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The sun stood high over the vast, open sweep of the savannah. From behind a clump of grass, its black spots merging with the shifting shadows cast by leaves on the dry ground, a cheetah scanned the horizon in search of prey. With the languid ease of a drowsy cat, the great predator stretched its forelegs and rolled its shoulder blades in a gesture uncannily close to a human stretch. At last, it spotted a group of gazelles, slowly edging closer to its concealed position as they grazed on grass yellowed by the dry season. The cheetah remained motionless, its gaze fixed on the prospect of a meal. It knew the wind and its camouflage were on its side, and so it would let the gazelles draw closer before making its move. It needed every advantage it could get if the hunt was to succeed.

When it judged the distance right, the cheetah set in motion another step in the eternal dance between predator and prey. In a single fluid movement, it fixed its gaze on one of the gazelles, lifted its head, and launched into its lethal sprint. The gazelles reacted almost instantly, as if instinct had warned them of the threat before it had even revealed itself. Thus began another episode in what is perhaps the most vertiginous of all struggles for life on the surface of the planet. The cheetah accelerated, and accelerated again, ever faster, like an arrow blurred by its own speed. Its strides devoured ground, covering metre after metre, and such was the force behind them that, for brief moments, its hind legs seemed to overtake its forelegs. The gazelle was all delicacy and precision where the cheetah was raw power and might, relying on bounding leaps to reach its greatest speed. It sprang as though its feet had turned to springs, with an almost ethereal ease that seemed to make light of the noble force of gravity that governs all things in the universe.

The cheetah knew its window of opportunity would be brief. Its muscular power allowed it to outmatch the gazelle over short distances, but its endurance was no match for the gazelle’s ability to sustain its effort over longer runs. With each change of direction, the cheetah seemed to revel in its perfect command of speed. It carved through turns at impossible angles, as if the laws of physics did not quite apply to it. At last, the gazelle seemed within reach. The cheetah tightened its muscles for the final effort, feeling life surge fiercely through its limbs. It felt the pure joy of a healthy body pushed to the height of its abilities. Just as the cheetah was about to launch its final leap and close the distance, the ominous crack of a rifle shot thundered across the African plain.

Cowardly and abrupt, death felled the great feline where it stood; yet its body, unable to defy inertia, carried the motion onward over the long metres required to bring a body travelling at over a hundred kilometres per hour to a halt. It fell and tumbled across the ground in an obscene cloud of brown dust, while flecks of its living blood struck and smeared against the dry, hardened earth. The gazelle, uncertain of what had happened, seized the fortunate turn of events to escape a death that, moments before, had seemed certain.

Although life was quickly draining from the wound along its flank, the cheetah found one last reserve of strength to open its eyes and see him. It wanted to know what kind of force of nature could have brought it down — this sublime creation that gilded the very pinnacle of what evolution had managed to produce on this teeming planet. What it saw surprised it. The being approaching its still-living body was certainly large, but it bore no resemblance to a powerful or even threatening creature. Nothing in its vacant gaze suggested the cunning of a predator. The being moved on two legs that barely seemed able to support its excessive weight. Its skin, naked and slack, looked almost sticky, glistening beneath a sheet of sweat that betrayed its limited physiological capacity to withstand the heat of the savannah. Even its complexion, visible where clothing failed to cover the body of a creature unable to endure the harshness of the elements, was too pale and lifeless, as though this living being had never truly lived.

As the cheetah’s eyes closed for the last time, the hunter lowered himself onto one knee beside the animal he had brought down, and once more wiped the sweat from his forehead with a white handkerchief. He called for two younger men, dark-skinned, whose task it was to carry the weight of the cheetah to the jeep that had brought them there. He dragged his obese body back to the vehicle, cursing the heat of the day and the flies already gathering around the dead animal, taking the moment to announce the day’s hunt was over. He was too tired to endure that climate any longer, far from the comfort of shade and air conditioning, and his body craved food and something cold to drink. He had one more trophy to display in his room, turned into a homage to death. He could now devote himself to the pleasures with which he slowly destroyed his body, if not with the swiftness of the bullet that had ended the cheetah’s life, then with the same grim certainty.

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Waving that huge claw is no piece of cake. The large claw can weigh up to half the total mass of the crab, so holding it above their heads and waving it must be nothing short of exhausting. But so is the male psyche, stopping at nothing to impress a potential mate. The claw waving is what evolutionary ecologists call an honest signal of fitness, an indicator of the overall quality of the male, for only the strongest males can wave the fastest and the highest. If a female is impressed, she will follow the male back to his burrow, and only after carefully inspecting the quality and depth of that burrow will she decide whether the male is worthy of mating.

Beyond its role as a crab-girl magnet, the enlarged claw has a few other useful functions for the male. It can be used to fight rival males over territorial disputes; it functions as a sort of radiator, helping the crab get rid of the excessive heat of a mudflat baked by the relentless tropical sun during low tide; it can be used to produce sounds for communication; and it can be used to deter predators, especially when the crab hides in its burrow and uses the claw to block the entrance. What the large claw is useless for is feeding. The smaller claws are used to collect food from the sediment and carry it to the mouth, but the large one is too big and clumsy for such fine movements. That means that the males, who only have one small claw, must feed twice as fast to get the same amount of food as the females who have two of those more nimble members.

If you do visit such a tropical mudflat and spend a while observing the fiddler crabs, as I did several times in the Bijagós archipelago of Guinea-Bissau, you will notice that they are not just waving and courting females. They are very often hard at work on their burrows as well. You are in the presence of a methodical engineer. To be more precise, what scientists call an ecosystem engineer. Ecologists define ecosystem engineers as organisms that modify their environment in ways that affect the availability of resources for other species. In other words, they are living things that create, modify, or maintain entire habitats. How do these small crabs achieve such a feat?

Intertidal sediments are so tightly packed that almost no oxygen can get in. In fact, that is the reason for their peculiar, sulphuric smell: without oxygen, bacteria resort to sulfates as a source of energy, releasing hydrogen sulfide gas as a byproduct. The incessant burrowing of the fiddler crabs, whose tunnels can reach 30 centimetres in depth, channels oxygen deep into the mud. This drives beneficial microbial activity and dramatically accelerates the breakdown of organic waste. Their burrowing also creates drainage pathways for trapped water, preventing waterlogging and salt accumulation around plant roots, and the constant digging churns up massive quantities of sediment, bringing trapped nutrients back to the surface, where they fertilize algae and marsh vegetation. As if that wasn’t enough ecosystem engineering, abandoned fiddler crab burrows also provide refuges for smaller animals, such as worms, small snails, and larval fish, protecting them from predators and extreme heat at low tide.

There are plenty of other ecosystem engineers around the world, the most famous of which is an animal that we seldom see or even think about, yet to whom we have much to thank. I am talking about the unassuming earthworm. Earthworms do on land a similar job to that of the fiddler crabs on the tidal flats, but on a much vaster scale. They aerate soils, cycle nutrients and prevent soil erosion, to such an extent that they are sometimes called a “farmer’s best friend”. Other examples of great engineers of the natural world include savanna elephants which, by knocking down trees, uprooting shrubs, and digging for groundwater, prevent forests from overtaking grasslands; beavers that convert fast-moving streams into nutrient-rich wetland ponds, creating critical habitats for amphibians, waterfowl, fish, and aquatic plants; and scleractinian corals that create massive reefs so critical for marine life that perhaps a quarter of marine species depend on them in one way or another.

There are about 100 species of fiddler crab in the world, found throughout tropical coastal areas. They are not strictly tropical, with species reaching as far north as Portugal and the northeastern USA, in the Atlantic, and California and Japan, in the Pacific. The largest one is the West African fiddler crab (Afruca tangeri), the one in the photo that I took in the mangroves of Guinea-Bissau. It’s not exactly a giant among crabs, but with a carapace width of up to 5 cm, it is usually larger than most other fiddler crabs.

I visited Guinea-Bissau several times, always with the goal of studying the ecology of the shorebirds wintering in the vast mudflats around the islands of the Bijagós archipelago. It’s a magical place where the sea is hugged by lush mangroves, not far from vast palm groves and cashew plantations, and with imposing kapok trees leaning over the waters. Clouds of shorebirds paint the sky, under the watchful eye of African fish eagles and Caspian terns, and if you are lucky you might even spot a hippo going for a swim or one of the elusive African manatees. The people there still lead very traditional lives, dependent on the rich seas around their islands and steeped in animistic traditions. Known as karangis di tarafe in the local creole, the fiddler crab is mostly not eaten by humans, who rather collect bivalves, snails and larger crabs. But if the humans leave it alone, that is not the case for many local fish and bird species. The fiddler crab is a key prey for whimbrels, and I’ve also seen gull-billed terns and even palm-nut vultures picking them from the flats.

The West African fiddler crab can be found anywhere from southern Portugal down to Angola, in intertidal mudflats and estuaries, where it tends to favour areas with tidal creeks or saltmarsh. They live in their burrows and try to minimize the time spent on the surface, as that is where they run greater risk of being eaten. Each crab occupies its own burrow except when two or more seek refuge together for a short time. The burrows are not just important for protection, but also help maintain moisture around the gills when the tide gets low, offer shelter during harsh weather, and are critical sites for mating.

They do need to leave their burrows to find food, as they feed by scraping off the top layer of sediment in search of detritus, algae and a type of microalgae known as diatoms. Thus the tiny fiddler crab forever lives in a trade-off dilemma: stay in the burrow and starve, or venture out onto the flats and be eaten. Researchers have found that smaller individuals tend to remain closer to their burrows when feeding, while larger crabs can afford to travel farther away and often forage in groups, true to the maxim that there is safety in numbers. Interestingly, each burrow is only used for about a week, after which the crab moves on to build another. We observed this in Guinea-Bissau, where we left cameras filming the mud to determine if all burrows were in use and found that about half of them were never visited by any crab. Presumably, their owners had either moved on to another burrow or fallen prey to a predator.

Fiddler crabs live a busy life, burrowing, moving, burrowing again and again, all the while sallying out in search of food while trying not to be eaten. In the midst of it all, they still find the time to defend territories, fight rivals, woo mates, and breed. Their hectic lives are a blessing for the surrounding tidal flats, which thrive under their subtle engineering. So, the next time you see a tropical mudflat waving at you, remember it is far more than a flashy courtship display. It is an indispensable engineer, restlessly at work, proving that nature’s greatest builders don’t always erect grand monuments. Sometimes they simply dig, wave, and quietly sustain the world beneath their feet.

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A voice sang in the distance, melodic and proud, weaving everything and everyone into a deep sense of mysticism. The sound seemed to rise from the desert itself, spirits lifting over the deep indigo horizon where the Sun had set only minutes before. The few plants edging the settlement appeared to tremble with the chant, and the people, absorbed in its rapture, stepped out of their homes in search of the source of such ethereal singing.

It was a woman’s voice, yet a deep one, at once gentle and rough, barbaric and refined, calm and powerful. The singing unfolded in strange sounds; the words blended into a flowing current that resembled the running of water in a mountain stream more than any human language. The sequence of sounds felt refreshing, like the scent of crushed mint by a river, yet the voice carried an exotic blend of Eastern spices and African peppers. There was ginger in that voice, there was almond in that speech, there was chili in that tone.

The singing was accompanied by the soft chime of an unknown metallic instrument, while measured beats of something akin to an adufe lent the music a rhythm as exotic as it was intoxicating. At times, over this complex composition, a powerful male voice would emerge, exultant in tone, suddenly rising into a fleeting crescendo that quickly dissolved beneath the continuous melody of the first voice.

In that settlement, lost between the foothills of the mountains and the vast desert, there lived perhaps some twenty families. They were simple, hardy people who had come together to strengthen one another in the efforts required to survive in that remote and isolated place. They lived in scattered houses, spread across a small hill that, at daybreak, was washed in the deepest blood-red hue, where the small watercourse that ensured their survival began. At its feet, beneath their doors and windows, the first dunes of the immense desert took shape, stretching out at the foot of the imposing mountains.

The song was known to all. Since time immemorial, it had accompanied the onset of night in that settlement. No one knew its origin, yet everyone knew where it came from. It was the song of the ghosts, the song of the restless souls, of those who had perished in the crossing of the desert. It brought them the story of the countless caravans and adventurers lost forever in that sea of endless sands.

