Nicola Chester

Nature Writer and Activist

otters

  • Nature Notes

    Lunch with an Otter. A text came from my son at college, whilst I was at work. ‘You’ll never guess what I’m having lunch with!’ There followed the most exquisite video clip, taken on his phone. An otter, hunting the shallow stream at one of the entrances to Andover College, rolling, roiling and revelling in […]

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  • Nature Notes

    Shifting mists. Each day, tentatively and in small increments, there is a little more light. And signs, too, of the season to come before we expect them: snowdrops and bluebell shoots, blackbird notes, the first drumming woodpecker and the gold lamb’s tails of lengthening hazel catkins; sherberty yellow daubs against the cold, wet, teabag-browns of […]

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  • Nature Notes

    Mercurial, argent: winter chalkstream. Below the high chalk of the North Wessex Downs, rainwater that has percolated through the porous substrate, flows at a near-constant 10C into benign, gin-clear chalkstreams. For otters in winter, this is a good thing. And there is potentially a better chance of spotting these elusive, mercurial creatures now: with their […]

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  • Nature Notes

    Wild Writing On Freeman’s Marsh, for Hungerford Literary Festival, 14 children have come seeking literary inspiration from nature. We begin by tuning in our senses, discussing the smell of dogs’ paws and listening for the thin, needling call of redwings arriving from the frozen north. And then we are out with our new notebooks, collapsing […]

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