Posts by Julia Flynn Siler
How Birdsong Evolves: In the Footsteps of an Oxford Biologist
Dr. Nilo Merino Recalde, a young researcher studying birdsong at the University of Oxford, walks through a wintry landscape leading into Wytham Woods in Oxfordshire, a woodland habitat for birds, foxes, badgers, and insects. This 1,000-acre woodlands, which date back to the last ice age, are one of the most studied wild places on the…
Read MoreSinging with the Choir
Workmen were pulling up the tattered carpets of our college chapel at Oxford, which meant that our choir was temporarily homeless for our weekly rehearsal. After casting around for alternative spaces, our music director came up with a solution: we crossed Holywell Street and entered the grounds of nearby New College, making our way to…
Read MoreIntrepid Women at the Pitt-Rivers Museum
On the eve of International Women’s Day, a standing-room only crowd of a hundred or so people squeezed into an upper gallery of Oxford University’s Pitt-Rivers Museum, a place known to generations of British school children as where they saw shrunken heads. The tsantsa, or shrunken heads, were removed from their display cases in 2020…
Read MoreThe Garden Maestro
Neil Wigfield stands in front of a mostly bare flower bed on a bitterly cold afternoon in February without a hat or gloves. Though the temperature hovers around freezing that day in Oxford, he’s wearing a single fleece top on to keep him warm. But, as he explains the succession of spring blooms that will…
Read MoreRowing the Thames
One of my recent discoveries in Oxford has been the Falcon Boat Club, founded by a group of pleasure-boating men from Holywell Church in 1869 and initially based out of of my local pub, The King’s Arms. Unlike most of Oxford’s rowing clubs, it admitted women as members from its beginnings, more than 150 years…
Read MoreWalking the Bells
My first Saturday in Oxford, I walk down the Banbury Road towards St. Giles Church. My small roller bag click clacks over the broken sidewalk. Bells peal in a melodic succession:123456…654321. At first, the ringing seems to be coming from a dated glass and concrete building – a structure, I learned, that some locals consider…
Read MoreBecoming a Late-in-Life Athlete
In the early days of the pandemic, I began sculling on a creek flowing into the San Francisco Bay – a waterway that’s home to egrets, herons, and the occasional northern spotted owl. Wearing a mask inside the boathouse, I joined other fledgling rowers on a novice master’s team. Four years later, I’m still rowing…
Read MoreHow a Sentence Reverberated
We’re all connected. I was reminded of that when a neighbor mentioned he’d read my story for Alta Journal about traveling to the Arctic Circle last fall. One sentence leapt out at him: “Nothing seemed fixed: water, stars, sky, or people. It was all changing and rotating and moving in a dance governed by randomness.”…
Read MoreLahaina’s Banyan Tree
The subject line was “Hello from New York Times Opinion.” It landed in my inbox about 24-hours after the horrific wildfires on Maui had begun to spread. I’d already checked in with friends who live on the island, to make sure they were safe. Like the rest of the world, I was watching in horror…
Read MoreArctic Adventures
Last fall, I took part in an unusual residency program in the Arctic Circle. I spent two and a half weeks aboard Antigua, a three-masted sailing ship with 29 artists and writers on an expedition to explore the Svalbard archipelago. It was quite a trip. I wrote a story about my experience for the current…
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