After a few minutes of fascination and exultation, the voice would wane. The rhythm of the sounds slowed, and the night seemed to crush, in its silent darkness, that outburst of beauty and colour. Like a lagoon that dries under the torment of long, blazing desert days, the song would come to its end. The dead would rest for now. They would return tomorrow to brighten, for a few minutes, the lives of those they had left behind.

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Every year it was the same. The wholesome air of late spring would gift the city that spectacle of colour and fragrance which painted the main avenues of the great riverine metropolis in shades of lilac. With a precision that seemed inspired by the meticulous craft of master watchmakers, the jacarandas would bloom in unison across the entire city, and only the greyest and most hardened of hearts could remain indifferent to them.

Such an extraordinary natural phenomenon was, in truth, owed to chance rather than to the intricate workings of natural evolution. In their native habitat, the tropical regions of South America, jacarandas — like most plants at those latitudes — were unfamiliar with the seasons. In the tropics, climate varies little throughout the year, just as the amount of light our sun delivers to those lands changes very little. Locals say that jacarandas there bloom all year round, but that each tree does so according to its own particular timing, a rhythm that repeats itself year after year. It was this constancy, shown by each tree over the course of its long life, that, with the help of human ingenuity and the clever hand of chance, would come to trigger such a marvel an ocean away.

The jacarandas that today brush the city in gentle hues all descend from a single tree that arrived there long ago, borne, who knows through what dangers and adventures, by brave sailors at the helm of intrepid caravels. If a seed rarely falls far from the mother tree, the same holds true for the timing of flowering, and so today the myriad descendants of that first jacaranda erupt into colour almost simultaneously.

When those days of vegetal exuberance come to an end, the pavements are left strewn with countless lilac petals, conjuring a new idyllic scene through the streets, this time at ground level. It was on such days that she would appear on that wide, airy street beside one of the city’s most famous squares. No one knew her name, nor where she lived, but the little old woman, fragile and time‑worn in appearance, would solemnly pace the pavement, gathering the fallen lilac flowers into a shopping trolley that seemed at least as old as she was. She did not pick up every flower, nor did she collect them indiscriminately. No, instead, she chose each petal with great care, as if searching for flecks of gold in the gravel at the bottom of a river.

The residents would watch her pass, up and down the street, the trolley growing ever fuller with the most beautiful jacaranda flowers. After four or five days of unceasing work, when wind, rain, and the grime of the city began to corrupt the beauty of that arboreal gift, the little old woman would vanish as unsuspectingly as she had appeared.

It was only when she died, inevitably on one of those days when the last jacaranda blossoms vanish into gutters and beneath car tyres, that the mystery of the old woman was finally revealed. Alerted by a smell of decay that was sweeter than it was foul, the neighbours of the small single‑storey house that still stubbornly survived in a city alley, almost crushed beneath the surrounding apartment blocks that time had raised around it, called the fire brigade. When the door was forced open, they found the old woman’s body, still seated in a worn armchair, with the air of someone keeping vigil. Beside her lay her late husband, resting in an open coffin, long since mummified by the many years that had passed since his death. His remains told the story of the love of someone who, year after year, had covered him with the finest blossoms the jacarandas had to offer. It was in this way that he had acquired the colouring that so astonished the firefighters. For that mummy, far removed from the pale, ashen hue one might expect of the properly dead, held for all to see that full lilac exuberance of spring, which year after year bathed the city in poetry.

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Link to Stage 6

I may have dodged the thunderstorms during the previous stage, but I was much less successful at avoiding the cold that was doing the rounds that summer. I fell ill two days before the date I had planned for walking stage 7, and was debating whether to go or stay home. When the day dawned, I was feeling somewhat better, so I decided to go for it anyway. I set off from Sleen with a still somewhat stuffy nose and my sense of temperature a bit off, but looking forward to finally reaching Coevorden, a city I had long wished to visit due to its historic relevance. Before that, I had a 21 km hike ahead of me, through what seemed to be mostly agricultural land.

I set off southwards from De Brink, in Sleen, in the footsteps of Vincent van Gogh. The great painter spent three months in Drenthe in 1883, painting and sketching the hard lives of the peat workers. One day he hiked to Zweeloo, a walk he described as poetic and almost dream-like. He was especially enraptured by the vision of an old lady working at a spinning wheel in a small inn, whose dark silhouette against a light background was like something out of a fairy tale, and even made a sketch that has unfortunately been lost. That old lady was most likely the widow Lammegien van den Horst-Sanders who ran an inn right there on De Brink, in Sleen.

I didn't walk long. My first stop was at Lunchroom 't Veurhuys, a stone's throw away from De Brink. I had travelled almost two hours to reach the start of the stage and needed a restroom break and some coffee before taking on the hike. A bit recovered, I set off again, admiring the pretty houses, and waving at the people having breakfast in their well-tended gardens. I am no car enthusiast, but the most surprising sight along the streets of Sleen was a pair of perfectly maintained classic cars: a DAF 44 from the early seventies and a Steyr-Puch 700C from 1964. Beautiful machines from a more colourful era of automotive history.

I left Sleen along a paved road, walking past a camping site and a riding school where several youngsters were practicing on horseback. After some 500 metres, the trail left the paved road to follow a narrow track between some trees and a few very dry meadows. The summer had been unusually dry, leaving some parts of the Netherlands looking more like my native Portugal. Beside the track, there were quite a few brambles, but unfortunately I couldn't find any ripe enough to taste. Maybe because of the drought, the trees already had quite a bit of yellow, sending a rain of golden leaves down onto the path with every hard gust of wind.

Eventually, I reached another paved road, this one running parallel to the Jongbloedvaart, a narrow canal linking Sleen to the larger Verlengde Hoogeveense Vaart canal. The canal had a very peaceful look to it, overshadowed by trees and overgrown with emergent vegetation. In between the lilies and cattails, water striders skated over the water on their long legs. I assumed the canal was no longer used for navigation. Along the canal were again many brambles, but once again disappointingly unripe. Eventually, I did find one that I judged was dark enough to eat, and was rewarded with its sweet taste when I tentatively bit into it.

On the other side of the road, vast fields of maize stretched almost as far as the eye could see. These were eventually replaced by wide meadows of green where cows grazed placidly under the morning sun. There were quite a few insects among the brambles and thistles next to the canal, amidst which I found a remarkable one: a hornet mimic hoverfly. A completely harmless pollinator that evolved to look like a menacing hornet to keep its predators at bay. There were also quite a few butterflies fluttering about, namely red admirals, green-veined whites and small heaths.

With my cold, the hike was going a bit slower than usual. I was sweating a lot more that would be expected for a day that wasn't particularly warm, and the occasional fits of coughing also didn't help. Still, overall I felt well and was happy with the decision to come. After some 2,5 km I reached the spot where the smaller canal met the Verlengde Hoogeveense Vaart, and turned left in the direction of Holsloot, but not before noticing the unusual sight of an alpaca farm. Over thirty of these woolly cousins of the llama roamed freely over a meadow wedged in the angle between the two canals.

The village of Holsloot was just a handful of houses spread along the Verlengde Hoogeveense Vaart, and was originally a community of canal workers who took care of the canal and of the bridges across it. This canal was indeed a shipping lane, much wider than the Jongbloedvaart and with clear banks. As I progressed along the canal, a couple of recreational boats sailed past me, probably with people enjoying their summer holidays. After about 2 km I crossed one of the old metal drawbridges to head southwards towards Den Hool.

I now walked along a paved road lined with green meadows grazed by cows, with the chirping of crickets filling the air around me. I soon reached Den Hool, a collection of old farmsteads, most of which were seemingly dairy farms. I stopped for a while at the lovely terrace of B&B en Theetuin De Kastanjehoeve, where I enjoyed some refreshing iced tea and a walnut pie, surrounded by flowers of many colours, butterflies, and bees. A few other hikers also shared that cheerful place with me. It was a welcome rest, but I quickly departed as there was plenty of road still ahead of me.

After Den Hool, it was another 2 km to Dalerveen, the next village on the route to Coevorden. I traversed a wide expanse of farmland, with a mixture of maize, sugar beet and asparagus, and halfway between the villages crossed the railway that links Zwolle and Emmen, which seemed to extend in an endless straight line in both directions. As the name indicates, Dalerveen lies in an area of reclaimed peatland (veen is the Dutch word for "bog"). This village was larger than the previous one, with many beautiful country houses, several of which were selling honey, jam and other local products in lovely makeshift shops on their front lawns. Here, I also came across a curious collection of birdhouses, including one made out of an old clog.

After the last houses of Dalerveen, I turned right into another paved road. The sign on the road said 5,5 km to Coevorden, so I was closing in on the day's goal. This part of the hike went through a wide open area of reclaimed land, once a vast swampy expanse that encircled Coevorden almost completely. The city rose to importance in the Middle Ages exactly because it commanded a small sandy hill that offered the only safe passage through the swamps. The treacherous nature of those swamps became famous in the Battle of Ane, a few kilometres southwest of Coevorden, where in 1227 a heavily armoured army of knights sent by the Bishop of Utrecht was defeated by a force of lightly armed Drenthe rebels and farmers organized by Rudolf II van Coevorden. Rudolf and the free farmers of Drenthe rebelled against the church taxes and feudal interference, and used the swamps to their advantage to defeat the powerful army sent to crush them.

Nothing remains of the swamps today, all of them drained and turned into intensively managed farmland. As I walked, several large tractors passed me by on the narrow road, busily driving back and forth: some were ploughing fields, while others were spreading manure with contraptions made of dozens of manure spouts that clattered against each other as the tractors made their way over the rough ground. After a while, I crossed the Drostendiep, the stream that once flowed from the ancient swamps and was canalised in the nineteenth century to help drain the landscape. Shortly after, I passed a gas extraction area, a reminder that a good part of the northern Netherlands lies above natural gas fields, and yet another example of the many ways this landscape has been bent to the will of man.

After some twists and turns, the trail left the paved road to follow a shell path through the fields. With the crushed shells crunching under my feet, I now crossed a patch of more extensively managed meadows that form breeding habitat for meadow birds such as curlews, godwits, and lapwings. The breeding season was long past, so no such meadow birds remained, and the only birds I spotted there were barn swallows, white wagtails, carrion crows and grey herons. Eventually, this path hit the Drostendiep and continued along its bank for several hundred metres. The waters were covered with water lilies, some with large yellow blossoms emerging from the surface, and many dragonflies buzzed all around me.

I crossed the Drostendiep two more times, first over a wooden bridge, and later over a sturdier bridge when I reached another paved road. The trail now went past green meadows and large black and white cows, and after a couple kilometres turned onto a grassy path running parallel to the ring road around Coevorden. This path brought me to the Stieltjeskanaal, a wide waterway linking Coevorden and Nieuw-Amsterdam. I followed the canal into the streets of Coevorden, going past some green and airy outer neighbourhoods, before reaching the canal that encircled the city centre.

Although the fortifications are long gone, the canal still follows the star shape of the old ramparts. It's bordered by a green area, the Van Heutszpark, a peaceful area of many trees, flowers and lawns that couldn't be any more contrasting with the belligerent function of the fortified wall that once stood in its place. My route followed three arms of that star before going deeper into the city centre. While crossing the park, I spotted many tits and a few nuthatches, as well as the city's 32 m tall water tower.

After the park, the trail crisscrossed the streets of Coevorden, past dark brick houses, an old school building, and a curious Baptist church that seemed to be housed in an old barn. I eventually reached the castle, now converted into a hotel. Aside from a lone cannon, little seemed to remain of the city's martial past. Even the former garrison building that I came across a bit further along is now a trendy-looking café called Het Garnizoenshuys. While I could understand the practical logic behind repurposing historic buildings, I couldn't help feeling that turning a castle into a hotel, or a garrison into a café, strips away a piece of the local heritage. And after all, what is a people or a nation without its history?

The stage came to a close in front of the local train station, after walking along the Friesestraat, Coevorden's main shopping street. I reached the end not without a tinge of disappointment, having expected a stronger sense of history from a city with such a remarkable past, but happy to have completed another stage. I was now very close to the German border, as well as the border between the provinces of Drenthe and Overijssel, and was looking forward to the next stage that would take me into a new province and another landscape. Ahead of me lay the Vechtdaal, the valley of the Vecht, the smallest of the great Dutch rivers. But that would be a story for another day.

