BBC Future

Japan is gripped by mass allergies. A 1950s project is to blame

Nithin Coca — Tue, 19 May 2026 10:00:00 +0000

A decision made 70 years ago to reforest vast swathes of Japan with just two kinds of tree has come back to haunt the country.

In February, videos showing what looked like waves of smoke blowing off an evergreen forest went viral in Japan. It wasn't smoke – it was pollen, and the videos were a warning to tens of millions of residents of the archipelago nation: prepare your masks and allergy medicine.

Every spring (which is already arriving earlier in Japan due to climate change) you'll see people of all ages wearing masks on the streets of cities across the country. The reason: hay fever, driven by all the pollen.

Hay fever – also known as allergic rhinitis – has now become a national crisis in Japan, with an estimated 43% of the population experiencing medium to severe symptoms. This compares to 26% in the UK and 12-18% in the US.

As well as the discomfort, these allergies can lead to sleep loss and poor concentration, and sufferers are more likely to experience other conditions such as asthma and food allergies. At the peak of Japan's hay fever season, the economic impact from both sick days and lower consumer spending is estimated at $1.6bn (£1.2bn) per day.

So why does Japan have such bad allergies? The reason has little to do with poor health or pollution, or even the natural environment, but decisions made by leaders more than 70 years ago in the decades after World War Two.

An overlooked crisis

During the war, oil and gas shortages led Japan to turn to the nation's most abundant natural resource – forests – as a source of fuel for home and industry. The result was widespread deforestation of natural forests, with the mountains around major cities like Tokyo, Osaka and Kobe completely stripped bare of trees.

"After World War Two, many of Japan's mountains became barren, causing disasters in various regions," says Noriko Sato, a professor and forestry researcher at Kyushu University in Fukuoka, Japan. (Bare mountains can increase the incidence of landslides and flooding). "Large-scale afforestation was carried out by public works, funded by tax revenues, to prevent soil erosion."

Aiming for rapid reforestation, the government chose to plant reams of only two different native, fast-growing evergreen species that could quickly reforest landscapes and provide wood for future use in construction: the Japanese cedar, sugi, and the Japanese cypress, hinoki.

Today, these hinoki and sugi plantation forests still cover around 10 million hectares (25 million acres) – a fifth of Japan's entire land area.

The problem is, sugi and hinoki trees also produce large amounts of lightweight pollen which can easily drift into cities. It's this pollen, often released all at once from the monoculture plantations, that is responsible for most seasonal allergies in Japan. The issue has become all the worse since these trees release ever more pollen after maturing at 30 years of age – now the case for nearly all of them.

"Pollen allergies have become a national health issue in Japan," says Sato. "Addressing this problem is urgent."

In 2023, Japan declared allergies a national social problem and the central government set out an ambitious plan – reduce pollen by 50% in 30 years. As a first step, it aims to reduce the forest areas planted with sugi trees by 20%.

But swapping out forests covering over 2% of Japan in 10 years is a massive endeavour. Plus, simply cutting these trees down won't be enough – they also need to be replaced with new forests to avoid soil erosion or accidentally undercutting Japan's own climate targets.

Return to life

Walking through sugi or hinoki plantation forests is eerie – all the trees are the same height and there are few birds or insects. The ground is spongy with dry needles, and there's little light or sound.

It's a stark contrast to Japan's natural forests, which teem with biodiversity and sound. With their diverse tree species like red pine, larch and maple, these forests support more of all kinds of wildlife. Japan's unique geography has made it one of the world's biodiversity hotspots, but habitat loss and invasive species have led much of its unique wildlife to become increasingly at risk.

With the monoculture plantation forests causing so many problems, it makes sense that Japan is now trying to replace them with something better. But it's a daunting challenge. The reason? Japan has a lot of forests. In fact it's one of the most forested industrialised nations in the world, with forests covering 68% of its land, a third of which are sugi and hinoki plantations. The US, by contrast, is 34% forested; the UK just 13%.

Across Japan, forests can be found right by cities. Japanese even has a word for the transition area between city and forest: satoyama.

Still, even before the 2023 government declaration, some local actors and non-profits had begun efforts to turn these forests into biodiverse ecosystems, and some are already seeing the benefits. The small town of Nishiawakura, Okayama, for example, has created an entire economy around reducing the 84% of its forests made up only of hinoki and sugi, turning wood into heat for eel farms as well as chopsticks and timber.

In 2020, Kobe, a larger port city in central Japan with a dense urban core and vast forests within its city limits, began an effort to turn more than 180 hectares (445 acres) of plantation back into natural broadleaf forests in a 15-year cycle.

Every year, an area is selectively clear-cut, removing sugi, hinoki but also other invasive species like bamboo. Broadleaf trees are left, and with more sun coming through to the ground, they grow back, along with other new seedlings either planted by staff or brought by birds or animals.

With its scheme now about halfway done, local government workers say they have been pleasantly surprised by how quickly biodiversity has returned.

"Our wildlife monitoring is showing more animals and insects returning, including badgers, pond turtles, many species of frogs, and rare insects too, which is encouraging," says Atsushi Okada, head of the Kobe City Environmental Bureau.

As well as addressing the pollen issue, the scheme aims to fulfil the Kobe's pledge to increase its protected areas to 30% of all land by 2030. More diverse forests should also protect the city against the landslides and natural disasters poised to become more frequent due to climate change, says Daisuke Tochimoto, a forester with the City of Kobe.

As for the cut trees, they are used for heating, furniture production and Japanese white charcoal, a smoke-free barbeque fuel which could also be used in industrial processes. The hope is that, over time, the project can become financially sustainable and not reliant on public funds, says Okada.

An epic challenge

Similar projects are beginning in other parts of Japan. One project in Hotani, Osaka, is now restoring wetlands and grasslands. And the largest effort aims to turn 10,000 hectares (25,000 acres) of plantation forests in Gumna prefecture to meadows and mixed deciduous woodland.

Smaller-scale projects are also common, says Akira Mori, a professor of biodiversity and ecosystem services at the University of Tokyo, pointing to dozens of initiatives around Japan.

Since the goal of removing 20% of the plantations was announced, the country has designated approximately 980,000 hectares (2.4 million acres) of sugi plantation forests as areas for focused logging and replanting. Still, not all of this is being turned into broadleaf forests: some of it is fresh plantations, often planted with low-pollen or pollen free sugi.

Japan's ministry of agriculture, forestry and fisheries did not respond to a request for comment on how much of this allocated area has been removed and replanted so far.

Still, these efforts may not yet be large enough to make much of a difference to the pollen.

And even if it achieves the goal, 80% of the plantation forests will remain. So Japan is also trying other ways to tackle hay fever.

Pollen data and forecasts, for example, are being used to better understand of where dispersion is likely, allowing authorities to selectively cut down the worst offending forests, and researchers are even looking at spraying trees with solutions to suppress pollen. In 2023, one forecasting company distributed thousands of pollen-detecting robots – whose eyes go different colours depending on pollen levels – across Japan.

Medicine is another prong to the attack, with the development of new treatments to better ease the symptoms of pollen exposure. One Japanese trial, for example, showed a long-acting under-the-tongue immunotherapy tablet was were still helping alleviate symptoms two years after treatment. Other scientists have even been experimenting with genetically modified rice designed to alleviate allergy symptoms. (Read more about the new wave of effective cures for seasonal allergies).

A careful transition

When the sugi and hinoki forests were first planted in the 1950s and 60s, they weren't meant to stand forever. At the time, it was assumed they would be gradually cut down and replanted over time, as had been the case before the war. But as Japan's economy boomed in the late 60s and 70s, major cities like Kobe and Tokyo grew rapidly, and it ended up being cheaper to import wood from other countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia.

In 2011, though, Japan set a goal of relying less on forestry imports, and has seen its domestic wood use grow from 26% in 2010 to nearly 42% in 2020.

Of course, if Japan is going to exploit its forests, it has to avoid the same mistakes made in Southeast Asia, where cheap wood means the clear-cutting of tropical forests. Junichi Mishiba, forest project coordinator at the non-profit Friends of the Earth Japan, worries that more incentives to cut down trees is leading to bad environmental practices. "There is an increase in clear-cut areas resulting from policies promoting harvesting," he says.

To support its efforts to replace the plantations, in 2024 the national government began collecting a new tax of 1000 yen ($6/£5) per year on all residents. The money is being used to support sustainable forestry, including reducing plantation forests and replacing older sugi with new, low-pollen seedlings, especially in urban areas.

