapes
You know those times when you open your map and the wind catches it and you curse and then you open it again, only this…
Wildflower Navigation Tips
The perfect antidote to the cabin fever that comes from being cooped up writing about the Arctic, it turns out, is to go for a…
Snow Wonders
One of the most rewarding things about natural navigation is that it shuns any attempt by the seasons to quieten things down. There are many…
The Different Life of Paths
Day in, day out, paths experience a different life to that of their verges. Very often there is undergrowth on each side of a path,…
The Smelliest Clue
One of the natural navigation techniques that ocean sailors have used for centuries is noticing that the incidence of flotsam and jetsam increases, on average,…
The Early Morning Star (that I could have done without)
This photo, taken just before six this morning, sums up my senses’ delight at being woken by our kids who decided to hold a animated…
The Power of Smell
I ran a private course in the South Downs on Saturday for a group of four friends. One of them gave me a great example…
Fog Navigation
This morning brought with it a nice thick radiation fog, which the sun will probably burn off soon. There is not forecast to be much…
Smell Power
Stumbled across a bit of a gem this evening. Marion Owen, ‘master gardener’, describing the moment she decided to become a gardener at the end…