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Clinging to a miserable plank of oak, the castaway held fast, stubbornly, to life. Around him the ocean’s fury was finally burning itself out, and the waves, though still terrifying, seemed on the verge of granting a respite to the poor soul. When the storm ended, the inevitable certainty of death arrived. Alone in that infinite salty desert, with no hope of rescue, he laid his head against the old wood that had circled the globe so many times, and waited for his end. Hours passed, or perhaps days, and death felt ever closer. Yet from the delirium of sun and thirst, something rose to the surface of his thoughts and tugged at the last threads of his consciousness. A sound that did not belong there.

Somewhere in the depths of his brain, restless neurons detected a pattern that stood apart from the monotonous murmur of sea and wind. Surf. Blue, vigorous waves breaking on a beach of white sand. In an effort that felt titanic, he lifted his head just enough to look towards the direction from which the sound seemed to be coming. And then he saw it. An island. The archetype of a tropical island of the southern seas. A vast curve of gleaming white sand, flanked by imposing palms and coconut trees. A pale ribbon licked time and again by the surf of the deep blue ocean, first broken into white foam and then dissolved into the dirty-white stain of wet sand. Faced with the possibility of survival, the body found strength where none had been left. Arms that moments before had lain inert became powerful oars, swiftly steering the improvised craft towards land. Salvation?

On that island he found the bare minimum needed to sustain the body. Food was abundant, both in the small forest and in the lagoon rich with the fruits of the ocean. Water ran through a narrow stream, from the island’s only hill down to the sea, as fresh and sweet as a delicacy from the heavens. With the materials at hand — small branches, twigs, and leaves — he built an improvised shelter that kept him dry on rainy nights. Beyond that, the tropical climate that prevailed there ensured that nights were never too cold for his meagre wardrobe, and the wood dried by the violent tropical sun easily yielded flame in the hands of a skilful man. Yet man is not sustained by the well-being of the body alone. On that island there was not the faintest trace of salvation for a mind scourged, day after day, by the most utter solitude.

The castaway devoted his many hours of free time to thinking. At times he thought in silence; at others, he thought aloud. One day he held long philosophical debates with a coconut palm; on another, he spent hours absorbed in the flames of his fire, pondering the eternal questions of existence. One day, after many long months had passed since his troubled arrival on the island, he came upon a glass bottle that had washed ashore. The bottle was still sealed with a cork, and that bottle, together with some paper and pens he had salvaged from the wreck, gave him an idea. He would write a message and send it out to sea inside the bottle, in the hope that one day it might be found by someone who could save him. He wrote something like this:

I am a castaway, stranded on an island for many long months. I do not know the island’s exact location, but I know that I am several hundred kilometres northeast of New Zealand. I feel terribly alone. Please save me. In return for this kindness, I offer here a small fruit of the long hours I spend thinking about life: Life is a collection of ideas, thoughts cast into the sea, lost in space, felt in the flesh with the searing force of a red‑hot iron.

He continued his life as before, fishing in the lagoon, hunting in the forest, and drinking water from the stream. He tried to convince himself that sending the message had changed nothing, that surely no one would ever find it. Yet he could not stop himself from spending part of his days gazing at the horizon, nor from walking the length of the beach in search of new bottles. One morning, like so many others, he rose and walked towards the shore. What he saw left him stunned. Not one, nor two. Hundreds upon hundreds of bottles, identical in every way to the one he had cast into the sea with his message, filled the lagoon. The bottles chimed softly in the gentle swell, their green glass contrasting with the turquoise of the waters. He picked up one of the bottles and immediately noticed that it, too, contained a message. He opened it and read:

I have lived for many long years in a vast city. I, too, feel terribly alone and would like to be saved. To whoever may help me, I leave this thought on life: Life is a long wait, a slow withering towards an inevitable end; its final outcome depends largely on what we learn from those we encounter along the way.

Still incredulous, he picked up the next bottle, whose message read:

I ask whoever finds this bottle to save me from my loneliness. In return, I offer this thought of mine: Life is a winding path, but the faster we travel it, the sooner we reach its end.

Now with little surprise, he found a third message in the following bottle:

Here on the farm where I live, the solitude is overwhelming. Save me! As for life, this is what I think of it: Life is a great mystery, the most beautiful creation of the Universe. We must make the most of the little we are entitled to.

He went on gathering bottles along the shore, in each one finding a plea for help and a small adage about life. They were written on papers of different colours, some in pencil, others in pen or even marker. Styles and handwriting varied, and the languages were as many as those spoken on the planet. To his astonishment, he discovered that he was able to make sense of all of them, from the letter written in Cyrillic, which read:

Here in the tundra, solitude is as long as the winter. I need help. I leave here a thought of mine about life: Life is made of all the little nothings, everything that happens in between the events we usually consider important.

To the letter written in Japanese characters, which solemnly declared:

I live in a jungle of concrete and neon alongside another thirty million souls. We all live atrociously alone and are in need of salvation. During the long hours I spent thinking, I came to understand this about life: Life is a route of lost destinations, a goal of unfinished purposes, a memory of forgotten remembrances.

He kept all the hundreds of bottles beside his hut, carefully lined up on the sand like pieces in some forgotten game. He also stored all the messages in a small watertight wooden box, spending the days that followed reading and re‑reading them, unable to find any explanation for such a phenomenon. From that entire wellspring of human feeling, he drew a single conclusion: his situation was no worse than that of any other human being, perhaps even better than that of many. Encouraged by this epiphany, he finally decided to take hold of the reins of his own destiny.

From that day on, he devoted himself to the construction of a raft with which he would return to civilisation. After three months of arduous labour, he set out to sea in a fragile yet hopeful vessel, driven by both a sail and a pair of oars. He carried aboard provisions sufficient for several weeks and departed full of confidence in his ability to reach inhabited lands. He took with him the many messages he had received on the island, along with several of the bottles that now sustained his vital reserve of potable water. Before departing, he cast a new bottle into the sea, with a message inside it. The new message said:

I have decided to leave my island and set out in search of people like myself. I wish you all the courage to find, in turn, a path that will carry you beyond the limits of your own prisons. And life? My friends, life is what we make of it!

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Link to Stage 5

A few weeks later, I was back at the old crossroads where Schoonloo lies, to push further in the direction of Coevorden, the oldest city in Drenthe and once an important fortified town on the route from Groningen to the German city of Münster. I wouldn't reach Coevorden quite yet. The day's journey would take me as far as Sleen and would also see me pass the 100 km mark since my starting point in Pieterburen. It would be a 23 km hike with a chance of thunderstorms in the afternoon, and I was curious to see what the day would have to offer.

I set off around 9 o'clock, with the vanishing morning mist still dimming the sun that peeked here and there through the overcast sky. The first sight of the day was right on the main street of Schoonloo: a huge 25-ton granite boulder named De Trekkerskei. Found near the village in 1966, this was an erratic stone, carried by glaciers all the way from Scandinavia during the Saale ice age about 150000 years ago. It was the first of the many such "wandering stones" (in Dutch, zwerfkeien) that I would see that day. The singing of goldfinches and house sparrows kept the stern old stone in good company.

Schoonloo is a small village, so I soon found myself walking along a paved road lined with crop fields growing sugar beet, onions and other crops I couldn't identify. The dark wall of the forest of Boswachterij Schoonloo approached quickly, and in no time I was under the trees of that old forestry project, a mix of evergreens and deciduous trees planted in the 1920s and 1930s. The age of the forest was noticeable in the height of the trees, with some of the larger pines well over thirty metres tall, and I could hear woodpeckers calling from the canopy.

The tall trees were a treat for the eyes, but my gaze kept being pulled lower down, towards the elfin miniature forest of moss and ferns growing at the giants' feet. As the track delved deeper into the forest, it only got mossier, and there were wrens and tits singing high above me. This was a well-maintained forest. Although there were many stumps where trees had been removed, I could also see many fallen old trunks that had been left behind to let nature take its course. The decaying trees would be a feast for fungi and other decomposers that slowly returned the nutrients locked in the dead wood back to the forest soil.

Even though this was the peak of summer, and the Netherlands was officially under severe drought, under the protective embrace of the trees the forest didn't feel that dry. I even spotted a few mushrooms sprouting among the leaf litter. One tree stood out among the myriad brown trunks: a Scots pine shimmered in brick red like a beacon. These trees often shed their outer bark, exposing the tannin- and carotenoid-rich inner bark, but I had never seen one quite as brightly coloured.

Another strange sight awaited me shortly after. I found a dead shrew squirming on the ground. No, it wasn't a zombie; the corpse was moving due to the intense activity of decomposers, including flies, ants, and especially a couple of colourful lesser burying beetles, which in Dutch are accurately named gewone doodgravers ("common gravediggers"). They were busy recycling the carcass. Nature was taking its course. After this fascinating, if somewhat gruesome observation, the path took an abrupt right turn towards the N376 road.

Before I reached the road, the route was brought to life by the revelries of a couple of dozen blue and great tits, which, as far as I could tell, were all juveniles hatched earlier that year. The tits seemed to have had a good year around those parts. Just before crossing the road, I had the chance to sit down and rest on a most peculiar perch: a century-old bench built in 1923 from erratic stones deposited by glaciers and later removed from the soil by workers during the reclamation of the ancient bogs and heathlands for forestry and agriculture.

After crossing the N376, my route continued through the forest, now along an old cobblestone path also made from erratic stones removed from the land. It was common practice to use such stones to harden the paths during the Great Reclamation (De Grote Ontginning, in Dutch) of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, when much of Drenthe’s natural habitat was drained and converted into plantations, and I would find several more such paths that day. Although the cobblestone path was not that old, it did make me think of the much older days of the Roman Empire, when all roads led to Rome. This one did not lead to Rome, but to the open expanse of the peat bog known as De Tweelingen.

These remnant peat bogs are called in Dutch hoogvenen ("high bogs"), referring to the fact that the peat mosses absorb rain and accumulate over centuries, continually growing upward to form a sponge-like dome above the surrounding terrain. The area had a mix of open bog, rushes and heather, the latter already starting to bloom and painting that peculiar landscape in purple tones. But the path just skirted the open area, and I was soon immersed in forest again.

As I walked, I spotted several earthballs, round, tough-skinned fungi that look a bit like small brownish potatoes sitting on the forest floor, and a couple of spring dung beetles busy dealing with a pile of horse dung that lay right in the middle of the path. After another kilometre, the forest ended quite abruptly, the path turning right to continue along the forest edge. On the left side stretched a sea of beet and maize, dutifully sailed by large machines spraying the crops. It occurred to me that the sound of the crop sprayers was the first human-made sound I had heard since crossing the N376, almost an hour earlier.

Beyond the fields lay yet another corner of the forest, where the trail was so narrow that I often had to duck to avoid the boughs growing over the path, or the web of cross orbweavers that had decided to weave their traps across it. The day was now getting warm, and I was happy to be under the cover of trees, but that wouldn't last. I was soon walking along the Meeuwenplassen, yet another open area of heathland interspersed with peat bogs. Here, I was fortunate enough to spot a butterfly I had never seen before, a silver-studded blue, basking on the heather. From the open landscape I could now see that the sky had turned dark. A storm seemed to be brewing.

After the bogs came a vast expanse of farmland, patrolled by a buzzard and several large dragonflies. I walked along a green path, overgrown with grass, and grasshoppers jumped merrily before my feet. The wind was picking up, offering some relief from the stuffy warmth. As I crouched down for one more failed attempt at photographing a grasshopper, I was overtaken by a group of six or seven young hikers. They seemed to be talking loudly nonstop, so I decided to bide my time among the grasshoppers to let them gain some distance and regain my peace and quiet.

Perhaps it was a bit antisocial of me, but this strategy soon paid off as I heard the lovely call of a common quail faintly in the distance. With maize stalks taller than me on the left and potatoes in bloom on the right, I trod along a lane bordered by oak trees. There were yellowhammers singing in the trees, and I soon heard another quail, and yet another as the maize gave way to a stretch of wheat. The noisy hikers were now barely visible in the distance, and the rays of sunshine breaking through the clouds over the golden expanse of wheat seemed to suggest that the threat of the storm had been averted, at least for now. I pressed on.