Data on its impact is not yet available, but Mori argues the support is not enough, with municipalities often lacking the capacity and expertise to design and monitor such changes to forests. A 2023 report by the Forest Declaration Assessment noted that in recent years, only 30-40% of Japan's newly harvested land has been replanted

Good forest management will be essential, agrees Mika Akesaka, an associate professor of economics at Kobe University. Leaving felled trees unmanaged, for example, can increase landslide risk and reduce water retention capacity, she says.

Mishiba, though, fears that by focusing only on seasonal allergies rather than wider ecological indicators, Japan is once again prioritising short-term solutions. The country needs to think 50 or even 100 years ahead, he says, considering biodiversity, climate and the role of the people who will live alongside these forests.

Japan's ministry of agriculture, forestry and fisheries did not respond to a request for comment on these concerns.

Climate threat

Urgency to act is also growing because of another unplanned factor – climate change. Around the world, temperature and weather shifts are impacting pollen spread and Japan saw its earliest pollen dispersal ever in 2025.

"Pollen dispersal is greatly influenced by weather conditions such as temperature and wind," says Mai Sato, a spokesperson with the Japan Weather Association (JWA), a forecasting company which releases regular pollen forecasts to the public.

Japan's vast forests also themselves hold huge amounts of carbon, and sugi plantations are responsible for almost half the carbon sequestered by its forests each year. Japan is leaning heavily on this carbon sequestration to achieve its net zero goal, and encourages it with a carbon credits scheme.

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Still, since 2004 Japan has seen a declining trend in the yearly amount being absorbed which it attributes to the maturity of its forests. Research has shown that since ageing trees absorb less carbon, thinning forests of old trees and planting new, younger and more diverse species will be essential to keeping Japan's forests an effective carbon sink.

Japan's ministry of agriculture, forestry and fisheries did not respond to a request for comment on how the plans to replant sugi and hinoki forests may impact its climate goals.

Before the 1960s, Japan didn't even have a word for hay fever. Japanese cedar pollinosis was first identified in 1963 and, according to researchers at the time, was new to the country. The hope is that with the return of more natural, diverse forests, Japan can one day go back to enjoying its springs – without the sneezes.

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World Cup history will be made on this grass. These scientists have spent decades perfecting it

Johnny Kauffman — Sat, 16 May 2026 10:00:50 +0000

The 2026 World Cup kicks off in just a few weeks. The grass on which the tournament's 104 matches will be played has a vital but often overlooked role. Scientists have fed, mowed and stamped on miles of turf to get it right.

It happened just eight minutes into the match. Ángel Di María stole the ball from a Canadian defender and took off toward his opponent's goal. One of Argentina's greatest footballers of all time had only the keeper to beat in a decisive moment in the group stages of the 2024 Copa America football tournament. But as he dribbled the ball towards the goal, he seemed to struggle to control it. Confronted by the Canadian goalkeeper at the edge of the penalty area, all Di Maria could muster was a relatively weak toe poke. The keeper blocked it easily.

After the match, the Argentinean coach and players offered an explanation for what might have gone wrong. The reigning World Cup champions claimed the quality of the grass on the pitch in Atlanta, Georgia, in the US, affected their performance.

The stadium where the match was being played – normally home to NFL side the Atlanta Falcons and Major League Soccer team Atlanta United – usually has an artificial pitch, but it had been replaced with a temporary grass surface just days before the tournament.

Players complained that the ball jumped like "a springboard", describing the pitch as a "disaster". Concerns about the quality of the pitches continued to dog the tournament as games were played in other stadiums around the US.

With the 2026 World Cup approaching, it is criticism that co-hosts US, Canada and Mexico will be eager to avoid. And they have brought in a team of specialists to make sure there are no complaints.

Over the past eight years researchers have bounced balls, stomped boots and abused patches of grass in the search for the perfect turf. They've fed, watered and nurtured different mixes of grass species to see how they'll cope. And they've measured blades of grass millimetre by millimetre to find their perfect length.

"It's a lot of pressure," says John Sorochan, a professor at the University of Tennessee, who has been contracted by Fifa to help oversee the growth, installation and care of the grass pitches at all 16 World Cup stadiums, including five that are covered by domes.

"Those are the ones that really have me worried," Sorochan says, "Because the Sun's gonna come up, but it's not going to come up inside. Plants need light, ideally sunlight, to grow."

Velcro or carpet

With the 2026 men's World Cup now just weeks away, the cumulative result of more than 170 different experiments conducted by Sorochan and his fellow researchers is about to be put to the test. They have built on decades of research on the science of cultivating and installing turfgrass on sports pitches.

Yet the grass pitches they have developed for the different stadiums across the US, Canada and Mexico will be trampled by 21 players at a time for more than 90 minutes per game, across 104 matches. The ambitions of the world's top football players and billions of fans around the world will rest on how the grass holds up.

Just five millimetres can determine if a pitch plays like "velcro" or a pristine natural carpet that aids the quick passing of the ball needed for exciting play, Sorochan says.

It took him and his colleagues hours of experimentation to determine the exact height at which each pitch should be mowed. On miniature pitches at their research facilities in Knoxville, Tennessee, US, they shot footballs out of bright red machines, carefully observing and measuring their speed and bounce. They wheeled a boxy, steel contraption across the grass so that a football boot attached to a post could pound the surface and test its springiness.

The researchers tested the turf for not only how the ball interacts with the surface but also the traction it gives players. They looked for ways to minimise divots during matches and avoiding wet spots that might interrupt the flow of a game. Worst still, a poor surface could have catastrophic consequences – leading to career ending injuries for players worth millions.

The geographic spread of stadiums also means the pitches have to flourish in dramatically distinct climatic zones – from the humid heat of Mexico City and Miami to the cool of Toronto and Boston.

To cope with this, the researchers have developed root systems, irrigation methods and maintenance schedules that are specific to each location. They have also tested different grass species to find the ideal type for the conditions. In warmer climates the turf will consist of Bermuda grass while cooler climates will have a mix of Kentucky bluegrass and perennial ryegrass.

Sorochan and his team determined that Bermuda grass pitches should be cut slightly shorter, because they're denser and dry more quickly than pitches of Kentucky bluegrass and perennial ryegrass.

To help make the pitches more uniform and durable, plastic fibres similar to those used in artificial turf, have been woven into the sod.

Still, footballers who play in Europe, where pitches are typically cool climate grasses, might be surprised walking onto a Bermuda grass pitch in Miami or Kansas City.

" They'll look at this and say, 'This isn't what I have in Germany – this is more like a putting green,'" Sorochan says. Each pitch will be slightly different, he admits. But because of his research he believes the variation will be minimal.

"It's just the massive scale of temporary fields that are gonna be built at one time" that makes Trey Rogers III, a professor at Michigan State University (MSU), anxious. He has been aiding Sorochan in preparation for the World Cup.

The pitches must be perfect, almost miraculous. Fifa has put its faith in Sorochan and Rogers, celebrities in the obscure field of grass science. The pair have never faced a challenge like the 2026 World Cup – and the stakes are high.

But it isn't the first time they've laid down turf for football's biggest stage.

The 'Guru of Grass' and his protégé

Rogers fell in love with grass working on a golf course in the American South. But his move to football came in 1992 when Fifa was looking for help installing a grass pitch inside the Pontiac Silverdome in Michigan for four matches during the 1994 World Cup. The stadium was home to an NFL team, the Detroit Lions, who played on artificial turf.

Like many Americans, Rogers knew nothing about the biggest sporting event on the planet. "I uttered the famous words that nobody ever lets me forget," Rogers says. "'What's the World Cup?'."

Even so, Fifa selected Rogers to be in charge of growing and installing a grass pitch inside the stadium. After a series of experiments, his team at MSU decided to grow a mix of Kentucky bluegrass and perennial ryegrass in a sandy soil. The sand would aid drainage while the two grass species could grow in a cool climate with relatively little direct sunlight. Rogers and his colleagues planted seed outside the dome in 1,994 hexagonal trays. It took thousands of hours of labour, much of it done by hand.

Sorochan was a student working on the project at the time. " I was literally the person that was tamping the sand," Sorochan says.

The hexagonal modules were one of the team's greatest innovations. The roots of the grass could be kept intact when the sections of turf were moved into the dome. It would be the first time a natural grass field was installed on top of an artificial pitch in a domed stadium.

When Rogers watched a team enter the dome for their first practice, they didn't inspect the pitch. Apparently, it felt normal to them. Like little boys, they tried to punt footballs high enough to reach the roof of the gargantuan dome. Rogers considered the project a success. It would earn him a nickname: the "guru of grass".

But at the end of the 1994 World Cup, Sorochan climbed to the top of the dome and looked down at the pitch.

"You could see the wear on the field," Sorochan says. "I thought, wow, how do we make that better?" Sorochan spent the rest of his time as a graduate student researching how best to grow grass indoors.

