Down on the intensive chicken farm (BBC News online)
Lower Farm, just outside Chesterfield, is not what most of us would think of as a farm. It is run by a poultry company called Applied Group. Everything happens in four large sheds. Nearly all chicken meat eaten in the UK comes from a place like this.
A wild green yonder (Regeneration & Renewal)
It was not known as the Thames Gateway when Pip, the narrator of Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, described the area's unique environment, "the dark flat wilderness, intersected with dykes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it."
Knut: a polar bear story (BBC news online)
Shortly after his birth, the German media reported that an animal rights campaigner was calling for him to be put down rather than brought up by humans. It prompted a huge groundswell of sympathy for the bear, which never went away.
Her name is Lola (Evening Standard)
She was born on a farm in Wales two years ago, bought soon after by entrepreneur Mark Astley, and sent to America to get an education. She has the distinction of being the only certified bedbug sniffer dog in Europe.
Badger of honour (BBC news online)
Why do people have such a strong attachment to this scarcely-seen creature?
Bolt from above (BBC news online)
The death this week of a giraffe struck by lightning raises an obvious question: are these lankiest of creatures especially vulnerable to bolts from the sky?
Far from the crowds in Hardy’s backyard (Financial Times magazine)
In a pretentious moment, one might call Hardy a writer of terroir. Far From the Madding Crowd, while lacking the tragic grandeur of Tess, Jude or The Woodlanders, is the first novel to refer to Wessex by name.
Best friends reunited (Daily Telegraph magazine)
There is a scene in The Loved One, Evelyn Waughs novella of 1948, that takes place at a fictional pet cemetery in Los Angeles called the Happier Hunting Ground.
Cold water, hot blood (New Statesman)
In the haze of rubbed out chalk I can just make out: "Today's temperature 12C, 53F". The atmosphere is Dunkirkian among the old campaigners, some of whom are in their eighties.
Cut is the branch (Daily Telegraph)
"I am a woodlander; I have sap in my veins," Roger Deakin writes. The late author is on a mission to get to the heart of something huge and elemental - to understand not just trees, but the very essence of wood.