After some two kilometres of farmland, I reached another vast forested area, this time Boswachterij Sleenerzand. Here, I crossed paths with a few other hikers, who seemed as happy with the silence as I was and passed by with just a quick "hello". The sky darkened once again, darker even than before, and the rustling of the leaves in the wind took on that distinct pitch that usually announces rain. I soon felt the first fat raindrops on my head, and the first hint of petrichor filled my nostrils. The dry land was eager for rain. I was less keen on getting soaked, so I quickly reached for my poncho.

The shower was intense, but didn't last long. I was soon walking bareheaded again over another cobblestone path through the forest. It was flanked by tall spruces and the dried needles over the stones gave it an even cosier feel. Now it didn't feel like I was walking to Rome, but rather to a snug hobbit hole somewhere in the Shire. High above me, in the canopy, long-tailed tits were in charge of the soundtrack to my Tolkienesque adventure.

After a while, the rain caught up with me again. I was now deeper in the woods, and very few drops actually reached me through the leaves. The sound of the shower pouring over the canopy filled the forest, making me feel like I was inside a waterfall. The petrichor mixed with the rich resinous scent of the forest was almost inebriating as I continued my hike. After a few minutes, this shower too abated. It was silent again in the forest. Even more silent than before, as the rain and the midday stillness had hushed all the birdsong. At a crossroads, I looked down the path to my right and saw a male roe deer, not 50 metres away. I could swear it nodded at me before solemnly walking away through the trees. I was starting to wonder if I had somehow crossed into some enchanted fairytale land.

A strange coincidence jolted me from this fairytale dream. The next people I crossed paths with were none other than a family that lived in the same neighbourhood as me back in Groningen. They were spending their holidays around those parts. Soon the cobblestones gave way to a paved lane, after which I crossed a paved road and the canal that ran parallel to it. Two young men were fishing by the canal, and I asked them if they were having any luck, to which they replied nog niet ("not yet").

After the canal, the route continued through the forest, along a dirt track bordered by beech, oak and spruce. After a while, I started hearing the grumbling of thunder in the distance, but above me the sun was peeking through the canopy and I could see patches of blue sky. Maybe the thunderstorm would miss me. Besides the path I was on, many other paths crisscrossed the forest, and where they met I sometimes saw stones with painted numbers. These were markers delimiting different sections of the forest, yet another use for the erratic stones that had travelled all the way from Scandinavia.

My route passed by a few more small bogs within the forest, reminders of how different this landscape must have looked a few centuries ago. Back in Stage 2, I found the landscape between Winsum and Groningen to be one scarred by progress, where the ancestral moors were replaced by flat, intensive agricultural meadows, and streamlined channels flowed along the beds of the primordial meandering rivers. Here, in Drenthe, the present-day forests may be lovely, but the leftover bogs and heathlands, as well as the cobblestone paths, were reminders that this was also a deeply altered landscape. Still, while in Groningen the story I read around me was one of blatant exploitation, here it seemed to tell a tale of stewardship and coexistence with nature.

I walked several more kilometres along the forest with the distant muttering of thunder still in my ears, yet above me the sun was still painting a patchwork of shadow and light on the path before me. Everything was dead quiet in the forest. The only wildlife I spotted in a long while were a couple of butterflies and one lonely drone fly. Was this the calm before the storm? Anyway, I still had several kilometres ahead of me and so I pressed on. Soon I turned left into yet another cobblestone path. It felt more irregular and harder to walk on, or maybe that was just my feet starting to get weary.

After about 500 metres, I realized this was not the right way. I had misinterpreted a sign and had to backtrack. Going back is always a bit disheartening, but as I returned to the right route, I was delighted to see a marker indicating I had 396 km left until St. Pieterberg. It was the first time that number had fallen below 400 and also meant I had now walked over 100 km of the Pieterpad. Not long after, I reached a wide clearing within the forest were a monument made of large erratic stones had been erected on top of a small hill. It was the Pieterpad monument, placed there in 2004 as a tribute to the creators of the Pieterpad, Toos Goorhuis-Tjalsma and Bertje Jens.

After that, my hike took me along a wide forest lane for a few more kilometres, passing Galgenberg, a prehistoric burial mound dating back to the Iron Age. It was a testament to how long this landscape had been intertwined with the fates of its human dwellers. Yet a couple of thousand years later, a very different memorial would be raised just a few hundred metres further ahead: a small monument in memory of the seven crew members of a British Halifax JB892 bomber that was shot down there during a Second World War bombing run. Their names are written on pieces of the aircraft’s fuselage that were recovered by schoolchildren during the war and later incorporated into the monument.

Past the memorials, I reached the end of the forest and had the final 4 kilometres of farmland to cross before reaching Sleen. I passed several farms with thatched roofs, some with piles of erratic stones decorating their front lawns. The wanderings of these stones were far from over when the glaciers receded. Before long, I spotted the church spire of Sleen on the horizon. With my destination in sight, my tired steps regained some of their spring. I soon entered Sleen, fittingly through the Groningerweg, next to a meadow where four mares grazed, each with a young foal. All eight horses immediately trotted to the fence as if to welcome me to their village.

I walked along the village streets, passing old, low-lying houses, some with thatched roofs. The first business I came across was unsurprisingly the local bicycle sales and repair shop De Schakel. I soon reached De Brink, the village's central square, which was actually triangular in shape. There the stage ended, in front of the local Dorpskerk ("village church"), a Protestant church dating back to the 15th century that boasts the tallest church tower in Drenthe. I had reached the end of a long hike and managed to dodge all the thunderstorms unscathed, so I headed to café De Deel for some refreshments before catching the bus home.

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Link to Prologue

Link to Chapter 2

A prison? The confined space to which he was restricted felt smaller with every passing day. His tiny cell had no windows, only the mercy of a dim, trembling light that clouded more than it revealed, blurring the boundaries of his existence.

Where was he? How long had he been there? In truth, he had no clear memory of any other place or state of being, and the near‑total absence of sensory stimuli made it impossible to grasp the passage of time. Sometimes he listened. Just listened. He tried to interpret those scarce auditory impressions with the naïve curiosity of someone experiencing experience for the first time.

Lost in the gentle cradle of that sheltered existence, he drifted through long hours, or perhaps mere seconds, lost in thought. Was this all he could expect from life, or only a brief antechamber to something still waiting beyond? Was this place the whole of the Universe, or merely a closed shell concealing the vastness of an unsuspected world outside?

Lately, he had begun to suspect that it wasn’t his prison shrinking, but his own body growing. He could feel changes in his limbs, which each day became not only longer, but stronger. And then one day — or perhaps it was night — in a moment of true epiphany, he finally understood that the dimness in which he lived was due not only to the lack of light in his little cell, but also to the simple fact that he had, until then, never realised his eyes were closed. It was on that day that he first felt the impulse to do something to change his condition.
The strength within him, growing day after day, became the spark that at last ignited in him a fierce resolve to fight for freedom.

After his first hesitant attempts to use his limbs against the matrix that held him, he soon realised that the key lay in his head. Something hard was growing beneath his eyes, and instinctively he knew he should use it as though it were a hammer. He hammered and hammered at the white barrier until, at last, his effort was rewarded: a first, brighter crack traced itself across the dull white that surrounded him. In the joy of that moment, he let out a brief sound from his throat, a first call that surprised him as much as the extraordinary revelation that his confinement might indeed have an end.

The hard work continued, and from that first crack many others soon followed, until eventually tiny holes of light pierced the veil that hid the rest of the world from him. He realised he could now use his limbs as levers to hasten his labour. When the shell finally gave way, he was blinded by the joyful, exuberant brightness of the daylight waiting for him outside. And when his eyes at last adjusted to the Sun’s thermonuclear radiance, he saw, outlined against the glorious blue of that spring morning, the sweet and tender expression in his father’s eyes gazing at him from behind a great orange beak.

The little bird had at last emerged, after four long weeks of incubation. He left behind the broken shards of his egg and drew a deep breath of the fresh morning air, certain that his life had only just begun.

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Link to Chapter 1

In a forgotten corner of a vast galaxy, hidden in one of the great arms that traced yet another immense spiral — one among the many carved into the darkness of the Cosmos — there shimmered a medium‑sized, pale yellow star. It was a star much like countless others, drifting through the eternal galactic dance, giving off light and warmth as it slowly orbited the galaxy’s distant centre.

Around this star orbited a small family of planets and other celestial bodies, much like the many that accompanied the countless stars filling that galaxy and all the others in the Cosmos. The third planet from the star was a rocky world with three peculiar characteristics. First, it was blue. The combination of an atmosphere rich in nitrogen and vast oceans of liquid water covering most of its surface gave it a striking deep‑blue hue, a calling card that earned it the epithet of the blue planet. Second, it was extraordinarily rich in life. Life there had produced a prodigious number of organisms in a myriad of forms, colours, and habits, occupying every corner of the planet, from the depths of its oceans to the peaks of its highest mountains, and even the sky‑blue atmosphere that dominated all its landscapes. Third… well, the third characteristic is a longer story.

The third characteristic of this planet was that it was home to a species which, without asking anyone’s permission, had decided to proclaim itself the pinnacle of creation. This species, a kind of two‑legged mammal with little hair, had declared itself the only intelligent form of life in the entire Universe, though it had not spent much time searching for any others. It had also decided that its own was the only planet in the Universe with life, although again, it had not devoted much effort to looking for life elsewhere. Such conceit, such boundless arrogance, would on its own be worthy of note, even in a universe as vast as the one we inhabit. Yet what truly made this species remarkable was its strange decision to exclude itself from the Nature that surrounded it, and to declare war on it whenever the opportunity arose.

Nothing like it had ever been seen before. Of course, coexistence and cohabitation are not always peaceful, every creature with siblings knows that well. But what we had here was an attempt to reject its own origin and its very nature. These creatures, who called themselves humans, considered themselves separate from the rest of the life that inhabited the blue planet. They created not one but many intricate mythologies to defend — from whom, it is not entirely clear — their supposed right to dominate and make use of the other forms of life that shared the planet with them. In their open war against the life that was their mother, father, brother, and sister, they ended up wounding the planet itself and its ability to support the life that defined it. They turned oceans into dumping grounds and lands into deserts, exterminated entire species and reduced many others to the status of mere servants. They even altered the planet’s own atmosphere, with consequences as harmful as they were unpredictable. And when they were not destroying the planet, they were busy destroying one another, with weapons that grew ever more complex and devastating.

However, no one can reject their own nature. No one can remain forever what they are not. Masks, no matter how tightly they cling to the skin, always fall in the end. It was for this reason that I compiled these Chronicles from a planet that was blue. Step by step, line by line, they show us — or rather, remind us — that the mask was never real. From the surface of their skin to the flesh and bone beneath, humans carried their true nature written everywhere. In their actions, in their words, in their way of living, humans bore the outline of their true essence. The only place where humans were ever less a part of what surrounded them was in the minds of those weak of spirit, the ones who preferred to hand out blindfolds rather than open their eyes and see. Men who refused to embrace, with open arms and a broad smile, their communion with something infinitely greater than the myths and phantoms they had created to obscure the vision of others. For humans were as much a part of Nature as were the myriad other species that shared that blue planet with them, in an unbroken continuum from the simplest unicellular organism to the most complex higher forms. That continuity was evident in their genes, evident in the biochemical processes that governed their bodies, and even evident in the structure of their bodies and in their behaviour. The extraordinary human brain, the seat of the intellect that allowed them to create technology, the arts, philosophy, every component of their grand civilisation, had its origins in the same natural evolution that shaped, with equal mastery, the octopus’s tentacle, the oak leaf, or the lion’s mane.

As the many dramas of this tragedy unfolded, indifferent to wars and battles, to deaths and births, to conquests and losses, to flowerings and metamorphoses, to extinctions and speciations, to the rise and collapse of entire civilisations, the small blue planet continued, unperturbed, its path around its star. And like it, the star continued, equally unperturbed, its path around the galaxy, and the galaxy itself continued, no less unperturbed, its journey through the brutally vast expanses of the Universe. For in the great scheme of things, the life of one human, or of a thousand million humans, is absolutely insignificant, just as insignificant as the lives of the countless millions of ants, elephants, jellyfish, bacteria, geraniums, and mushrooms that travelled with them on the planet that was blue. And yet, across the seas, the lands, and the skies of that planet, nothing was ever more important…

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Link to Stage 4

Link to Stage 6

The beauty of slowly walking the Pieterpad one stage at a time is that we see the progression of the seasons as we go along. When I set off southwards from Pieterburen, it was still the end of winter and spring was just starting to spread its first shy tendrils over the land. Now, as I arrived in Rolde ready to take on stage 5, summer was already in full swing: the trees had lost their fresh spring garb and turned a deep, lush green; in the herbs and shrubs, many flowers were already giving way to fruits and berries; and we had even been through a heatwave the week before. Still, with a forecast of 21°C, overcast skies and a 60% chance of rain, keeping my head cool wouldn't be a problem on my trek to Schoonloo.