And when Fifa contacted Sorochan in 2018 for help with the 2026 World Cup, he asked Rogers and MSU to join him. What they'd have to pull off made their work at the Silverdome in 1994 seem like a child's science fair project.

Sea kelp and silica

Typically, sod is grown as locally as possible in soil similar to where it will be installed. The act of cutting and moving the turf can stress the plants and they often need several weeks to recover.

At the World Cup, however, many of the pitches will be installed just 10 days before their first match.

Joe Wilkins III's sprawling sod farm outside Denver, Colorado, US, is responsible for the World Cup pitches in Dallas, Atlanta, and Houston. These three stadiums will host more than a quarter of the tournament between them. The stadiums are all domes, where no direct sunlight reaches the pitch.

"They're the biggest challenges," Wilkins says, whose grandfather founded the Green Valley Turf Company in 1962.

Bright green grass covers hundreds of acres at the company's farm. To prepare the sod, Wilkins' staff planted seed in sand on top of thin plastic. This helps to protect the roots when it is harvested and reduce the shock the plants experience.

Over the following weeks, workers water and mow the grass meticulously, adding fungicide, fertiliser, humates, sea kelp and silica.

"The grass never takes a day off," Wilkins says.

Sorochan has visited Green Valley Turf Company several times in the last few years, and Wilkins shipped sod to the University of Tennessee to help Sorochan's experiments. There, the team had built a state-of-the-art shade house to replicate conditions inside a domed stadium while MSU used a 2,100sq m (23,000sq ft) asphalt pad to replicate laying turf on stadium floors.

To stabilise the turf at outdoor stadiums, a gravel base is laid below a firm layer of sand, which the sod is then rolled out onto. For the temporary pitches laid on top of artificial pitch surfaces in NFL domes, an interlocking plastic grid and woven plastic sheeting is used instead of the gravel base to provide adequate drainage.

Just weeks before the World Cup begins, Wilkins and his staff are now undertaking the laborious process of cutting and rolling up the grass. Using what Wilkins describes as "giant pizza cutters" attached to farm vehicles, they slice the sod into 1.2m (4ft) strips. They wait until the Sun is setting so the grass is dry, then roll it up and load it onto refrigerated trucks.

At the same time, dozens of other refrigerated trucks are hauling over a million square feet of grass from a handful of rural sod farms to stadiums across North America.

" I've never done anything as big in my career," said Alan Ferguson, Fifa's senior pitch management manager.

At those domed stadiums, when the grass finally arrives, it may be the last time it's touched by sunlight, but it still has to thrive for weeks more.

Feeding the grass

After the sod is unrolled at the covered stadiums, a magenta glow will blanket the entire pitch, emanating from dozens of white, metal bars just a few metres above the grass. These retractable LED grow lights can be moved into position to provide the grass with the energy it needs to grow. In Dallas, at the home of the Cowboys NFL team, for example, the grow lights descend from the roof.

"You can be working underneath them and mowing and doing all you need to be doing, and the grass is just growing," Sorochan says.

Growing grass without direct sunlight is much easier today than it was at the Silverdome in 1994 because of advances in light emitting diode (LED) technology.

Sorochan isn't worried about a repeat of what happened at the Copa America. At the Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, where Argentina and Canada faced each other, the distance between the grass pitch and the artificial turf used for American football games underneath was too shallow, creating the kind of trampoline effect the players reported, he says. Fifa has asked for more of a buffer in 2026.

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The 2025 Club World Cup also provided a partial rehearsal. The turf researchers deployed many of the same materials, techniques and workers used this year.

"The Club World Cup was a tournament in its own right," said Fifa's Ferguson. "But it also naturally offered us the opportunity to test and try some of these logistics."

While there were a few complaints still about quality of the pitches at the club tournament from players and coaches, Fifa insisted they met international testing standards.

Fifa has spent more than $5m (£3.7m) on grass research for the 2026 World Cup, according to Ferguson. It's a lot of money for something that few people even think about when watching the drama of football's most prestigious competition.

Rogers hopes that in the long run, the research he and Sorochan have done will lead to wider improvements in how grass is used in sport at many levels. It may even persuade some American football teams to switch from artificial turf, even in domed stadiums, he says.

"There will be techniques and things that they're developing that you could even take to the local high school," adds Elizabeth Guertal, a professor of turfgrass management at Auburn University who isn't involved in the World Cup project.

Meanwhile, Rogers and Sorochan know well-tended grass, like a child, is tender and resilient. It can brace a striker as they make a sharp cut with a ball and cushion a goalkeeper at the end of a sparkling save. They have created the stage for the drama to unfold.

Now it's up to the players to see whose dreams will come true.

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The unusual ways Fijians predict when a cyclone is approaching

Frankie Adkins — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 09:01:40 +0000

Creeping yams and bees behaving strangely – in Fiji, farmers read nature's warning signs to predict hurricane season.

It's July, a month when Fijian farmers begin watching wild yams closely. "If they see wild yam vines creeping along the ground, there's going to be a hurricane in between November and April – the hurricane season," says farmer Marika Radua. If the vines shoot upwards, it's unlikely a hurricane will hit, he says.

In the dense jungle on Vanua Levu, Fiji's second largest island, Radua's farm is a riot of green. Every plant has its place – from rows of delicate lettuce, to sturdy taro and cassava. For years, Radua has read the signs in nature to know when, and where, to plant his crops to ensure they thrive each season.

Yam vines are natural indicators of extreme weather, according to Fijian traditional ecological knowledge. This environmental knowledge comprises ancient traditions held and practiced by indigenous peoples. When the vines hug the ground, "they are already trying to protect themselves from the wind. It's nature," Radua says.

Many Fijians – especially those from older generations who are more likely to use traditional farming methods – believe other organisms act as natural weather forecasts, such as bananas, bees and breadfruit.

Before modern technology, environmental indicators like these were used across the world to predict natural disasters. But in the last century, data from satellites, weather radars and computers has provided increasingly precise monitoring and forecasting.

In the Pacific, communities are returning to ancient wisdom to anticipate extreme weather, to enhance modern methods. Scientific studies and Fiji's meteorological service are recording these local "early warning signs" of tropical cyclones and flooding. As climate-change-driven disasters pick up pace in the Pacific, traditional knowledge might buy communities more time to prepare.

A total package

In 2024, the Fijian Meteorological Service announced it would integrate traditional environmental knowledge into its scientific forecasting – describing the pair as "a total package".

Fiji follows in the footsteps of Vanuatu, Tonga, Samoa, Niue and the Solomon Islands – Pacific nations participating in an ongoing project to integrate traditional knowledge in their early-warning systems.

Siosinamele Lui, the climate traditional knowledge officer at Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP), an intergovernmental body, says natural indicators are key to helping remote communities can prepare for weather events.

"In most parts of the world, traditional knowledge and national services are not mentioned in the same sentence," says Lui. "But in the Pacific, it's now becoming the go to. It's normal practice."

Since 2016, the SPREP project has been researching natural indicators, with Pacific islanders reporting early warning signs directly to the Pacific Meteorological Desk via calls, messages, social media or local climate centres.

Vanuatu is "leading the way" with an app named ClimateWatch, says Lui. The app has a database of crowd-sourced natural indicators – for example, green turtles nesting further inland suggests a cyclone may be approaching.

However, using traditional knowledge to preempt weather events is not an instant process, says Lui.

"You cannot integrate a data set that's only five years old with a data set that's 100 years old. At the moment, most of our monitoring data is not old enough for us to build it into the climate forecast," she adds. Therefore, the government is studying the correlation of traditional indicators with weather events, before building this into their climate forecasting model.

However Lui says that promoting traditional weather knowledge can help people in secluded areas.

"To put it in context, you're looking at the biggest ocean in the world, and you have thousands of islands that are widespread. You don't have monitoring equipment on every island," says Lui. This technology is expensive and sparsely located, leading to gaps in meteorological data, she adds.

Not everyone will be able to get critical warning information on time, if at all. "That's where this programme comes in," says Lui. "Whether it's from the Meteorological Service or whether it's traditional warning systems. The goal is for people to respond and be prepared," she says.

Listening to the land

For Fijian people, traditional knowledge such as how the seasons change isn't "black and white", Radua says. "We don't write things down – they are translated from one generation to the next through stories, songs, dances and idioms," he says.

Radua, who is a climate resilience expert on Vanua Levu, began compiling this cultural wisdom into a seasonal calendar available for farmers on the island. Many farms, both commercial and family-run, in Fiji have converted to modern ways of farming – for example monoculture, planting and cultivating a singular crop. Radua teaches subsistence farmers how to return to traditional agricultural methods, such as planting multiple crops at different times of the year.

