Belfast’s walls tell the story of a city in transition. From the political murals that emerged during the Troubles to the vibrant street art, community projects, and large-scale building murals that define many areas today, the city’s public artwork reflects its past, present, and evolving identity. Exploring Belfast through its streets reveals a place where history, creativity, and community continue to shape the urban landscape.
A journey through Castle Espie WWT’s wildfowl enclosures reveals ducks from across the globe, each species reshaping what we think we know about these familiar birds. From the precision of Barrow’s goldeneye to the theatrical display of the hooded merganser, this is a brief encounter that lingers, turning observation into something far more attentive.
At Lackford Lakes in Suffolk, the great crested grebe moves through water like a recurring signature, appearing and vanishing between reed shadows and open stretches. Its life unfolds entirely on the lake’s surface and beneath it, where diving, feeding, courtship, and the raising of young become part of the same continuous rhythm. To follow it is to read the lake in fragments that only make sense when you stay long enough to notice the return.
Each winter, thousands of light-bellied Brent geese arrive at Strangford Lough, carrying with them the memory of Arctic summers and long Atlantic crossings. Their presence shapes the rhythm of the lough, tying a quiet Northern Irish shoreline to distant landscapes and global journeys, and reminding us how deeply place, movement, and survival are connected.
As the Okavango crosses the Caprivi Strip, its waters move slow and bright beneath the sun. Along the banks, birds gather in the reeds and drift over the shallows, their calls rising softly above the steady flow of the river as it winds east through grass and sky. On the grassy shores, hippos stir in the shallows while antelope graze nearby, each creature folded into the quiet rhythm of the passing water.
In the brief green season of the Kalahari, the desert breathes again — herds moving across the grass, storms flashing over the dunes, and the land holding its quiet promise beneath the fading light.
The lilac-breasted roller—Southern Africa’s “wedding bird”—is more than dazzling plumage. It is a bearer of blessings, a dancer in the sky, a reminder that love and beauty endure across the savanna.
Devil’s Tower rises abruptly from the Wyoming plains, a fluted monolith of stone shaped by volcanic forces and centuries of erosion. Known to many Indigenous nations as Bear Lodge, it is a sacred site woven into stories of bears, stars, and prayer. To walk its base is to encounter both geology and legend, stone and spirit, in one unforgettable place.
Etosha lies in the north of Namibia, a wilderness shaped around its vast central pan — a salt flat so large it can be seen from space. This pan, stretching more than 120 kilometers across, dominates the park, its edges fringed by savanna, mopane woodland, and scattered waterholes that draw life from miles around. When... Continue Reading →
Long-billed and deliberate, ibises are a patient presence along South Africa’s wetlands, lawns, and city parks. From the brassy call of the hadeda to the gleam of the glossy ibis, these birds thread water and land with equal grace. This piece follows their tracks — history, habitat, and the small human stories that gather around their slow work.
The Footstep Chronicles 