Immediately after the start of the day's journey, I came across not one but two dolmens, still well in sight of Rolde's medieval church. They were surrounded by a scenic grove of oak trees and there were wrens and yellowhammers singing from the canopy. Today, these ancient structures attract quite a few tourists, and there were several people there taking photos and even climbing on the stones, but that wasn't always the case. Until the Middle Ages, people looked upon them with awe, or even fear, associating them with pagan gods and giants. In fact, the Dutch word hunebed literally translates to "giant's bed", from the Middle Dutch word huen, meaning "giant".

After the dolmens, the route went eastwards along a lovely green path between two rows of English oaks. The path was bordered by farmland on both sides, in a mixture of maize, beet, flowers and cattle pastures. I was once again accompanied by the singing of many birds: blackbirds, song thrushes, wrens, blackcaps and whitethroats, to name just a few. At some point, a little murine animal with reddish fur crossed the path before me. I am no expert in rodents and it quickly disappeared among the greenery, but I believe it was a bank vole.

The going was slow. Not for lack of a firm path to walk on, but because I was constantly distracted by the many butterflies fluttering around me. They came in different colours and sizes, and I wanted to get a picture of each one. The most abundant were the whites, both the small and large species, and the ringlets, but there were also speckled woods, red admirals and meadow browns, the latter a new species for me. In fact, it wasn't just the butterflies distracting me. It was also insect rush hour on the many common hogweed flowers along the path. Each inflorescence seemed to have a dozen or more red soldier beetles locked in a reproductive orgy, and there were also quite a few bees and hoverflies about.

Despite the entomological feast, I eventually made it to the bridge over the Rolderdiep, yet another section of the Drentsche Aa river system. From the bridge, I spotted a couple of banded demoiselles dancing over the water, beautiful metallic-blue damselflies with a broad dark spot on the outer part of their wings. Just past the bridge lay a pasture where a large herd of ponies was grazing, many of which were mares nursing their foals. Not much further ahead, I reached the cover of the trees of Landgoed Tolhek, just in time to escape the first light rain shower of the day. I passed an old couple hiking in the opposite direction who commented: mooi weer voor een wandeling ("nice weather for a hike"). It was indeed quite pleasant, neither too warm nor too cold and the few raindrops that reached me through the canopy felt refreshing.

The trail went on, following a lovely country lane where the green was only broken here and there by the screaming scarlet of red elderberries. This whole section of the Pieterpad that I had walked since Rolde was actually the bed of a historic railway that linked Assen and Stadskanaal until the 1930s, but the tracks were fully pulled up in the seventies and now only their memory remains. The trail then skirted the village of Anderen, near which a large branch had fallen and blocked part of the path. It was most likely a remnant of the heavy storm that had raged over the Netherlands a few days earlier. I went around it without much trouble and reached the point where the trail turned right, away from the old railway bed, and continued parallel to the N33, the main road linking the provincial capital of Assen to the port of Eemshaven.

The relaxing sound of birdsong was replaced by the loud engines of rushing cars, but the butterflies were still very much active and I added the map butterfly, the green-veined white and the holly blue to the day's list. After a while, I went under a viaduct to continue parallel to the N33 on its eastern side, past a large farm with huge cowsheds where I could see large brown cows methodically chewing their feed. After the farm, rising above a meadow where several mares grazed with their foals, I heard the unmistakable song of a skylark. It was singing high above the ground, as these birds usually do, and so loud that I could clearly hear it above the incessant noise of the traffic. Still with the skylark in my ears, I turned left away from the road and slowly the other sounds of nature took hold of the landscape once again.

The trail now headed into the low-lying area of the Andersche Diep — yet another section of the Drentsche Aa — and the track was sometimes muddy from the rains of the recent storm. The side of the road was painted yellow by ragwort flowers, and amidst them there were many startlingly bright orange and black caterpillars of the cinnabar moth. This moth always lays its eggs on these plants, allowing the caterpillars to absorb toxic compounds found in the ragwort while feeding, making them unpalatable to predators. As I approached the Andersche Diep, the landscape opened into a vast area covered with rushes and sedges that at first looked gloomy, but then suddenly came to life as the sun peeked through the clouds and brought colour to the scenery.

The path here was so narrow that my legs had to push through the vegetation, and butterflies swirled all around me. I again spotted many ringlets and, eventually, another species I had never seen before: an Essex skipper, a small and energetic butterfly sporting golden-orange wings with narrow, dark borders. A bit further ahead, I reached the stream, which I crossed using just a wooden board laid across the bed and a sturdy rope to help keep one's balance. This place had been used to ford the Andersche Diep since the Stone Age, but today there is also a narrow wooden bridge next to it for the less adventurously inclined.

After the openness of the riverine area, the trail dove into the woodlands along the Gasselterveld and Drouwenerveld nature areas. For the next few kilometres I would walk under the shade of trees. The woods greeted me with much chiffchaffing and chaffinching, and the flickering flight of the ringlet, map, and speckled wood butterflies. There was also some scat on the dirt track that was likely from martens. This was a typical old Dutch production forest, with trees planted in rows. It was mainly populated with beech and oak, but with other species thrown into the mix, namely Norway spruce and Scots pine.

I walked along the green woods, feeling the soft forest floor underfoot and breathing in deeply the warm, grounding smells of the forest. I could almost feel the calm peeling away the layers of stress from my skin. Along the path there were many purple foxgloves, some as tall as me, always abuzz with bees and bumblebees, and in a small clearing I spotted a beautiful painted lady butterfly and another meadow brown. In another clearing I was met by the pendular flight of a broad-bodied chaser, a large, bulky dragonfly with a golden-brown body that indicated this was a female — the males are light blue. Where the path brushed the edge of the forest, I could see farmland beyond: potato fields in bloom and a barley crop shaking in the wind, just begging for an ethereal Celtic voice to rise above it in traditional Irish song.

Between the Gasselterveld and the Drouwenerveld, there was an open area where I came across a large boulder lying next to the trail. Stones are not a common sight in this part of the world and I later found out this was an ancient marker indicating the border between the marks (in Dutch marken) of Drouwen and Grollo. In Drenthe, the marks were a historic agricultural cooperative system dating back to the Middle Ages, where each village held a shared stake in the surrounding uncultivated lands, such as heaths, forests, and marshes, collectively managing their use, grazing, and turf-cutting according to a system of proportional shares called waardelen. As I sat on a bench near the ancient marker, I found a feather that looked interesting and later confirmed it belonged to a long-eared owl. I can only imagine the many times owls perched on that boulder since it was laid there many centuries ago, oblivious to why it seemed so important to the human dwellers of the region.

Shortly after, before reaching the next forest patch, I heard the unmistakable call of a common quail, a familiar sound from my native Portugal that I had not yet heard in the Netherlands. The quail seemed to announce a change in weather and I soon felt some raindrops on my face. The shower was more cooling than soaking and I welcomed the fresh tingle on my skin as I pressed on. I was soon under the cover of trees again and, after crossing a paved road with some traffic, I turned right into a forest path that looked like an old cobblestone road, and then left into a narrow path that seemed to dissolve into the forest.

I was now walking past Meindersveen, a boggy remnant of the vast, treacherous peat bogs that once covered much of the region. Over the bog, the sky was turning darker, leaving me wondering if heavier rain awaited me, but I had my trusty poncho in my backpack so I walked on, not too worried. I soon reached the edge of the forest, where it skirted the heathland area of the Grolloërveld. I sat to rest on a bench overlooking the heather and found a pin that someone had left behind. It featured the Portuguese flag and a flag with a yellow scallop over a blue background, which represents the Caminho Português, the Portuguese Route of the Camino de Santiago. Whoever had sat on that bench before had been hiking in my homeland.

I now had just a few kilometres of farmland left before reaching Schoonloo, but plenty still to see. Just out of the forest, a huge butterfly landed on the path. I carefully approached to get a picture because this was something I had never seen before and from the picture I later learned it was a purple emperor, one of the largest butterflies in Europe. It was the perfect closing to a great day of butterfly watching.

After that sweet encounter, I crossed a couple of barley fields, enjoying the infinite bucolic calm of the barn swallows and sand martins hunting over the gently swaying barley stalks. The route turned right to follow the paved road to Schoonloo, passing by several large farmhouses and farmers busy working the fields with their tractors. Just before reaching the village, the trail went through Schoonloër Strubben, a remnant of ancient oak forests, where poor farmers who couldn't afford to cut down whole trees for timber, instead repeatedly chopped down branches for firewood, fencing, and tanning leather, each time leaving the stumps (de stobben in Dutch) to aggressively sprout multiple new trunks. The end of this forest brought me onto the streets of Schoonloo, passing a marker indicating I had 410 km left to walk to the end of the Pieterpad.

Schoonloo originated in the early Middle Ages as a daughter settlement of nearby Grolloo, being located at the intersection of the old post road from Groningen to Coevorden and the road from Beilen to Borger. It's a small village of about 400 inhabitants, so it didn't take me long to reach the end of the stage, in front of Eetcafe Hegeman. Unfortunately, the café was closed, but I still had something with me to nibble while waiting for the bus at the nearby stop. Stage 5 was done and I went home with the memory of the kaleidoscope of butterflies swirling around me.

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Link to Chapter 34

Seven years have now passed since my time on the Selvagens Islands. In seven years, many things change1. I’ve kept in touch with several of the colleagues and friends with whom I walked every corner of Selvagem Grande, and I know that, just as for me, much has changed for them as well.

Maria Dias now lives in the United Kingdom, where she works for BirdLife International, involved in several projects dedicated to the conservation of seabirds and to mapping the regions of the ocean that matter most to them. She continues to visit the Selvagens Islands regularly, having been there again just this past summer. As for Cristóbal Pérez, he returned to his native Galicia and left scientific research — at least in its more academic form — moving instead into the world of clinical trials and the pharmaceutical industry. As the Spanish say, la ciencia está bien, pero hay que comer (“science is all well and good, but one still has to make a living”), and working conditions for university researchers are far from comfortable on the Iberian Peninsula.

Maria Pinto completed her master’s thesis on Bulwer’s petrels and is now a doctoral student at the University of Vienna, in Austria, where she continues to conduct research in the field of marine biology, particularly on the issue of plastic pollution in the oceans. She also runs an engaging YouTube channel about her work, which she named Sea&me. The other student, Federico de Martino, finished his biology degree and then headed to Denmark for a master’s in environmental management. After completing his degree, he did an internship at the European Commission in Brussels, where he still works today in the area of environmental safety.

Not long after our time on the Selvagens Islands, Joana Rosa travelled to India to volunteer in a project that brought acupuncture to the favelas of Mumbai. After that, she returned to Portugal, where she continued working in her Chinese medicine practice. While in that line of work, she began to feel that the source of the pain she treated in people was the agony of our planet itself, and so she started taking an interest in permaculture and in the regeneration of human impacts on the Earth. In 2015 she became a mother, and she realised how increasingly dehumanised childbirth was becoming, and how little emotional support mothers received. Since then, she has devoted herself to her daughter and to a few projects linked to permaculture, while also trying to learn more about how to support women in the postpartum period.

As for the wardens of Madeira Natural Park, Lourenço Alves and Jaques da Mata, they continue to provide that essential service to all of us: keeping watch over and caring for the small paradise on Earth that the Selvagens Islands truly are. That leaves me to mention Selvagem, the island’s canine resident. Maria Dias assures me that she is still there and in good health — slightly older now and with less energy to accompany the biologists on their expeditions to the plateau, yet always alert to the arrival of new visitors and eternally unable to stop the endless lizards from stealing her food.