Not only is this better for nature, but it means farmers can listen to the land for early warning signs, says Radua. "The trees will tell them, when something flowers, it tells them," he says, explaining how farmers keep an eye on shifts beyond normal seasonal patterns. "That's preparedness and resilience," he adds.

For Pacific communities, the need to buffer against extreme weather is more urgent than ever. Radua recalls Cyclone Winston, which caused widespread damage, costing Fiji's agricultural sector over $2m (£1.5m). "Most of us lost all of our crops," he says.

According to a 2025 report that assessed the country's climate risk – ranking Fiji 103 out of 190 countries – tropical cyclones are predicted to increase in severity in Fiji. Pacific Island countries need around $1bn (£730m) for climate adaptation investments, according to the International Monetary Fund.

Although several ideas are being considered to increase the country's climate resilience – from seawalls to climate migration – integrating ancient wisdom is being proposed as a low-cost part of the solution in Fiji.

"Almost everything about mitigating climate change is pointing back to traditional knowledge," says Radua.

Buying time

Some Fijian communities reported that traditional signs were the first and most reliable way of being alerted that Cyclone Winston was approaching.

In a coastal village in the Province of Tailevu, on the southeastern fringe of Vitu Levu, Fiji's main island, villagers noticed nature reacting in uncharacteristic ways up to four months before the cyclone.

In a 2025 report, published by independent think tank the International Institute for Sustainable Development, 10 villagers in Tailevu recalled witnessing a spectrum of signs, that have been previously seen happening prior to cyclones.

Around three to four months prior to the cyclone, hornets nested close to the ground, five or more breadfruit grew on one stalk and the central shoots of plantain plants curled instead of growing straight. One month before the cyclone, fishers noticed the sea felt hotter, while small fish were found dead on the shorelines. One week before the cyclone, seabirds flew towards land, swooping lower than usual. (Read more about how seabirds predict tropical cyclones.)

The report suggests that tracking natural indicators gives communities more time to prepare prior to a disaster. With greater warning, villagers could stock up on food and fresh water, reinforce their houses and move farm animals to sheltered spaces.

"Faced with escalating climate risks and climate impacts, mounting costs and overstretched budgets, local and national governments are looking for ways to address the climate crisis in a cost-effective way," says Alec Crawford, the director of nature for resilience at the International Institute for Sustainable Development.

But nature-based solutions grounded in traditional ecological knowledge goes beyond their cost effectiveness. "They are the most well-suited adaptation actions to implement, because local communities are the ones who know best how to adapt to their changing environment," adds Crawford.

Coping mechanisms

Joeli Veityaki, a climate scientist from the University of the South Pacific, says traditional indicators were developed centuries ago as important "coping mechanisms". "There are examples that our technology is just as good as tech in other parts of the world that are so dominant," he says.

Patrick Nunn, a professor of geography from the University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia, says we have hardly "scratched the surface" of traditional ecological knowledge.

"In places like Fiji, all of its traditional knowledge is empirical based – people see something and they infer an association," he says. Nunn gives the example of when black birds fly over the land, and people deduce that a cyclone is on its way.

"This knowledge has already been validated simply by the fact that they've been shown to work over long periods of time. If the sighting of black birds over the land is not a reliable indicator of an approaching tropical cyclone, then people wouldn't have retained that knowledge for so long," he adds.

Nunn refers to oral stories from the Pacific that describe ant behaviour, which aligns with scientific observations. For example, leaf-cutter ants appear to detect subtle environmental changes that signal impending rain, prompting adaptive responses. While this does not constitute scientific proof that ants can predict tropical cyclones days in advance, it does suggest that their behaviour may be predictive in ways consistent with Pacific traditional ecological knowledge.

The idea that Pacific Islands are inherently "vulnerable" or "lack resilience" is misguided, says Nunn. "People arrived in the Western Pacific more than 3,000 years ago, and they've been there ever since. They didn't survive by luck – they survived by design."

This doesn't mean the region is without challenges, or that climate change isn't reshaping traditional ways of life. Between 1999 and 2018, Fiji ranked as the 13th country most affected by extreme weather events.

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"But there is a formidable body of traditional local knowledge in every Pacific Island community that is able to assist in developing strategies for coping with future climate change," says Nunn.

Back on his farm in Vanua Levu, Radua echoes a similar sentiment. "Knowledge evolves with time, but it's not just about traditional knowledge," he says. "It's about living in harmony with nature."

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There's something special about Kangeroo Island's koalas

Ana Norman Bermudez — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 10:00:00 +0000

Inside the island colony being tapped to help save Australia's koalas from deadly chlamydia.

Brandishing long plastic poles, a small team of researchers are trying to coax a female koala down from the gum tree she's comfortably perched on.

At first, she seems unfazed. Then everything happens quickly. She clambers down the trunk, leaps onto the grass, and lets out a deep growl before rolling onto her back, claws raised in defence. In a series of well-practiced steps, the experts carefully lift her into a crate. Once sedated, she is laid on a towel for a routine health check.

"I think she has chlamydia," says Karen Burke Da Silva, a conservation biologist at Flinders University in South Australia. Chlamydia has become a major epidemic among koalas, affecting up to 88% of individuals in some mainland populations. Caused by the bacterium Chlamydia pecorum, it can lead to blindness, infertility, pneumonia and – unlike chlamydia in humans, which is rarely fatal – often death.

Chlamydia has swept through the mainland, and this captured koala is one of about 40 inside South Australia's Belair National Park, near Adelaide, collared by scientists studying their health and genetics.

Yet on a nearby island, the disease has never been recorded. Kangaroo Island is thought to host the world's largest chlamydia-free koala population, offering something of a living insurance policy for the species. Still, these koalas are under a pressure of their own: more than a century of isolation has left them deeply inbred and genetically fragile.

This is what brings Burke Da Silva and her colleague Julian Beaman to study koalas in the region. They hope that by first improving the genetic diversity of Kangaroo Island's koalas, then introducing them to other low-chlamydia areas of Australia, they can help tackle the current plight facing the species.

Death by a thousand cuts

Native to eastern and southeastern Australia, koalas are listed as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Though still numerous overall, with a population of between 398,000 and 569,000 according to official estimates, they have been declining steadily for decades and now mostly survive in small, fragmented populations. This has lowered their adaptability to the effects of climate change, habitat loss and disease.

"In each of those pockets, you get inbreeding and random population fluctuations that raise the risk each one will go extinct," says Beaman. "If we're not careful, it will be death by a thousand cuts."

Kangaroo Island is separated from Australia's southern coast by just 13km (eight miles) and is the country's third largest island and a biodiversity hotspot. A short ferry ride from the mainland, the island's rugged coastline makes way inland for a patchwork of sheep-dotted grassland and dense native bush.

The koala population living here is entirely descended from a small group of around 20 individuals introduced from the mainland in the 1920s, at a time when conservationists feared that the fur trade would wipe out the species. By 2019, the population had exploded to 50,000, so many that they were often described as a pest. "People talk about them negatively," says Beaman, as we walk through a native eucalyptus forest on the island. "But it was actually a highly successful introduction."

As chlamydia runs rampant through mainland populations, the island's isolation has shielded its koalas from infection. Natasha Speight, a koala researcher from the University of Adelaide and co-author of a 2019 study which found the Kangaroo Island population remains free of chlamydia, says this makes it "the largest population in Australia with this status".

While chlamydia may have existed in Australia before Europeans arrived in the late 18th Century, research suggests that Westerners' livestock introduced new strains. Combined with habitat loss and shrinking genetic diversity, this has fuelled an epidemic that today threatens the species' survival.

Chlamydia can be cured with antibiotics, but treatment is far from straightforward – it requires koalas to be captured, can fatally affect their ability to digest eucalyptus leaves, and provides no protection against reinfection. A vaccine approved in 2025 offers genuine hope, cutting mortality in wild populations by 65% – but vaccinating wild populations at scale remains a formidable challenge.

Researchers including Speight, though, think that protecting Kangaroo Island's koalas and using them to help repopulate the mainland could, alongside the new vaccine, ultimately ensure the survival of the species.

Black Summer aftermath

Living on an island has not shielded these koalas from other threats. Kangaroo Island's otherwise green forests are punctuated by the charcoal-black stems of Xanthorrhoea grass trees – neither grasses nor trees but succulents that develop trunk-like protective coatings in response to fire. They are visible reminders of Australia's 2019-20 Black Summer bushfires, which devastated the island and killed around 80% of its koalas, reducing the population to 10,000.

