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Last Sunday a man strode by me on Bridge Street with a riot of colour and widespread wings on his shoulder. He was taking his great macaw, of scarlet, indigo and gold plumage, for a stroll. Happily, it was a mild day. “He does not like the cold,” the man told a passerby who asked about the parrot. Man and bird looked absolutely companionable.

I was reminded of the parrot who features strongly in Iris Murdoch’s The Book and the Brotherhood. A small African Grey enters the life of eleven-year-old Gerard Hernshaw when clients of his father’s leave the country and cannot take the bird with them. Gerard falls “instantly and passionately” in love with the parrot, whom he names Grey. Its very presence in the house makes him feel he is waking up every day to a miracle. He delights in Grey’s grace and good health, his clever yellow eyes and his pure pale grey feathers with a touch of scarlet in his tail and wingtips. read more

What happens when the world’s most devastated sites are left to recover on their own, free of human interference? In her meticulously researched Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape, Scottish investigative journalist Cal Flyn gives us an answer both apocalyptic and optimistic.

A writer of remarkable physical and emotional courage, Flyn takes us to the city of Pripyat in Ukraine, largely abandoned after the 1986 meltdown of the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl. Although visitors are barred from entering the decaying buildings, she defies the order and finds everywhere a new forest of birch, maple and poplar rising amidst the ruins. This resurgence is astounding, given that Chernobyl is the most radioactively contaminated site in history. In the worst affected areas in the aftermath of the meltdown, every mammal perished within a few days. However, by 2010 wildlife had rebounded, including deer, elk, lynx, boar, beaver, and even the brown bear, not seem in the region for a century. read more

The Parrot and the Book

A Brave Journalist’s Foray into the World’s Most Toxic Wastelands