And what about me? A great deal has changed over these seven years. After returning from the Selvagens Islands, I continued working as a researcher at the Museum of Natural History and Science and later at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon. I was mostly involved in projects studying the migration of waders between Europe and West Africa. These birds, long‑legged and long‑billed, prefer to stay close to continental margins, gathering in large numbers in estuaries and other wetlands, and then migrating to the distant Arctic tundra where they nest. This work allowed me to visit extraordinary places such as Banc d’Arguin, in Mauritania, where the Sahara desert comes to bathe in the Atlantic Ocean, or the picturesque islands of the Bijagós Archipelago, in Guinea‑Bissau, where the sea is embraced by lush tropical vegetation in the form of mangroves, palm groves, and majestic kapok trees. These journeys brought me enough adventures to fill another couple of books like this one.

But the greatest adventures came through my family life. In October 2012 my son João was born, and in June 2015 my daughter Teresa — and they turned my whole world upside down2. It was largely because of them that, after much deliberation, my partner Ana and I decided in 2017 to emigrate to the Netherlands, where we found firmer ground on which to anchor our roots. We now live here a family life more complete and healthier than the one we knew in Portugal. With the change of country came a drastic professional shift as well. I left scientific research to embrace teaching, and today I am a lecturer at the Hanze University of Applied Sciences, where I teach biology, physiology, research methods, and ethics to engineering students.

And what about the Selvagens Islands? There have certainly been changes on the islands as well. Today, on Selvagem Grande, there is telephone coverage and internet access, and the facilities of the Nature Reserve have been expanded to accommodate the now permanent presence of the Maritime Police. The islands also gained some visibility through the media coverage of the President of the Republic’s visit in the summer of 2013 — he even went so far as to ring a Cory’s shearwater, which struck me as a rather distasteful political exploitation of those majestic animals.

Speaking of Cory’s shearwaters, as well as Bulwer’s petrels, Madeiran storm‑petrels and the other seabirds, they continue to survive in an ocean increasingly victim to human excesses. Overfishing is, year after year, decimating the stocks of many fish species, some of which are essential for the birds’ survival, and many birds fall victim to fishing gear themselves. Meanwhile, pollution of the marine environment shows no sign of abating; in recent years, the problem of plastic in the ocean has become particularly worrying, as seabirds and other marine animals ingest it with severe consequences for their health. These are serious problems affecting our oceans as a whole, and the Selvagens Islands, despite their isolation, are not immune to them.

But I will not end this narrative on such a negative note. I prefer to focus on all that we still have to preserve, on the endless wonders that the Earth has to dazzle us with, and on the thousands upon thousands of scientists, wardens, students, nature lovers, concerned citizens, responsible politicians, visionary entrepreneurs, and charismatic leaders who — whether men or women, young or old, with darker or lighter skin, with greater or lesser faith in their diverse creeds, beliefs and passions — fight, day after day, to protect this blue planet that is the only home we have in a Universe that may be marvellous, but is also, for the most part, dark, cold, and inhospitable to life.

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Life didn't start in that noxious planetary surface, but underwater, cradled in the warm, nutrient-rich waters of the primordial ocean. Life started in the water, and never really left it, it just learned to carry the ocean within. We can live on land because our body is extremely efficient at keeping water inside, but on hot summer days we are constantly reminded of the thin line we must tread. We need to sweat to keep the body at an appropriate temperature, and if that water loss is not quickly compensated through drinking, we soon start to feel the effects of desiccation: dizziness, headaches, and, eventually, loss of consciousness. Other organisms are much worse at keeping their water inside the body, and it's not uncommon to see worms and slugs that lost the battle against the elements and lie dead, dried out on the pavements.

Sometimes, there is a world of difference in how even closely related species handle water loss. For instance, the land slugs that we sometimes find withered on a pavement are close relatives of the land snails. Both are gastropods classified within the suborder Stylommatophora, which is defined by having two pairs of tentacles on their heads, with the eyes located on the tips of the upper pair. In fact, land slugs evolved from snail-like shelled ancestors, trading that armor for extreme flexibility, which allows them to squeeze into tight, moist hiding spaces where predators can't reach them. However, unlike the slugs, which can only thrive in moist places and need to hide away when temperatures rise, snails can deal quite well with hot, dry conditions and are a common sight in the peak of summer. Part of that has to do with having a shell, but snails have other ways to keep their tiny personal ocean inside their bodies.

Snails not only have their protective shell around them, but when conditions are adverse they can seal themselves inside the shell by secreting a specialized layer of mucus that quickly dries and hardens into a membrane called an epiphragm, which locks the moisture inside their bodies and creates a largely airtight seal against the blistering summer heat. When heat reaches lethal levels, snails are able to shut down, entering a state of prolonged torpor known as aestivation. Desert snails can survive in that state for months, until a rainstorm finally brings them back to life. Furthermore, if you ever notice clusters of snails gathering on the top of fence posts or dried bushes on hot summer days, you are witnessing yet another adaptation to resist the heat and save water. Because of thermal stratification, the air just a few centimetres above the baking earth can be significantly cooler, saving the snails from the heat radiating from the ground.

Snails are quite common and widespread, and if you look through your garden you are bound to quickly find several of them munching away at your plants. One such common garden dweller is the brown-lipped snail (Cepaea nemoralis), one of the most common large land snails in Europe. It may look like the one in the photo below, but it can also be quite different, because this is a highly variable species with shells ranging from brown, through pink, to yellow or even whitish, with or without one to five dark-brown bands. In biology, the occurrence of two or more clearly different morphs or forms in the population of a species is known as polymorphism and may arise for different reasons. Brown-lipped snails tend to be darker in woodlands than in open areas, which might be related to camouflage or an adaptation to local climates: paler, more reflective colours in sunny environments reduce water loss and overheating.

This species feeds mainly on dead or senescent plants, so it is actually not a significant threat to your garden. Like all land snails, they are hermaphrodites, meaning each individual has both male and female reproductive organs, but they still need to mate with other individuals to produce viable offspring. Mating mostly happens in late spring and early summer, after which they lay eggs that hatch after 2 to 3 weeks. These snails are relatively long-lived, reaching up to 8 years of age, meaning that some of the snails in your garden might be older than the children playing in it. To survive the winter, they crawl under leaf litter or burrow into loose soil, sealing themselves inside their shells to escape the frost. While they remain largely dormant during the coldest months, an unseasonably warm spell can quickly prompt them to wake up and explore.

The next time a summer heatwave hits your neck of the woods, as you scramble for shade and something cool to drink, remember that you are taking part in yet another chapter of an age-old battle. Ever since our ancestors took the bold step to colonize the land on our planet, we must forever battle to keep that primordial ocean inside our bodies, its water sloshing within each one of our cells. We are far from the worst at waging that good fight, but it is quite humbling to think that a humorously slow and unimposing snail can do it better. Something to ponder as you sip your iced tea on a shaded terrace and spot a bunch of snails hanging from a post under the blistering sun.

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I remember the six weeks I spent on Selvagem Grande as an extremely pleasant period, from which I retain almost nothing but memories of happy moments, calm, joy, and a sense of work well done. After the six planned weeks on the island — with the job completed and almost all of the island’s wonders discovered — it was time to return to reality. Of course, there was also longing1, and plenty of it. I missed my family, especially my partner Ana who, while I was on Selvagem Grande, was carrying in her belly our little one, tiny João, who would be born that October. I missed home too, “civilization,” and that other Portugal fastened to the rest of Europe.

The 8th of August 2012 brought with it my departure from Selvagem Grande. This time, incredibly enough, the handover went smoothly. The Navy vessel, the buoy tender N.R.P. Schultz Xavier, arrived on the scheduled day, and the tiring transfer of people and supplies between the ship and the island unfolded as planned. We left Selvagem Grande around four in the afternoon (see photograph below), but behind us the now‑unmistakable silhouette of the island remained visible on the horizon for several hours, as the sun sank toward a phenomenal open‑sea sunset.

The N.R.P. Schultz Xavier was a considerably larger ship than the N.R.P. Cuanza, which had brought me to the Selvagens Islands. This time I even had a bunk to sleep in. We had also prepared a small hamper for the trip, and the sea was phenomenal, so the journey went by without the slightest incident. I remember only that magical sunset, the Cory’s shearwaters and Bulwer’s petrels patrolling the waters around us, and a group of Atlantic spotted dolphins that at one point came very close to the ship and accompanied it for several minutes in their usual joyful show of leaps and dives.

We arrived in Funchal at dawn and made the most of that day, the only one we would have on the island of Madeira. Lourenço and Joana, Madeirans through and through, were determined to show us some of the wonders of their beautiful island, so rightly known as the pearl of the Atlantic. Thanks to the highways and tunnels that have tamed Madeira’s rugged terrain, we had enough time to briefly visit Ribeira Brava, a small seaside town on Madeira’s south coast known for its waterfront promenade and easy cafés, and São Vicente, a lush north‑coast village framed by steep green valleys and famous for its lava caves.

We returned to Funchal in time to stroll through the city and enjoy a delicious dinner of limpets and parrotfish. After the meal, our hosts took us to a bar where we could try the best ponchas in Funchal — of course, just to confirm that the ponchas we made on Selvagem Grande were indeed the best in the world! I won’t deny that we were already more than a little tipsy when we said our goodbyes late that night, but the next day Cristóbal and I still managed to wake up very early to catch our flight back to Lisbon. My adventure in the Selvagens Islands had come to an end; what remained were the memories that will stay with me for the rest of my days.

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In professional snooker, the playing surface must be absolutely perfect. The exact height, density, and direction of the nap — the fuzz on the fabric — dictate the physics of the entire game. If the nap is uneven by even a fraction of a millimeter, a slow-rolling ball will drift ever so slightly, enough to ruin a player’s shot. To achieve such perfection, professional snooker cloths are exclusively made of the best Merino wool, and the process of raising the nap is still done with natural teasel seed heads. The technique of using teasels to finish cloth dates back to Ancient Rome and became widespread in the Middle Ages, when the wool trade became a backbone of the international economy. Today, the process is heavily automated and relies almost entirely on large machines equipped with specialized metal wire teeth. While these suffice for most everyday fabrics, they still fail to achieve the same results as natural teasel for three main reasons: first, the tiny, elastic hooks on a teasel head are much finer than any steel or nylon wire a machine can draw, separating individual wool fibers at a microscopic level; second, unlike steel wire that may tear a thread when it hits a microscopic knot in the wool, a teasel hook will simply break its own tip off, avoiding catastrophic tears in expensive fabrics; and finally, teasels create a highly uniform, directional nap, allowing players to anticipate friction depending on whether the ball rolls “with” or “against” the nap, helping them achieve that near-perfect control of the cue ball.

Outside the world of sports, teasel heads are a classic example of the striking winter skeletons left behind by plants after they shed their green summer exuberance in preparation for the darker months of the year. The photo below shows a wild teasel (Dipsacus fullonum) head right here in my neighbourhood, in Groningen, and you can see why gardeners intentionally leave such structures standing through winter. They have a rather exquisite, geometric beauty, look especially striking under a thin layer of snow, and also form a crucial source of food and shelter for birds and insects.

Such sturdy, beautiful structures left behind by plants to endure the winter months tend to fall under three categories: seed heads and cones, pom-poms and umbels, and rattleboxes and pods. Other than the wild teasel, examples of the first group include the cones of the purple coneflower, which often provide a winter buffet for goldfinches; and the silver, golf-ball-sized flower heads of the globe thistles, which look like miniature engineered spheres. Among the second group are the beautiful papery, sepia-toned, flat flower heads of hydrangeas, which remain intact on the woody stems all winter long, holding tiny caps of snow; as well as the massive, exploding-star spheres of the giant alliums, which dry out into delicate, see-through, tawny cages that look like whimsical architectural wire structures dotting the winter landscape. Finally, plants like the evening primrose leave behind tall, woody stalks lined with neat, split-open seed pods that local birds rely on during the coldest months and also provide overwintering cavities for native solitary bees; while the wild indigo produces pea-like seed pods that turn a dramatic, inky charcoal black and rattle as the wind shakes the seeds inside.

The wild teasel is also known as fuller’s teasel, although the latter name is usually applied to the cultivated variety that is used for raising the nap of high-end fabrics. The species is native to Europe and North Africa, but has also been introduced to the Americas, southern Africa, Australia and New Zealand due to its value for textile processing, where in some regions it has become a noxious invasive weed. It’s an herbaceous biennial plant, meaning it takes two years to complete its life cycle, and can grow up to 2,5 metres tall. The leaves are lanceolate and 20 to 40 cm long, while the inflorescence forms a cylindrical head of lavender flowers at the tip of the stem. The seeds are an important winter food resource for some birds, notably the European goldfinch.