Flinders Chase National Park, a 32,800-hectare (81,000-acre) wildlife haven on the western edge of the island, was especially hard hit.

Soon after the fires, Burke Da Silva and Beaman began to study Kangaroo Island's changing koala ecology. As the park's forests turned to ash, surviving koalas fled into nearby blue gum (Eucalyptus globulus) plantations in search of food, recalls Burke Da Silva.

But in 2021, Kiland, a logging company that owns over 18,000 hectares (44,000 acres) on the island, began clearing its blue gum trees and converting the land to agriculture.

"Suddenly, they started clearing the plantations where our tracked koalas lived," says Burke Da Silva. Many died from injury or starvation. "It was horrific."

In 2024, with support from environmental philanthropist Alan Noble, who donated funds in memory of his late wife, Beaman and Burke Da Silva bought a 530-hectare (1,300-acre) tract of plantation land bordering the Flinders Chase National Park, before it could be cleared by Kiland. Together with Noble, they co-founded The Koala Sanctuary, securing the habitat of roughly 1,000 koalas – around 10% of the island's remaining population.

A Kiland spokesperson told the BBC that its contractors operate under a South Australian government-approved plan which aims to minimise impacts on koalas. The company remains supportive of The Koala Sanctuary's conservation work, they added.

The sanctuary will open to tourists in spring 2026, providing vital funding for its research and conservation work, says Burke Da Silva.

It's also here that researchers are using a koala conservation approach never before attempted at this scale.

A genetic bottleneck

At Flinders University's biology lab in Adelaide, molecular biologist Katie Gates opens a small white box from a deep freezer. Vapour spills from the test tubes inside. "These are tissue samples from Kangaroo Island's koalas," she explains. The scientists have sequenced DNA from these samples – tiny pieces of skin collected from the koalas' ears – to measure the population's genetic variation.

The results confirm what the team had already suspected: Kangaroo Island's koalas show very low genetic diversity, "We've found males with one testicle, or none," says Beaman. "And we've seen spinal deformities."

This makes Kangaroo Island's koalas highly vulnerable to a phenomenon geneticists call the "extinction vortex", Beaman says. In small, isolated populations, the random loss of genetic variation accelerates, while at the same time inbreeding brings harmful mutations to the surface. As numbers fall, random demographic swings become more significant, increasing the risk of sudden decline.

"All the data we have shows this population is highly inbred," says Carolyn Hogg, chair of the Australasian Wildlife Genomics Group at Sydney University. It means, she says, that genetic rescue is critically important for the koalas on Kangaroo Island.

Genetic rescue involves introducing unrelated, genetically healthy individuals to reduce inbreeding and is increasingly recommended as a conservation strategy. But it has typically been reserved for very small populations on the brink of extinction. While koala translocations are relatively common in Australia, they have historically been driven by population management and habitat loss rather than genetic considerations.

Burke Da Silva and Beaman plan to restore the genetic health of Kangaroo Island's koala population. "It's the first time [genetic rescue] will have been done for koalas at this scale," says Hogg. If successful, the project would be a critical step to establishing the only large koala population that is both genetically healthy and chlamydia-free in Australia.

Diversifying genes

The first step will be to bring genetically diverse, chlamydia-free male koalas from the mainland to breed with local females in the sanctuary. Rather than managing breeding in captivity, which would be impractical at this scale, the team plan to fence off patches of forest where animals can interact naturally. Gates programmed to respond to radio collars will eventually allow only the genetically rescued animals to enter Flinders Chase National Park.

"The aim would be to get as many first-generation individuals out in the new population as possible without there being many inbred animals in the area of release, which is why post-fire is a good time to do the genetic rescue," says Burke Da Silva.

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Genetic rescue attempts can backfire if poorly planned, for example by undermining the genetic integrity of either population. Recent studies suggest those risks have been overstated, but Beaman and Burke Da Silva are taking precautions.

For the first translocation, planned for the second half of 2026, the team has identified a wild koala colony near the border between South Australia and Victoria with particularly high genetic diversity. To test whether they are a genetically diverse match, males from this colony have been paired with Kangaroo Island females at Cleland Wildlife Park, near Adelaide. The DNA of their joeys is currently being sequenced.

The researchers are also building a computer simulation to test how the characteristics of the koala groups chosen to breed together might shape outcomes."You can look at how big the population target and source are, sex ratios, age structure, and workshop those different scenarios to see what matters most," says Beaman.

If diversity remains too low, a second cohort from a different mainland population will follow. "We'll need to analyse the genetics after the first round and use the models to decide whether another introduction is needed," says Burke Da Silva.

Once the required diversity is achieved, the plan is to introduce these genetically healthy, chlamydia-free koalas to the mainland in areas where chlamydia rates remain low. (Exposing any of the koalas involved to infection could undo the conservation gains entirely.) The government of New South Wales, where koalas are declining rapidly, has already expressed interest in using these koalas for future reintroductions, according to Burke Da Silva.

A conservation long-game

A cool wind moves through the trees at The Koala Sanctuary as Burke Da Silva and Beaman walk through a patchwork of former plantations and pockets of native forest. Over the coming years, they plan to gradually restore the land to indigenous vegetation. They stop beneath a native brown stringybark tree, where a female munches on leaves.

"She has a joey," says Beaman, pointing to the tiny ears peeking out from her back.

Restoring the genetic health of Kangaroo Island's koalas will take years. But by 2027, Burke Da Silva and Beaman hope to have begun repopulating both Flinders Chase National Park and parts of mainland Australia with disease-free and, by then, genetically resilient koalas from the island.

The project is "more than achievable with careful planning", despite the unprecedented size of the population they hope to rescue, says Hogg. Preserving Kangaroo Island's reservoir of chlamydia-free koalas will also complement broader national efforts, she says, including habitat protection, planting of genetically diverse trees for the koalas' food, a robust chlamydia vaccine, and genetic rescue of other populations with low diversity.

If it succeeds, the project could serve as a model for managing other genetically fragile wildlife populations before they reach crisis point. Despite numbering in the hundreds of thousands, Australia's koalas are "fragmented, isolated and genetically vulnerable", notes Beaman. "What we're doing here is testing how to manage that before it's too late."

Burke Da Silva and Beaman also want the sanctuary to model a wider ethic of coexistence. They are working with the Ngarrindjeri community and other Aboriginal groups for whom Kangaroo Island holds deep cultural significance, sharing access to the land for ceremonies.

For Burke Da Silva, that idea sits comfortably alongside the sanctuary's scientific mission. "Ultimately, it's not just on us to heal nature," she says. "We need to rediscover what it means for us to be healed by nature as well."

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'It's the rainforest of the sea': These 1960s photos reveal Jamaica's lost underwater paradise

Cagney Roberts — Sat, 09 May 2026 09:00:53 +0000

A trove of snapshots from a 1960s diving expedition reveals stunning glimpses of Jamaica's vibrant ecosystems of the past. This is transforming our vision of what coral reefs can be.

In 1966, marine scientist Eileen Graham dived into the waters along the northern coast of Jamaica to study the lush, vibrant coral reefs. Over the course of two years and long before digital cameras, she gathered a collection of over 1,000 images from Discovery Bay, Runaway Bay and Rio Bueno that capture reefs dense with coral, bright with sea fans and sponges, and alive with shoals of snappers and grouper fish.

Today, that archive of stunning photos has taken on a new significance, scientists say: after decades of declining Jamaican coral reefs, it is reminding the world what a healthy habitat looks like. Graham's images, once a snapshot of an underwater world bursting with life, have become evidence of change and loss. But the photos can also help us know what to aim for, when trying to protect and restore the reefs.

"There's a huge diversity of coral in Eileen's photos. You really see how lush these ecosystems were back then. It really feels like the rainforest of the sea," says Jelani Williams, a Jamaican marine scientist at the University of Southern California.

Once considered one of the most biodiverse regions in Jamaica, the island's reefs have suffered a series of disasters. They were devastated by Hurricane Allen in 1980, and also battered by invasive species, pollution, tourism and warmer waters due to climate change. Ever more powerful storms continue to wreak havoc on corals. And there has been a decline in mangrove forests in the Caribbean, which protect and nurture reefs.

Through old photos like Graham's, "we can learn what a thriving reef looked like before it began to be destroyed," William says.

In 2019, Ken Johnson, a principal researcher at the Natural History Museum in London, came across Graham's photos, which were donated by scientists from the Discovery Bay Marine Lab in Jamaica. Johnson was astounded by their beauty, but noticed how drastically the marine life had changed, even since his own diving days in the Caribbean back in the 1980s.

"The sea floor at Discovery Bay used to be covered in live corals at around 80-90%. Nowadays the coral cover is much lower at around 10-20%," he says.

