Science & Nature

of the beauties of place is that it has the ability to imprint itself upon us in an instant. Many will have known that immediate, electrifying symmetry upon arriving somewhere that seems to fit so perfectly with your life as to be predetermined, the place you were always meant to find.

E7, the bird whose satellite track revealed an impressive 7,396-mile nonstop flight, didn’t attain fame because she did anything particularly unique for a bar-tailed godwit, but because she showed us how remarkable the usual can be.

‘because to some people it looks like a big empty space with nothing in it, but for us, it’s a really important place filled with wildlife and lovely, wonderful communities, and we wanted to protect them.’ She’d appealed to the critical difference between ‘space’ and ‘place’ – one a malleable territory largely