The Mauritius kestrel is a small bird of prey found nowhere on Earth except the island of Mauritius. Measuring only about 20 to 26 centimetres in length, it has short, rounded wings, brown upperparts marked with black, and a pale cream chest patterned with dark, heart-shaped spots. Most falcons are built for speed and chase their prey across open country, but the kestrel is different. Its broad, rounded wings let it turn sharply and weave between the trees of thick forest rather than fly in fast, straight lines. It is the only bird of prey native to the island that still survives today.
The kestrel hunts by day. It spends long periods perched on a branch, watching the ground and the surrounding foliage for the slightest movement before dropping suddenly onto its target. Its diet sets it apart from other members of the falcon family: instead of feeding mainly on other birds, it relies heavily on the small geckos that live in the trees of the Mauritian forest, although it will also take insects, young rodents and the occasional small bird. The species once occupied the dense native woodland that covered much of the island, and it shows a strong preference for steep valleys and cliffs, where hunting perches and sheltered ledges are easy to find.
Pairs breed once a year, in the southern spring. The female generally lays three or four eggs in a hollow — a cavity in a cliff face, a hole in a tree, or, in recent decades, a specially built box. She carries out most of the incubation herself, while the male brings food to her at the nest; once the eggs hatch, both parents feed the young. Because the nesting cavity is fixed in place and cannot be moved, the eggs and chicks are easy targets for any animal able to climb up to them.
For thousands of years the kestrel had faced no predators on the ground and was widespread across the island. This changed once people settled Mauritius and began to clear its forests. Enormous areas of woodland were cut down to make room for fields of sugar cane and, later, tea, so that by the twentieth century only a small fraction of the original forest was left standing. The loss of trees gave the birds far less space in which to hunt and nest. From the 1940s a further danger appeared: chemicals such as DDT, sprayed to kill mosquitoes and protect crops, gradually built up in the food chain and weakened the shells of the kestrel's eggs, so that many cracked before the chicks inside were ready to hatch.
The settlers had also brought with them a number of animals that the kestrel had never before encountered. Rats and feral cats climbed to the nests, and crab-eating monkeys, which had been introduced to the island long before and were by then living wild in the forest, robbed the cavities of their eggs. Between the disappearance of the forest, the effect of the chemicals and the appetite of these newcomers, the population fell sharply. By 1974 only four wild birds were known to remain, and the Mauritius kestrel was described as the rarest bird in the world.
A rescue effort had in fact begun a few years earlier, but little progress was made until a young biologist named Carl Jones took charge of the project at the end of the 1970s. Jones refused to accept that the species could not be saved. His team removed eggs from wild nests and hatched them safely indoors, a step that encouraged the females to lay a replacement clutch and so doubled the number of chicks produced each season. Young birds reared in captivity were later released into protected forest. The kestrels were also given nest boxes that predators found much harder to enter, along with extra food to carry them through periods when wild prey was scarce.
The strategy succeeded. Numbers rose steadily through the 1980s and 1990s as more captive-bred birds were set free, and by the end of the century several hundred kestrels were once again flying above the island. The recovery is now widely regarded as one of the most successful projects of its kind ever attempted, and in 2022 the country honoured the bird by declaring it the national bird of Mauritius. The kestrel's future, however, is still not secure. Today's population descends from very few survivors, so its genetic variety is narrow, and introduced predators remain an ever-present threat. Conservationists continue to watch over the nests, maintain the boxes and look after the remaining forest. Their main goals are to keep the separate populations healthy, to protect enough suitable habitat for the birds to spread on their own, and to keep local people closely involved in the effort.
ABeneath the shallow waters around the British Isles there once lay vast underwater meadows of seagrass — grass-like plants, chiefly a species known as eelgrass, that root in the seabed and sway with the current. These meadows were once common along sheltered coasts, but today they are classed as nationally scarce. Some estimates suggest that as much as 90 per cent of the UK's seagrass has vanished over the past century. Because the loss took place out of sight, few people noticed. 'You cannot see a seagrass meadow from the beach, so when it disappears, nobody mourns it,' says Dr Helen Marsh, who leads a seagrass restoration project. 'Everyone understands that a forest has been cut down; almost no one realises that something just as rich has gone from beneath the waves.'