To show the noticeable decline and support conservation efforts, Johnson began amassing a trove of photos from other diving scientists in other locations who took pictures in the pre-digital age. These old photos may help modern generations avoid what's known as the "shifting baseline" syndrome, according to Johnson: as a habitat becomes depleted, we may shift our idea of what this habitat is supposed to look like, and then no longer even realise what has been lost. Once we see the devastated habitat as a new normal, we may then feel less urgency to try and restore it.

Photos like Graham's can however fight that normalisation, Johnson says, by showing us the actual "baseline": the original, lush state of the habitat.

For example, Graham's 1960s images show an abundance of branching and wide-plate coral covering most of the sea floor, as well as shoals of snappers, groupers and parrotfish weaving through the reef. This abundance is no longer visible today.

Saving Jamaica's reefs - and beaches

The impact of the declining reefs can be seen on land, too. "When you're on vacation and enjoying the gorgeous white sands that Jamaica is known for – many are not aware that our white sand comes from coral reefs from many decades ago," says Camilo Trench, a marine biologist at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica. Research suggests that this white sand is under threat and the decline of the reefs contributes to beach erosion in the Caribbean, while healthy reefs can protect beaches.

The range of threats to the reefs is complex and interlinked, and includes a sea-urchin die-off in the 1980s. Diadema antillarum, a black, long-spined sea urchin, protects the coral reefs by grazing on and thereby controlling the growth of algae. In 1983, an unknown pathogen, possibly introduced by ballast water from ships, caused a mass sea-urchin die-off, and a decline in the reefs. That threat remains: in 2022, there was another sea urchin die-off.

Due to rising mass tourism on the island, fish such as snappers and groupers that also graze on algae are being caught in larger quantities as food for tourists, studies suggest. The algae then overgrow and compete with the corals for space and sunlight, ultimately smothering them.

Last year, another disaster struck: Hurricane Melissa, a Category 5 hurricane, brought catastrophic damage to Jamaica with intense flooding and widespread devastation to people's homes. 185-mph (295km/h) winds engulfed the shores of North and Western Jamaica, tearing roofs off homes and shattering fruit trees. It was the most powerful storm ever to hit the island. Hurricanes have been found to contribute to the decline in coral reefs in the Caribbean as they churn up the sea and break off the corals.

"I had no idea what a Category 5 hurricane looked like or what kind of devastation it would have. Jamaicans are still recovering from the effects of Hurricane Melissa, including the emotional trauma," says Williams.

The full impact of the disaster on the island's people, and its ecosystems, may only become clear with time.

Trench is on a mission to protect Jamaica's reefs through initiatives such as the Jamaica Mangroves Plus Project, which aims to preserve and restore mangrove habitats across the island. Many of the marine species that can be seen in Graham's photos would have spent their early life stages in mangrove nurseries, which play a crucial role in supporting healthy reefs. Mangroves are also important carbon sinks, storing more carbon per hectare than forests on land.

"Mangroves give me the most hope. They are tough and climate resilient," says Trench.

Williams suggests that protecting Jamaica's reefs also means understanding and preserving the microbes that help keep corals healthy. He warns that climate breakdown has created a "new normal" across Jamaica and the Caribbean, saying real resilience will require more holistic and innovative approaches than those used in the past. "You can't really have conservation efforts without understanding what the baseline microbial communities are, and also trying to preserve those things," says Williams.

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Trench and Williams both argue that protecting Jamaica's reefs will require stronger government action, from tougher environmental laws to rethinking shipping routes, hotel development and research funding. Without more drastic intervention, Trench warns that rising heat and pollution will drive further species loss, though he says a climate‑resilient future is still hopeful. "It's not impossible for Jamaica to make a turnaround to build climate resilience. It's just going to take some very hard decisions," he says.

Looking back at Graham's images from the 1960s offers a rare glimpse into a different Jamaica, one rich with marine habitat complexity and beautiful reefs, before threats from climate crisis to overtourism. Scientists are predicting that 80%-90% of the world's coral reef will die off by 2050, making archives such as Graham's, which reveal lost ecosystems, more important than ever, says Johnson.

But he stresses that "we can't only keep referring to changes that happened 50 years ago".

"We need to respond to ongoing ecological changes. Some coral reefs are responding differently to climate change and perhaps some are more resilient," he says.

"What we're now seeing today in Jamaica and the Caribbean is not normal," he adds. "More collections like Eileen's need to be documented and curated before they're all lost."

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Cherry Kearton: The eccentric influence on a young Sir David Attenborough

Stephen Dowling — Fri, 08 May 2026 10:00:00 +0000

As a child, Sir David Attenborough was transfixed by the work of Cherry Kearton, a photographer and filmmaker who almost single-handedly changed the way we view the natural world.

In the late 19th Century, photography was a laborious process suited more to indoor portraits than the great outdoors.

The highest-quality cameras shot on glass plates and were cumbersome constructions made of hardwood and brass. The plates needed plenty of time to expose an image – hence the studied gazes of subjects in Victorian studios, standing stiffly in front of the camera's lens.

It was only towards the turn of the century that cameras became small enough to be truly portable. In a leafy corner of Surrey in England, two brothers out on a walk used one to take pictures of a bird's nest. It turned out to be the first-ever photo of a bird's nest with eggs in it.

In doing so, one of them – Cherry Kearton, the younger – not only became probably the world's first professional wildlife photographer, but helped inspire a young boy who would later become the most famous naturalist of the television age – Sir David Attenborough.

"Kearton's films captured my childish imagination," Sir David said ahead of the radio series Attenborough's Life Stories in 2009. "It made me dream of travelling to far-off places to film wild animals."

In 2012, Sir David even travelled to Bradford to the National Science and Media Museum to view the cinema camera Kearton designed himself and which he used to shoot his 1935 documentary The Big Game of Life.

British bird life

Richard and Cherry Kearton grew up on a Yorkshire farm in the late 1800s. John Bevis, who wrote a biography of the brothers called The Keartons: Inventing Nature Photography, says they "were from a very working-class family who were mostly miners; Richard was the elder brother by about nine years".

Richard had been invited to a job in publishing in London, and eventually his younger brother Cherry joined him.

"They were out together with friends in Elstree, about 1892, and Cherry was always very interested in the latest innovations, and cheap cameras, pocket cameras, were just becoming available, and he'd brought along a camera. Richard was more knowledgeable about natural history, and he found a bird's nest and he said, 'Cherry, have a go at taking a photo of this.'

"They had an idea on the spot that they would make a book, illustrated entirely with photographs, of birds and birds' nests. There hadn't been a book like that up 'til that time. That meant travelling all across the country, because a lot of birds have very site-specific nesting locations."

Written by Richard and illustrated using Cherry's pioneering photographs in 1898, the book British Birds' Nests: How, Where and When to Find and Identify Them was the first nature book to be entirely illustrated with photographs. More books followed, and the pair would publish together for more than a decade. "Cherry was a very good photographer; compared to the natural history photographers of the time, his composition was very nicely framed, he had an artistic eye," says Bevis.

He adds that having catalogued the birds' nests and eggs of the British Isles over thousands of photographs, "[Cherry's] next thing was to get photos of birds themselves, and they needed to make some kind of [animal] hide".

"They came up with this series of wonderful realistic hides, the most famous of which was the Hollow Ox, which was a cow's hide over a wooden frame with just enough room for a photographer inside, standing in there bent double, with the camera sticking out of a hole in the neck. It was very good, it was very effective, but it was an absolute pain to operate.

"There was a stuffed sheep, which was too small for a photographer, so they set it up in front of a likely perching spot and pointed a camera out of a hole in the neck and operated it with a pneumatic tube."

The Keartons used ladders supported with ropes to get shots of nests on high branches; Cherry learnt to abseil so he could snap seabird nests built in the nooks of cliffs. Little seemed too difficult or dangerous.

The Keartons' designs were fiendishly inventive, and Richard Kearton would become known as the "Machiavelli of bird photography".

Cherry's fascination with technology went far beyond photography; the turn of the century also brought ways of capturing sound, such as recording onto wax cylinders. Cherry, got his hands on one. "He made the first ever recording of a bird in the wild… it wasn't a great recording, but it was the first one in the wild," says Bevis.

The Keartons also embraced the moving image, setting up a studio where they created the first rudimentary wildlife documentaries. In 1908, Cherry took the first moving images of London from the air, having hired an airship which took off from Wandsworth Gasworks south of the River Thames. Six years later, while in Belgium, he would take the first moving images of the war that would devastate Europe and kill more than 17 million people.

