Taking Flight

While humans have largely stayed home over the past year, there have been plenty of anecdotal reports of animals reclaiming their habitats or even extending their territory. The David Attenborough-narrated documentary The Year Earth Changed, which chronicled the profound changes in the natural world in 2020, featured penguins exploring pavements in Cape Town, deer returning to their ancient grazing patch in Nara, Japan, and a leopard staking its claim on terraces at a safari lodge.

For city dwellers, waking gently to the sound of birds chirping has been one of the few upsides of lockdown, when traffic noise was replaced by the calming consonance of nature. Being stuck in one place also