A word for it

It's usually the Germans who can encapsulate entire English sentences into a single word - but often those words can be pretty long. Enormous respect, then, to the Mamalilikulla First Nation people of western Canada, for whom the word 'Aweenak’ola’ translates as ‘we are one with the land, sea and sky and supernatural Ones and have a responsibility to care for all the beings’. I think this is perhaps a bit like the notoriously untranslateable Welsh word 'hiraeth', which the 'We Learn Welsh' website says is 'A grief or sadness after the lost or departed, yearning, nostalgia, wistfulness, homesickness, a longing for a particular person, place or memory you’ve kept safely, and sadly, may never revisit later on in life' (I summarise) 

The indigenous Canadians are in the news because they have have offered to re-home on the mainland a grizzly bear that has swum through dangerous, freezing waters to an island, where it is the only bear resident, and making some of the humans there revisit just how committed they are to living in an untamed natural environment. The Mamalilikulla have a one-word solution, but it seems that the impenetrable complexity of Canadian politics doesn't allow the authorities to immediately give the obvious two-word response: 'yes, please'

We are convinced we saw an apex predator in the Teifi Marshes Nature Reserve. Not a grizzly, but an osprey. The observer sitting beside us with some hi-spec binoculars and a very, very big lens on their camera did not seem all that excited, but she was not the sort of birder with whom you engage in conversation in a bird-hide! There have been osprey sightings here over several past days, which gave us the idea that a passing bird-of-prey that we could not recognise, with generally the right shape, might have been it. In the spirit of Aweenak’ola, we know what we saw!

You want evidenced news? We definitely saw this little grebe catch and, with some effort, eat this fish. It is a determined mite of a bird - repeatedly diving and staying underwater for almost alarming lengths of time. This is another of my never-mind-the-quality-feel-the-Aweenak’ola pictures: a very small bird quite a long way away and a phone camera on full digital zoom. At least you can tell it's not an osprey