African wildlife

His first successful film came after former US president Theodore Roosevelt, an enthusiastic hunter, requested a meeting in Africa. "Roosevelt was trying to get away from being in public eye for so many years," says Bevis. Cherry was only interested in shooting with a camera, and took a dim view of Roosevelt's hunting. He said that helping "accomplish the extinction of anything beautiful and interesting is a crime against future generations".

Cherry and Roosevelt were both drawn to Africa's wildlife but for very different reasons, says Austin Farahar, the head of photographica at Chiswick Auctions in the UK, who sold some of the Kearton's archive and cameras in early 2026.

"They had a certain level of admiration, but I don't think they saw eye to eye, because Roosevelt was going through Africa, shooting everything, and just having a great laugh," says Farahar. "Obviously Kearton was slightly less of the opinion that that was how to do it." Bevis adds that Roosevelt only met up with Kearton "a bit reluctantly", but was persuaded that the British wildlife photographer could accompany him and shoot footage.

Kearton made a successful film of Roosevelt's safari across eastern Africa; it was released with much fanfare in 1910 as Roosevelt in Africa. Given their completely opposing views on wildlife, it was an odd – if lucrative – collaboration.

Kearton then spent much of the First World War as part of an allied unit in East Africa, formed of "mavericks" who were at home in the African bush, says Bevis.

"In the early 1920s he got married to a South African opera singer [Ada Forrest]… I think from that time forward he started to have a more comfortable life – the safaris became a little more sedate," he adds.

Kearton, however, was by no means slowing down. Cherry and Ada travelled to an island off the coast of South Africa, and lived as the only human inhabitants in a warden's shack among what Kearton described as "five million" penguins. They made a film – called Dassan: An Adventure in Search of Laughter, Featuring Nature's Greatest Little Comedians – which was released in 1930. (The island's name is actually spelled "Dassen".)

"They spent six months filming and photographing and writing about these penguins," says Bevis. "And that was the film that a young David Attenborough saw in 1933. When Kearton wasn't filming and photographing, he was doing lectures around the country, and Sir David Attenborough would have gone to one of those and seen that film."

There is, in effect, only one degree of separation between a boy fascinated with the wildlife he saw on a Yorkshire farm in the 1880s, and the natural history documentaries we enjoy watching today: Bevis believes the brothers would have greatly appreciated the effect their films had. "The Keartons were very interested in the educational aspect, and they were very interested in spreading the word."

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A legacy camera

Cherry was a keen inventor, and had been frustrated at how cumbersome many of the cameras he had to take with him were. In the early 1900s he fashioned a more portable camera using a rifle stock with a plate camera attached – but after the war refined it into a much smaller device, one that could use lighter roll film and which would automatically advance to the next frame after every shot – technology that wouldn't become mainstream for another two decades, says Farahar.

The camera was sold earlier this year as part of a large lot of items from Cherry Kearton's estate (he died in 1940, and Ada in 1966), including books, letters, prints and the various paraphernalia Kearton had used to take his pictures and films. "It becomes so rewarding to put the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle back together again," says Farahar. "And that's what it was like with this camera… there's no picture of him with it. It's very, kind of naïve, and very rough… he literally battened it together in his shed. But it works."

Farahar couldn't wait to get his hands on the camera, which is now more than 100 years old. There was no manual – it was a one-off Kearton had built using his own intuition.

Farahar says he showed the camera to an old schoolfriend – wildlife cameraman Hector Skevington-Postles, who has worked on some of Sir David's own documentaries, such as Planet Earth and Asia.

"He was at my house, and he said, 'Got anything interesting at the moment?' And I literally thought, 'This rifle camera!' I was like, 'What you make of that?' And he said: 'Are you joking, this is incredible!'"

Before the sale took place in February, Farahar was able to spend more time with the device. Playing around with it before the sale, he was able to get its transport mechanism whirred into life – proving Kearton's remarkable talent. "I was trying to get to grips with it for a long, long time," he says. "I was like, 'How does this thing work? What are the secrets of this camera?' And then I eventually figured out how it cocks and whines. Everyone in the office was going mad because I was making so much noise."

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'It was one of the key moments of my life': The thrilling fossil discoveries that sparked Attenborough's love for nature

Richard Fisher — Sun, 03 May 2026 10:00:00 +0000

Fossils fascinated Sir David Attenborough throughout his childhood. The BBC retraces the steps of Sir David's formative experiences roaming the British countryside.

For Sir David Attenborough, it was a moment that would shape his childhood – and quite possibly his entire career.

It was the late 1930s, and he had cycled into the English countryside. Arriving at an exposed rock face, he began searching among fallen fragments below. He picked up a promising stone, and split it apart with his hammer.

"There, perfect in every detail, glinting as though it had just been polished, was a coiled seashell… an object of breathtaking beauty," he recalled in 2009. "And my eyes were the first to see it since its occupant died 200 million years ago."

It was a fossil ammonite – a spiral-shelled creature around the size of his palm. Due to their coiled appearance, local people once believed they were snakes, but they were actually cephalopods: a marine mollusc similar to the modern-day nautilus, which swam in ancient oceans.

"I suppose it's true to say that it was one of the key moments of my life," he said. "I have been repeating that moment, off and on, throughout my life and the thrill has still not worn off."

This ammonite was just one of many ancient creatures Sir David collected as a teenager, near his boyhood home in Leicester, England. He was an avid fossil-hunter – and would continue to find and acquire interesting specimens throughout his life. "I spent a lot of time as a boy searching for fossils in the Leicestershire countryside. Indeed, fossils still give me great pleasure," he told me in a letter in May 2025, shortly after his 99th birthday.

Ever since I was a teenager, I've also collected fossils. So, one recent spring, I decided to trace Sir David's trips from his childhood home to the local sites he visited, hoping to gain a better understanding of his life before fame. How did his boyhood fossil-hunting hobby influence the young naturalist?

Collecting treasure

Sir David spent much of his childhood in Leicester, in the English Midlands. Today, the Attenborough family home sits in the middle of the city's university, its current occupants members of the science and engineering department.

However, traces of the Attenborough family remain across the campus. Round the corner is an arts centre dedicated to his brother Lord Richard Attenborough, an actor who played many roles in his lifetime, including – aptly – the founder of Jurassic Park in the 1993 movie, who uses amber fossils to extract dinosaur DNA.

Looming over the brothers' former home is the 52m-tall (170ft) Attenborough Building – a brutalist 18-storey tower known as the "cheesegrater". Perhaps contrary to expectation given the two brothers' fame, the tower was named after Sir David's father Frederick, an academic historian and principal of the university.

In 2016, letters written by Frederick Attenborough during the 1930s and 1940s about his son were unearthed – and they hint at a boy fascinated by Leicestershire's geology, and who then wished to pursue the earth sciences as a career.

Speaking on his 90th birthday, Sir David explained that his father didn't necessarily know much about rocks and fossils himself, but "he did say, 'There are ways of finding out: you can go to the museum or there are some good books, you can read about that.' And so [he] encouraged us to find out for ourselves".

The letters also mention Sir David's collection of carefully labelled fossils, minerals and other treasures.

In his 2002 autobiography, Sir David described its contents – what he called his "museum". "Its backbone was my fossil collection gathered from Leicestershire rocks. It also contained butterflies, birds' eggs (legal at the time), abandoned birds' nests…bun pennies, champion conkers, the shed skin of a grass snake, and a fragment of Roman brickwork."

Via his father's university work, researchers and other visitors would often pass through the family home – and this gave him the opportunity to show off the collection. One day, a Nobel-winning biochemist visited with his daughter, the young archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes (nee Hopkins), and he toured her through his specimens with pride. "When she showed interest in my fossils I felt I was walking 18 inches off the ground," he recalled in an interview with Mail Online in 2014.

Afterwards, Hawkes sent him a parcel, which he gladly received. "There was a pearly nautilus, a desiccated pipe-fish, some Roman tesserae and a medieval silver coin, a few grey shards of Anglo-Saxon pottery, cowrie shells from the Pacific and pieces of coral. Each was packed separately. Each was a treasure. It was one of the most memorable days of my childhood," he wrote in his autobiography.

When he was 12 years old, he also added a piece of Baltic amber (fossilised resin) to the collection, given to him by a young girl staying with the family. During World War Two, Sir David's parents took in some of the many children fleeing Germany. "I remember one girl, Marianne, she was 12 – about the same age as I was – and came from a city on the Baltic coast where her father was a doctor," he recalled in a 2004 film called the Amber Time Machine.

"He had given one small precious thing as a sign of his thanks to whoever it was who cared for his daughter. It felt surprisingly warm and light in my hand, but what made me fall in love with amber is what I discovered inside it. I found something miraculous: there were insects preserved in astonishing detail. I burned with questions: what sort of world were they from? They must have lived a long time ago, but how long?"

