Sightings · 7 October 2026
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Issue 01 · The living world, as it changes
What’s new
in the natural world
Field Notes is a running magazine of short dispatches: a species turning up where it shouldn’t, a wetland coming back, a study that changes how we count something, and the people who spend their weeks outdoors finding it out.
Dictated, this morning
Everything alive is filing a report. This is where we read it.
In this issue
5 dispatches published so far. New pieces go up as the notes come in — usually one a week, more when something is moving.
Latest dispatch
More from the notebook
Field report · 7 October 2026
Counting what you cannot see
Most of the animals in any given wood are not visible, and the ones that are visible are the ones that do not mind being seen. So how do you count the rest? This week I spent two…
Research · 7 October 2026
What a decade of moth trapping actually shows
A new analysis pulls together ten years of nightly moth trap records from [number] sites and finds the headline everyone expected, plus one nobody did. The expected part: total…
Habitat · 7 October 2026
A river was given its bends back. The fish noticed.
For sixty years this stretch of river ran in a straight concrete channel, which is efficient for moving water and useless for everything else. Last winter the channel was broken…
Sightings · 7 October 2026
The hedgehogs came back to the car park
Three years ago the strip of scrub behind the retail park was mown flat twice a summer and nothing lived in it. Then the mowing stopped, a volunteer group started leaving the…
How this works
Three kinds of note
Sightings
Something turned up
A species recorded somewhere new, earlier or later in the year than expected, or in numbers nobody has seen before. Short, dated, sourced.
Habitat
Ground that is changing
Restoration projects, land coming back, land going under pressure. What is being done, by whom, and whether it is working yet.
Research
What the papers actually say
New findings translated out of the abstract: what was measured, what it means for the place you live, and what is still unknown.