birds

Conservation biologist Nicholas Wilkinson begins to tell the story of the dove, 'Ectopistes migratorius', and is overwhelmed by the number of wings around him and the difficulty of accounting for one of the most notorious extinctions ever to occur on the planet: the destruction of the passenger pigeon.

Two penetrating glimpses into the wild world in times of calamity: Rob Carney's juxtaposition of the poetic and the political observing a hawk and squirrel in the US; Samantha Clark's lockdown contemplation of loss and stillness by a loch on a grey day on Orkney.

Latest in our Outbreak series on the global pandemic and its aftershocks, Dawid Jussarak reports from an empty university, in China, Michael McLane from a New Zealand small town

This week in the second 'palimpsest' of short pieces for our Outbreak series, Juhi Saklani watches the birds in India; Tom Smith watches history repeat itself in the Czech Republic.