Aves. Miles de ellas. Una amplia cinta de color gris pálido a lo largo de toda la playa. Hacía años que no veía tantas. Había perdido la esperanza de que aún era posible, que aún quedaban bandadas tan grandes en este mundo dañado. En los últimos meses, un dramático titular tras otro me hizo desesperarme de que cualquier criatura, aparte de las hormigas y las cucarachas tal vez, aún pudiera sobrevivir en números que había leído de niña o que había visto en documentales sobre la naturaleza narrados por Attenborough. Absorbí la vista. Los pájaros salpicaban la playa como las letras de esta págin ..read more

Birds. Thousands of them. A broad ribbon of pale grey along the entire beach. It was years since I'd seen so many. I had lost hope it was still possible, that there were still flocks so large left in this damaged world. In recent months, one dramatic headline after another had made me despair that any creature, other than ants and cockroaches perhaps, could still be surviving in the sorts of numbers I had read about as a child or seen in Attenborough-narrated nature documentaries. I drank in the sight. The birds dotted the beach like the letters on this page. What were they? A rapt stare thro ..read more

Glendy Vanderah's Where the Forest Meets the Stars is an Amazon Charts, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post bestseller, will be translated into 11 languages, and has a phenomenal 4000 overwhelmingly positive reviews on Amazon (UK and US combined). It is Glendy's debut novel, a love story that has touched the hearts of tens of thousands. For me, it had an added attraction: one of the main protagonists is a biologist, like me, who conducts research on nesting birds, and Glendy herself is an endangered bird specialist. We share another connection: by an extraordinary coincidence, Glendy's hus ..read more

My new book, ,The Giant Otter: Giants of the Amazon, is available for preorder! I have been involved with giant otters, in one way or another, since 1998. That, I now realise, covers two decades, almost half my life. It all started with a literature study commissioned by the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW). Actually, it started before that, with a Geographical Society sponsored expedition to the Las Piedras River in south-eastern Peru. I saw giant otters in the wild for the first time and mentioned the experience to my colleagues; I was then working at the Netherlands Committee fo ..read more

Day 4, 9 am, Cocha Cashu, Manu National Park, Peru. The water boils and churns as nine endangered giant otters vigorously pursue a school of fish. One otter swims under and up, sending a spray of panicked boca chicos into the air. Another bursts from the water and I see it twist and snatch a fish in mid-air before both plunge back into the lake. Moments later, the otter resurfaces and, firmly grasping its prize between large, webbed feet, begins to devour it, head first and with great relish. Overhead, an osprey launches itself from its observation point high in a tree, swoops down, and hurls ..read more

An opinion piece in The New York Times caught my eye recently. In ,The Beast in Me, Maxim Loskutoff describes an encounter with a female grizzly bear while hiking in Glacier National Park, Montana. When they first see her, the bear is: “… close enough to make out the rolling power of her gait and the light gold fur on her back, and far enough away for us to feel safe.” Loskutoff and his partner admire her for a while and continue their walk. On emerging from a stand of pine, however, they notice the bear is now a mere football field away and coming directly towards them. And Loskutoff has what ..read more

I don’t know whether to applaud Mark Cocker or kick him in the shins. Maybe both. I’ve just finished reading his ,Our Place: Can We Save Britain’s Wildlife Before It Is Too late? It is a brutal, bruising read. I mean this literally: There were pages, quite a few of them, that made something in my chest physically ache. Though I’m Dutch and currently live in Peru, I’ve spent almost a quarter of my life in Britain ̶ one year in Fort Augustus, Scotland; four formative years near Woodbridge, Suffolk; four years in London; and two years in Oxford. Not to mention annual holidays with my parents and ..read more

My mother and I both have husbands who do not much care for visiting museums and famous monuments, or gardens, ancient ruins, and historical houses. Our spouses are more the outdoorsy types, with a love of wild places untouched by the destructive hand of man. We share their passion for nature, but find ourselves equally drawn to the things of beauty and meaning created by that same hand. So, once in a while, my mother and I set off, just the two of us, to immerse ourselves in European culture for a few days. In Venice, we were dazzled by the shimmering mosaics of the Basilica di San Marco, and ..read more

Imagine this. It’s night and you’re alone in the rainforest. You’re walking along a narrow trail, a machete in one hand, a torch in the other. You see an oddly shaped branch on the ground and you reach out with the machete to give it a tap. A loud, menacing hiss fills the air. You look up, and a reptilian eye reflects the beam of your torch. You realise you are standing metres from the head of a black caiman, the largest predator in the Amazon. Those metres are entirely occupied by its jagged tail and tabletop back. This is what happened last year to Orlando Zegarra, a Peruvian tropical ecolog ..read more

I have a confession to make. It’s hard for me, a lover of all creatures wild, to admit this, but… I have rather ambivalent feelings when it comes to the hoatzin. Surely, by the laws of nature, such an inept, ungainly, witless animal should be extinct by now? Hoatzins live along the shores of oxbow lakes, which, in Peru, also happens to be the preferred habitat of the giant otter, an animal I have studied in the wild for several years. So I have had the dubious pleasure, countless times, of watching these heavy, pheasant-sized birds do their thing of shuffling and flapping laboriously in low-h ..read more