If you look closely at where a teasel’s leaves meet its stem, you may notice that they fuse together to form a deep, water-tight cup. When it rains, these cups fill up with water and inevitably become watery graves for ants, flies, and beetles, which led 19th-century botanist Francis Darwin — one of the sons of the great Charles Darwin — to propose that the plant was carnivorous. There has been a great debate ever since over this theory, but more recent research suggests that those water cups are essentially defensive moats against sap-sucking insects. The plant has no means to lure insects into the water, nor does it secrete any enzymes to break down its presumed prey. While it may opportunistically soak up a tiny bit of nitrogen as nutrients leach from a decomposing insect, this is likely an accidental bonus, as studies have found that teasel growth and reproduction are entirely dependent on soil nutrients.

So, while Francis Darwin may have been wrong about the wild teasel’s appetite for flesh, he was entirely right to be captivated by this plant. It need not be carnivorous to deserve our fascination. Standing alongside faded hydrangea flowers, rattling wild indigo pods, and many other beautiful plant structures that punctuate the barren winter landscape, the teasel is a reminder that the natural world never ceases to amaze. Beyond its rich history in human industry, its geometric beauty, and its clever defensive moats, it just needs a little touch of winter frost to show off how beautiful plants can be, even in the dead of winter.

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Link to Chapter 34

The last major task that awaited us before the end of my stay was fitting the geolocators, the small devices that would collect information on the migratory routes of the Bulwer’s petrels. Since, at that stage, these birds only visited their nests at night, the work had to be done after dusk and ended up taking up most of the nights of my final week on Selvagem Grande. Fortunately, these were pleasant nights of teamwork, as most of these climbs to the plateau involved every member of the team then on the island, including our tireless dog Selvagem. They were lively nights that always rewarded us with interesting observations, whether it was the beauty of the nocturnal sky or the sight of two Bulwer’s petrels so absorbed in a fierce, unrelenting fight that they didn’t separate even when six humans and a dog arrived right beside them. We began this task six days before the end of my stay, and I expected to finish it in two or three nights of work. But that was not how things would unfold.

The first night yielded only four birds captured and fitted with a geolocator, which immediately suggested that placing all twenty devices we had available would not be as simple as I had hoped. The second night brought another four, keeping the pace of the previous evening, but the third night produced only three birds. With nine devices still to deploy and my nights on the island running out, I decided to push the field effort further on the fourth night. I chose to pull an all‑nighter and spend the entire night up on the plateau, visiting the nests every hour.

It was certainly a long night. The first round of nest checks was done around half past midnight, in the company of Maria and Cristóbal, and we found three birds to which we could attach the devices. It was a good start for that night’s labour, but there were still six geolocators left to deploy. Once the first round was finished, my colleagues headed back home — they had work to do the following morning — leaving me alone on the plateau. The night was magnificent, with moonlight so strong it casted shadows on the ground and allowed me to walk without a torch, and with a mild temperature that let me stay out all night without much cold despite the wind blowing from the sea. Between rounds of nest visits, I rested in a small shed on the plateau, where the wardens keep equipment. I shared the space with a few geckos that watched me leave every hour to check the nests.

The sky was spectacular, with countless stars and the pale streak of the Milky Way stretching almost from one end of the sky to the other. It was the kind of night that makes it easy to believe the Universe is truly infinite. Spending a night alone in such a harsh place was an amazing experience, but the all-nighter — which lasted until seven in the morning — yielded only three more birds. Despite that brutal effort, I still had to capture another three birds during the final two nights of my stay. But first, I needed to give my body a chance to recover from the sleepless night. Unfortunately, once you cross into your thirties, an all-nighter has the same effect as an epic hangover.

The following day, I dragged myself around the Nature Reserve house, with little strength in my muscles and no activity in my brain. I tried to save what little energy I had left for yet another night ascent, hoping with fingers crossed that it would be the last. I really didn’t feel like climbing up again on the final night, which would already be taken up by packing and other preparations for the trip back to Madeira. But that didn’t depend on me; it depended on the Bulwer’s petrels and their unpredictable visits to the nests.

When night fell, with my body finally more awake, we climbed to the plateau. We quickly caught two individuals, and it seemed we might be able to finish the work that very night. But the last plastic ring, needed to attach the geolocator to the leg of the final bird, snapped. Clearly, luck was not on our side. Once again, there was work left for the following day. Selvagem Grande didn’t seem eager to release me from my tasks before the very hour of my departure. To make up for this streak of bad luck, the Universe treated us once more to an absolutely stunning sky — the kind no one has ever truly seen unless they have escaped the light pollution of the European mainland — complete with two shooting stars to crown the moment.

The following day, we finally fitted the last device (see photograph below), remarkably during daylight as we carried out our usual morning round to weigh the chicks. The mission was complete; all that remained was to do the necessary tidying and cleaning and wait for the navy vessel that would arrive the next day. On the legs of the Bulwer’s petrels, the geolocators were beginning to collect, day after day, the precious information that would show us, for the first time, the details of their long journeys across the ocean. From then on, the work passed into the birds’ wings. All that remained was to wait for their return with the data.

In the following year, during June 2013, my colleagues recaptured those birds newly returned to their nests and recovered the geolocators that had taken us so much work to deploy. Eighteen of the devices had faithfully done their job and contained valuable information, later analysed by Maria Dias and by another Maria devoted to seabirds, Maria Alho, a Master’s student at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon. They discovered that, immediately after the breeding season, the Bulwer’s petrels move to the deepest parts of the Atlantic Ocean, spending the winter patrolling waters with average depths greater than four thousand metres, always far from the continental shelves of both Africa and South America. Most of our birds remained around the latitudes of Cape Verde and northern Brazil, but some of the tracked individuals ventured deep into the South Atlantic, even crossing the Tropic of Capricorn. These deeper waters, far from any continent, are generally avoided by most seabirds, largely because they are notoriously poor in fish. Yet these are the waters preferred by the Bulwer’s petrels for much of the year, showing not only how special this bird truly is, but also that the ocean still holds mysteries far beyond our sight.

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An introduced species is simply a foreigner living in a new land. Scientists estimate that there are more than 37000 established introduced species worldwide, a number that is probably very conservative, and the number is growing by roughly 200 new species every single year due to global trade, shipping, and travel. Some of these species were imported intentionally, as ornamentals, agricultural crops, or pets, but many others simply hitched a ride and found a new place to dwell. Most stay within a small area, or rely entirely on humans to survive, but about 10% of them become what is known as invasive. These are the ones that aggressively spread, outcompete local wildlife, alter ecosystems, and cause severe economic harm. It is estimated that invasive species cause close to 400 billion euros in damages and economic costs every year, alongside immense ecological mayhem.

Here in the Netherlands, a common invasive species is the giant hogweed. Locally known as reuzenberenklauw (“giant bear’s claw”), this plant originates from the Caucasus Mountains and was brought to western Europe as an ornamental plant in the 19th century. Each plant can produce tens of thousands of seeds and it thrives in disturbed soils, so it spread like wildfire, outcompeting the native vegetation. The giant hogweed is also very dangerous for humans because it contains high concentrations of chemical compounds called furanocoumarins, which easily penetrate our skin just by brushing against the plant. At first it causes no immediate pain or visible effect, but when the skin is exposed to sunlight, these chemicals become UV-activated and damage skin cells, leading to severe irritation and blistering that can resemble second-degree burns. Despite intensive efforts to control it, the giant hogweed remains very widespread and a risk for humans and natural habitats alike.

Some of the most disruptive introduced species worldwide are actually very familiar ones. In fact, they are literally household names: cats and rats. Cats have accompanied humans everywhere they have gone, as pets and as an efficient solution for house pests, but they are also ruthless predators, having contributed to the extinction of at least 63 species of birds, mammals, and reptiles globally, particularly devastating island ecosystems where native wildlife evolved without mammalian predators. Rats have been hitchhiking on ships for centuries, colonizing almost every corner of the globe. They voraciously prey on bird eggs, small animals, and native vegetation, and are the primary drivers of island biodiversity loss. In fact, most ecological recovery efforts on islands can only begin once rats have been eradicated.

Other infamous members of the list of worst invasive species in the world include the European rabbit, which after being introduced to Australia bred... well, like rabbits, causing such damage to the local flora that it led to massive soil erosion and starved out many native herbivores; the zebra mussel, a tiny freshwater mollusk which multiplies so aggressively that it can physically clog power plant water pipes, coat boat hulls, and starve out native mussels and fish by stripping plankton from the water; and the water hyacinth, an aquatic weed that can double its population size in just six days, forming thick, choking mats over lakes and rivers that block sunlight, deplete oxygen levels, and make boating or fishing impossible.

For someone who enjoys contact with wildlife, the topic of invasive species is a conflicting one. On one hand, there is no doubt that invasive species are a very pressing ecological issue and all measures should be taken to revert the invasions and mitigate the damage they cause; on the other hand, it’s not fair to vilify the invasive organisms. They found themselves in a new place, and are simply trying to survive, even if at the cost of the native species. I would much prefer enjoying a given animal or plant in its native environment, surrounded by its natural ecosystem. If it is in a non-native area, then it is more responsible to at least not facilitate its further spread, for instance by not walking over a patch of invasive plants to avoid inadvertently spreading their seeds.

This brings me to a species that I have seen both in its natural range and in places where it is increasingly becoming a problem: the Egyptian goose (Alopochen aegyptiaca). Back in 2001, I visited Uganda to take part in a Tropical Biology course. During the course, we visited Queen Elizabeth National Park, where we could enjoy typical African wildlife such as elephants, buffalo, hyenas, and even lions. Among the birds, there were some Egyptian geese, calmly swimming the same waters as huge crocodiles and hippos. A few months later, back in Europe, I spotted one in a city park in Lisbon. Being still a relatively green birdwatcher, I thought I had stumbled upon an incredibly rare sighting. Little did I know that these geese had been expanding in Europe already since the 1960s, when they were spotted breeding in the wild in the Netherlands.

Today, the Egyptian goose counts over 26000 breeding pairs in Europe, about half of which are in the Netherlands. I now see them on a daily basis, both in urban areas and in more natural habitats. They are quite handsome birds, as you can see in the photo below, but unfortunately they are also extremely territorial and aggressive towards native wildfowl. I have personally seen them attacking and killing shelduck chicks that wandered too close. They also occupy the nests of other species, even native raptors such as buzzards and goshawks; they cause significant damage to crops and pastures; and their nitrogen-rich faeces can degrade water quality and increase the risk of toxic blue-green algal blooms and bacterial infections like botulism.

The Egyptian goose is the bad boy of the local ponds, maybe because it evolved to survive alongside African megafauna. It brought that savanna-forged grit to the manicured parks of Europe, and is thriving in the only way it knows how. The next time you take a walk and notice an Egyptian goose fiercely guarding a patch of grass, a stand of hogweed along a road, or simply one of the neighbourhood cats on the prowl, take a moment to really look at them. These creatures are stark reminders that the nature we step outside to enjoy isn’t a static postcard from the past, but rather a complex puzzle in constant motion. Beyond the interwoven layers of history, ecology, and human impact, what is playing out before our eyes is raw survival. Who can say what we would recognize if, centuries from now, someone brought us forward to their present, into the mists of our own future?

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With that surge of fieldwork that dominated the final stretch of my stay on the Selvagens Islands, I almost forgot to mention the main form of entertainment that filled our free time during that period: the Olympic Games. The London 2012 Olympics began on 27 July, with an impressive opening ceremony orchestrated by the renowned filmmaker Danny Boyle, featuring British icons such as the super‑spy James Bond, the bewildering Mr. Bean, and even Queen Elizabeth II herself. We, the six temporary islanders of Selvagem Grande, despite our isolation and thanks to the wonders of modern telecommunications, followed closely the Olympic achievements of our peers in the most important sporting competition on the planet.