Fossil firsts

Once he was old enough, Sir David explored far and wide in search of fossils to build his museum further. Aged 13, he spent three weeks alone cycling to the Lake District in North West England, staying in youth hostels. "I doubt many parents would let children do that now," he told the Mail Online in 2014.

Still, the geology close to home in Leicestershire also offered more than enough treasures to find. Many of the rocks in this central region of England are from the early Jurassic – and contain a variety of fossilised prehistoric life. Even today, palaeontologists still make significant discoveries: in 2021, a 10m-long (33ft) ichthyosaur – a "sea dragon" – was found in the Rutland reservoir, less than 50km (30 miles) to the east of Sir David's old home.

While exploring Sir David's boyhood trips, I traced one of the routes that he would have cycled in search of fossils. Travelling east out of the city from his home, the young man would have soon emerged into meadows and farmland, pedalling up and down steep country roads.

"There you could find pits where a honey-coloured limestone was quarried for smelting iron. In that there were some of the loveliest fossils imaginable," he recalled in his autobiography. "I would leave home early in the morning on my bicycle, with special home-made collecting bags strapped to the carrier over the back wheel, and sometimes would not come back until after dark with the bags loaded with specimens, each carefully wrapped in newspaper for protection."

Another frequent destination was the village of Tilton on the Hill, one of the highest places in East Leicestershire. Today, it is little-changed: with a village shop, traditional pub and a church that dates from the 12th Century. It has special significance because it lends its name to Tiltoniceras, a Jurassic-era ammonite discovered in 1913 at Tilton Railway Cutting, a few kilometres east of the village. "When I found out… I decided that I must be living in one of the world centres of palaeontological treasure," Sir David recalled in his autobiography.

Over the decades, Sir David has often mentioned this ammonite and the cutting where it was found – and he returned to film there for a 2020 Netflix documentary. As a boy he would have known that the site was particularly rich for fossils because the rockfaces were relatively fresh. A few decades earlier, in the 1870s, workers had carved into the sandstones, ironstones and clays to make way for a railway line between Market Harborough and Melton Mowbray (famous for its pies). So, while he may have had to step over rails and sleepers to reach the rock-face, he would have been rewarded with abundant ammonites, but also bivalves and brachiopods (shelled creatures like mussels or clams), gastropods (with spiral shells) and belemnites (squid-like cephalopods).

"The moments of success when that rock fell apart and revealed a shell that hadn't seen the Sun for 200 million years, and that I was the first human being to see, seemed to me then – as to be truthful it still seems to me now – to be moments of magic," he recalled in a 1989 series about palaeontology for which he returned to Leicestershire. "It's a beguiling business, for you know that even if you've not found anything so far, the very next blow of your hammer might reveal something amazing."

When I visited the cutting in April 2025, the railway had long since closed – it shut down in the 1960s – and the only sound was insects buzzing in the overgrown grass. Today, it is designated a Site of Special Scientific Interest, which means that while fossil hunters can search for specimens in fallen fragments, they are prohibited from bashing at the rock faces with their hammers. The kind of ammonites that Sir David remembered seeing can be found at the top of the outcrop, in what's called the Marlstone Rock: a mixture of limestone and sandstone that formed in a shallow, tropical sea 190 million years ago. But even more ancient shells are packed into a layer further down the rock face.

Tales of Charnia

Tilton Railway Cutting is not the only site in Leicestershire that has yielded fossil firsts over the years. Another location nearby would become even more famous, when a fossil was found that changed our understanding of life's origins. It was discovered by two schoolchildren, only 11 years after Sir David left school himself – much to his chagrin later in life. "The rocks to the north-west of the city were of no interest to me…they didn't contain any fossils. So I didn't waste my time by looking there. How misguided I was," he recalled in 2011.

One day in 1957, a schoolboy called Roger Mason cycled with two schoolfriends to climb in a quarry in Charnwood Forest, near the village of Woodhouse Eaves. (The area is now a Unesco geopark). There, they spotted something curious: a fossil with leaf-like branches that was unmistakably once alive. Mason knew that this shouldn't have been possible, because the rocks were pre-Cambrian in age, which would have made the fossil around 570-550 million years old. The geological consensus at the time was that life's origin happened later.

It would turn out that Mason and his friends weren't the first to spot it. In 1956, another schoolchild, Tina Negus, had seen the fossil, but her teachers hadn't believed her. When Mason told his father, however, he persuaded a geologist at Leicester University to take a look. He confirmed it had indeed been a living creature, and published the find in Proceedings of the Yorkshire Geological Society. It was named Charnia masoni, after Mason, and despite its appearance it was an animal, not a plant.

"It caused a geological sensation," Sir David recalled in a 2011 BBC radio programme about the fossil. Reflecting on his own childhood fossil-hunting, "I couldn't help wishing that I hadn't paid so much attention to the accepted geological wisdom of the time, and that I had been the schoolboy who found that key fossil in the Charnwood."

One can only wonder whether the attention from such a find might have changed the broadcaster's future path. Mason also, went on to study earth sciences – but unlike Sir David, would become a professional geologist.

Collecting continues

While Sir David may not have become the geologist he aspired to be in his teens, he would continue to collect fossils throughout his life, even when he was working on other projects.

In 2011, for example, he told the story of how he was once duped by a fossil-trader into buying a pair of "copulating" trilobites: a scuttling creature with multiple legs and large eyes, a bit like a giant woodlouse. In a break between filming in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, he tracked down a seller in a remote village.

"He had hundreds of them in a great pile in his back room," he recalled. "I started to try and sort through them, but… it was really quite dark and difficult to see. The owner kept producing specimens he called 'very special – very good!' Still, I couldn't make up my mind… He pulled my sleeve, 'This one,' he said. 'Very very special, very, very rare. Two! Together! Making love!!' I was astounded… Could I resist a pair of love-making trilobites? Of course not."

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However, later Sir David realised his mistake. "Of course, they were two separate specimens. One that was partly curled had been stuck to the underside of the other with some rather unconvincing plaster. It was, I suppose, a lesson. But I still have the pair of them. They are tucked away in my cellar so I am not continually reminded of my gullibility. But whether they are copulating or not, no one could reject creatures with eyes like theirs."

Trace fossils

Back at Sir David's childhood home on the Leicester University campus, his museum of ammonites, rocks and other ephemera is no longer inside. However, on the side of the building you can see a "trace" fossil of a different kind, hinting at the people who once lived in the home.

Behind a clear plastic panel, you can make out the faint scrawls of the Attenboroughs on the brick. At some point in the 1930s, they each signed their names, leaving behind the trace of the family who once lived there – and the boy whose fascination with fossils would shape a life exploring the natural world. Sir David's career would take him all over the globe, bringing nature's far-flung wonders closer to me and you, but it all began here, with a bicycle, a few local rock faces, and a teenager's prized collection of ancient creatures.

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How to make Google put preferred sources up top when you search

BBC Staff — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 17:30:00 +0000

A new feature lets you choose which publishers – including the BBC – appear at the top of your search results. Here's how to use it.

Whether seeking the day's headlines or a healthy recipe, turning to Google search inevitably yields almost too much information – and with the recent rollout of AI summaries, trusted sources can sometimes seem lost down the page. With their new Preferred Sources tool, Google has put some control back in users' hands.

You can now personalise your Google settings to select the BBC and any other publication or news source you'd most want to see when you visit Google websites and apps. These are your Preferred Sources. Find out more, below.

What is 'Preferred Sources'?

Preferred Sources are websites you select in your Google settings that Google will prioritise when showing news and content. When you add a site as a Preferred Source, Google is more likely to show you articles, videos and other updates from that site.

Where will my Preferred Sources appear?

Preferred Sources may appear in the Google Top Stories results on Google search. The most likely place you'll see your Preferred Sources will be in the "from your sources" section nested within Top Stories results, both in the desktop and mobile versions of Google search.

What are the benefits of personalising my Preferred Sources?

When you personalise your Preferred Sources settings, you're making Google work smarter for you. Choosing the BBC as a Preferred Source means that you see news from your trusted source more frequently.

How do I add the BBC as a Google Preferred Source?

The fastest way to add the BBC as a Preferred Source is to use this direct link and tick the box next to BBC.com. (If you're not logged in or you don't have a Google account, the link will first ask you to sign in or create an account before bringing you to the selection screen.)

You can also set your Preferred Sources while searching: After you search for something on Google, you'll see "Top Stories" next to a starred card icon. Click that icon to add BBC.com as a Preferred Source, then reload the search to see new BBC results. This preference will now be applied to all future Google searches.

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