From judo to table tennis, from swimming to rowing, from athletics to gymnastics, and from team sports to the more radical disciplines, we devoured everything RTP1 had to show us. We might not have understood much about some of the sports at first, but after a few days we were already able to distinguish an ippon from a waza‑ari in judo, and we even felt confident enough to give our opinions on who the best athletes were in the various acrobatic and artistic gymnastics events.

Unfortunately, the performance of the Portuguese athletes was not among the most impressive, with the excellent silver medal won by the canoeing duo Emanuel Silva and Fernando Pimenta standing out as the clear highlight. Also etched in our memory were the strong results achieved by the rest of the Portuguese canoeing team, as well as Jéssica Augusto’s seventh place in the marathon. The defeat of our great judoka Telma Monteiro, eliminated already in the second round of her competition, was not easy for us to accept, but we did take some small consolation in seeing that the athlete who defeated her, the American Marti Malloy, went on to win the bronze medal.

But the Olympic Games are above all a celebration of the unity of the human species, and so the nationality of the athletes, and the partisanship that comes with it, matters very little. Countless athletes, across the most diverse disciplines, amazed us with their achievements: whether it was the death‑defying routines on the horizontal bar by the Dutch gymnast Epke Zonderland, the infernal strokes of Michael Phelps and company in the Olympic pool, the gazelle‑like stride of Usain Bolt in the sprint events, or the extraordinary team plays in the volleyball and basketball tournaments.

We spent many pleasant afternoons debating the merit of a judo throw, the quality of a somersault, or even the beauty of the volleyball players from Eastern European countries. We, the temporary inhabitants of Selvagem Grande, might not have been Olympic athletes, but we returned home in excellent physical shape after all the exercise we did there every day, whether climbing cliffs, swimming through crystal‑clear waters, or walking the island’s dusty paths (see photograph below). Of course, if there was a gold medal for weighing Bulwer’s petrel chicks, it would certainly have gone to Portugal, with the top spot on the podium shared between Maria and me.

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The more you notice the life beyond your body, the more you see how it reflects the life within you. Like in any love affair, that sense of communion will keep you coming back for more. At first you will enjoy the obvious, the nearby, and the easy to spot. Things like flowers, butterflies, and birds are all a feast for the eyes and easily accessible regardless of where you live. But as you further the process of rewilding yourself, you may come to learn to see what cannot be seen. Some animals are so skittish and secretive that they are virtually impossible to spot, yet they leave behind signs, signatures of their presence to be read by keen, knowing eyes. A bunch of hairs, a couple of feathers, footprints, scat, pellets, bite marks, and dens or nests can all be tell-tale signs of the presence of an animal even when it can't be seen.

In southern Europe, we can find the red-rumped swallow, possibly the most beautiful swallow in Europe. Unfortunately, the species is quite scarce and easily overlooked among the much more abundant barn swallows. But if you happen to find a mud nest shaped like an igloo, with a dome and an entrance tunnel, often built under bridges, then you know that there are red-rumped swallows nearby. No other European bird builds a nest like that.

If you find a shallow hole or small depression on the ground that is full of tiny, black, olive-like droppings, that is a sure sign that there are rabbits around. That hole is a latrine, a communal toilet that the local rabbits use to do their business. Such latrines are also useful for biologists because their number and size can be used to accurately estimate the abundance of rabbits in a given area without ever laying eyes on a single one of them. Such scat is also an easy way to tell rabbits apart from their close relatives, the hares. Hares also produce tiny, roundish droppings, but these are pale greyish or brownish and scattered over the ground instead of gathered in a well-defined latrine.

And then there are the chewed-up trees near waterways. They are the handiwork — or rather, the teethiwork — of none other than beavers, and a sure sign that there are beavers nearby. Each of these is a great example of wildlife signs that can be used to detect hard-to-spot animals, and finding these can be just as enjoyable as the flight of a butterfly or the song of a bird for the initiated nature lover. There is another type of sign that, once learned, will have you feeling like a bushman hunter deep in an African savanna: animal tracks.

Tracks often tell a story. The shape and size of a footprint can tell you which animal made it, but several footprints together can say a lot about where the animal was going, how fast it was travelling, if it was maybe injured, or even if it was carrying or dragging something. They are also a fantastic way to detect wildlife that is otherwise extremely hard to spot. Take the European badger (Meles meles) which left the footprint in the photo below. I have visited several places where badgers live, and even seen the entrances to their setts, the massive underground dens where they live, but I have only ever seen a badger once. In fact, the sighting was so far away and in such bad lighting that I am not even completely sure it was indeed a badger. But if there are muddy patches near where they live, it's not that hard to find the roundish, five-toed tracks with clear claw marks, often compared to miniature bear tracks.

European badgers have a very distinct look, with a black-and-white striped face looking a bit like a grumpy old man with thick eyebrows or spectacles. Maybe because of that, their cultural image is often that of an old badger sitting in its cozy home, drinking tea and reading or telling stories to its friends. But beyond the fairytale imagery, they are fascinating animals. Badgers are mustelids, which means they are related to otters, martens and weasels. The European badger is a powerfully built animal with a small head, stocky body, small black eyes and short tail, and a coat of black, white, brown, and grey fur. They are found throughout Europe, and in the Caucasus and parts of the Middle East.

These animals are nocturnal, spending the daytime sleeping in their vast underground setts, which they dig with their powerful claws. They are very particular about the cleanliness of their burrows, carrying in fresh bedding and removing soiled material on a daily basis. They also never use their burrows as toilets, instead digging shallow latrines away from the sett entrances. Although they are classified as carnivorans, just like the big cats, the canids, or the bears, badgers are omnivores, eating a wide range of small animals and plant material. Interestingly, the origin of the English word badger is uncertain: it may derive from "badge", in reference to the white mark on its forehead, but the French word bêcheur ("digger") has also been suggested as a possible origin.

Whether you track badgers, rabbits, swallows, or maybe even a lion or a tiger, wildlife signs allow us to add a whole new dimension to how we perceive and experience nature. Admittedly, it's not easy to learn such a skill, but the good news is that there are some beautifully illustrated nature guides that focus specifically on tracks and signs. If you have the opportunity, try to look for these cryptic clues, for the payoff will be enormous. The ability to see what isn't there is nothing short of a superpower, and one that is well within our reach. Just try it!

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As the weeks went by, July came to an end and August arrived, bringing with it my final week on Selvagem Grande. It was time for us to start collecting blood samples from adult and chick Bulwer’s petrels in the new nests we had detected over the previous weeks. We had found a total of thirty‑four new nests, more than enough to sample the twenty adults and twenty chicks we were aiming for. Still, it was possible that some of those nests had since been predated, and there was also the familiar challenge that the parents did not visit the nests every night.

On the first night dedicated to this work, we climbed up to the plateau at around ten in the evening to check the thirty‑four nests. In the first five nests we visited, we found four adults, so it seemed pretty much in the bag that we would find all twenty birds among the thirty‑four nests. But that was not how things went. After that initial stroke of luck, we came across several nests that had been predated and many others where the chick was alone. By the end of the round we had only eleven adults, still an excellent result for a single night’s work. Another night like this and the sampling would be complete.

The following morning we began sampling the chicks. That task did not pose any major problems, since the chicks were always “at home”, but collecting a blood sample from a Bulwer’s petrel chick is a little more difficult because they are such tiny animals. It is also one of those tasks that doesn’t feel entirely right to carry out. Even knowing that, when done properly, this type of sampling causes no harm whatsoever to the little bird, it still meant pricking a minute creature with a needle that seemed disproportionately large beside it — although substantially smaller than the needles we are used to seeing used for drawing blood from humans.

Fortunately, the sampling went very well. Small as it is, the brachial vein is already perfectly visible beneath the skin of the underside of the wing, tracing a thin dark line over the white bone, close to the joint that corresponds to our elbow. On that first day we sampled thirteen chicks, stopping only because the fierce wind blowing across the island pushed so much dust into my eyes that it caused considerable discomfort and forced me to return to the base to wash my eyes and apply some eye‑drops to soothe the irritation.

By nightfall, with my eyes already in better shape, we climbed back up to the plateau to continue our vampire‑like activities. The work that night went very well. Not only did we collect the nine remaining blood samples from adult birds, but we also fitted the first four geolocators to track the migration of the Bulwer’s petrels. The wind remained terrifying, howling in our ears without pause, and we had to keep our eyes half‑closed at all times to protect ourselves from the dust swirling through the air.

Despite the tempest, the only mishap that night was a Bulwer’s petrel that, out of stress or revenge, vomited onto me a mixture of squid and fish: its most recent meal. I considered it a fair response; after all, had I not been sticking needles into them? The sea‑scented slime now decorating my trousers contained fragments of squid tentacles, fish scales and fish vertebrae, materials that offer a vivid glimpse into the diet of these birds. Similar materials were used by my colleagues Silke Waap and Hany Alonso to study the diet of Bulwer’s petrels in detail, and they found that these birds feed on a wide range of fish and squid, mostly species that live in the deep sea and visit the ocean surface only at night — strange and mysterious creatures with unusual names such as the flowervase jewel squid, the Cocco’s lantern fish, or the diaphanous hatchetfish.

To conclude our vampiric campaign, the following morning we collected samples from seven more chicks. With practice, it had become quite easy to draw blood from the tiny veins in their wings, but it still didn’t feel entirely right to disturb such small and young animals in that way. Our consolation was seeing that the chicks sampled the day before were perfectly recovered and didn’t even have any visible mark on the wing that might tell the story of our encounter the previous day. Mission accomplished! We now had all the blood samples we needed. But we still had sixteen geolocators left to deploy, which meant a few more nights of work ahead of us in the few days remaining before my return to Funchal and to civilization.

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This ability to resemble another organism or an inanimate object is what we call mimicry, a common strategy in nature that can be used for defense, but also for offense or to help with reproduction. The European comma performs what is known as cryptic mimicry, in which the organism mimics an inanimate, unremarkable object in its environment to go unnoticed, and thus fool its predators. Other examples are stick insects, which look just like any regular stick or twig, or some octopuses that can change colour to exactly resemble rocks, sandy seabeds, or even corals. Other types of defensive mimicry include what is known as Batesian mimicry, in which harmless, tasty species copy the bright colors and patterns of a toxic or dangerous species; and Müllerian mimicry, in which two or more toxic or dangerous species evolve to look like each other, so that predators easily learn what they should avoid, reducing the number of individuals of all the species in the loop that fall victim to predators. A good example of the latter is the many species of bees, wasps, and hornets that all share variations of the same black-and-yellow striped abdomen.

The direct opposite of these various types of defensive mimicry is aggressive mimicry. The proverbial wolf in sheep's clothing. In this case, predators or parasites use mimicry to look harmless or enticing, thereby luring in unsuspecting prey or hosts. Classic examples of this behaviour are the anglerfish, which uses a glowing, fleshy lure that mimics a small worm or fish to draw smaller fish right into its mouth; and the common cuckoo which lays its eggs in the nests of other birds and produces eggs that precisely mimic the color and spotting patterns of the host bird's eggs, tricking the host into raising the cuckoo chick as its own.

That leaves us with the most romantic kind of mimicry: reproductive mimicry. This is most commonly seen in plants, where an organism mimics something else to get help with reproduction, usually without offering anything in return. Some flowers produce pheromones that make them smell like female insects, thus attracting the males; others, like the bee orchid, also look exactly like a female bee, enticing male bees to land on the flower and attempt to mate with it. In both cases, the male insects get nothing but disappointment, while the plant successfully glues its pollen onto the insect, which carries it to the next flower.

Organisms that use mimicry are necessarily hard to spot, but the European comma may be a good one to start with. When out flying, or sunbathing with spread wings, it is quite exuberant, and even when it folds its wings to show the cryptic undersides, there is still a solitary, bright white mark at the center of the wing. This mark is shaped like a comma, giving the species its name. It is also a relatively large butterfly, reaching a wingspan of 6 cm, and widespread throughout Europe, North Africa, and large parts of Asia, especially in areas of open woodland and wood edges. The caterpillars are quite spiny to deter predators and can be found foraging on various plants, such as nettles, hop, elms, currants, and willows.

Mimicry is a fascinating phenomenon, one that keeps nature lovers on their toes. After you spot your first European comma posing as a dead leaf, or a stick insect indistinguishable from a twig, something subtle shifts. The world does not change, but your way of looking does. Shapes hesitate. Edges become suggestions. From that moment on, every leaf carries a small doubt: is it just a leaf?

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