BSeagrasses are not seaweeds but flowering plants, more closely related to the grasses of dry land, and they are the only flowering plants that live fully submerged in the sea. Much of the damage to them was done in a single, dramatic episode. During the 1920s and 1930s, meadows collapsed almost simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic in what came to be called 'wasting disease'. The cause was eventually traced to a slime mould, a microscopic organism that passes from plant to plant through the water and rots the leaves from within. Within a few years the outbreak had destroyed roughly nine-tenths of the eelgrass in the North Atlantic, and the meadows have never fully recovered.
CThe seagrass that clings on today faces newer pressures, the greatest of which is pollution. When too many nutrients wash off the land into the sea — from farm fertiliser or sewage — the water fills with tiny floating algae, and a fur of growth coats the seagrass leaves. Starved of the light they need to make food, the plants weaken, and they become far more likely to succumb to disease. Anchors and boat moorings tear at the beds, and building work along the shore has buried others. 'This plant is fussy about water quality, and our coastal water is often anything but clean,' notes Professor Ian Coyle, a marine ecologist who has studied the surviving meadows for two decades.
DWhere seagrass was once plentiful, coastal communities found many uses for it. Once it had washed ashore and dried, it was light, springy and slow to rot. For generations it was gathered to stuff mattresses and cushions, and it was packed around fragile goods to protect them in transport. Because it trapped air so well, it also made excellent insulation. On some islands off the coast of Denmark, where timber was scarce but drifts of eelgrass piled up on the shore, it was twisted into thick bundles and used to roof houses. Such roofs were prized because the material cost nothing, resisted vermin and decay, and lasted a remarkably long time — commonly around 200 years, and in a few cases very much longer.
ENot every meadow was lost, and the survivors are of great interest. In a handful of sheltered bays and estuaries the seagrass has held on, and researchers are eager to understand why. Local conditions appear to hold the answer. In one broad, shallow inlet on the west coast, a small human population and a gentle, slow-moving current keep the water unusually clear and free of the pollution that finished off meadows elsewhere. 'The reason this bay still has its seagrass is not luck; it is the particular combination of conditions here,' says Bethan Rowe, who manages a coastal reserve on the inlet. 'But we cannot afford to be complacent. The farm run-off and the moorings that damaged other sites lie only a short way up the coast.'
FRestoring a meadow is painstaking work, and the favoured method does not move whole plants but begins with seed. In late summer, divers gather ripe seeds by hand from healthy meadows; the seeds are then sealed inside small hessian bags that are laid on the seabed, so that the young plants take root in place as the fabric rots away. Britain's largest such scheme, off the coast of north Wales, aims to sow several million seeds across ten hectares. 'Sowing seed rather than adult plants lets us cover far more ground for the effort involved,' explains Marsh. 'It is slow, and not every bag succeeds, but where it works the seagrass soon begins to spread by itself.'
GWhy go to so much trouble? A healthy meadow is astonishingly valuable. It shelters young fish — among them species that fisheries rely on, such as plaice and cod — so that a single hectare may hold thousands more fish than the bare seabed nearby. It also locks carbon away in the mud beneath it, where the carbon can stay for thousands of years, which makes seagrass one of the sea's most powerful defences against a warming climate. Yet not everyone agrees on how best to bring it back. Coyle urges caution. 'Before we spend fortunes planting new meadows, we ought to work out why the survivors have lasted, and put our energy into protecting what we still have,' he says. 'A young meadow is fragile, and it can even carry disease to older ones. Sometimes the wisest course is to clean up the water and let nature do the rest.'
Once seagrass had washed ashore and dried out, coastal communities put it to many uses. It was often used to fill mattresses and 24, and to protect delicate goods while they were being transported. As it held air so well, it also worked as effective 25. On some Danish islands, it was twisted into bundles that formed the 26 of houses, which could last for about 200 years.
Few feelings are as unwelcome as boredom. We sigh in queues, fidget in waiting rooms and reach for our phones within seconds of finding ourselves with nothing to do. From childhood we absorb the message that an empty hour is a wasted one. But is the feeling we are so quick to chase away really useless — or does it quietly do something for us that constant entertainment cannot?
My colleague and I, both psychologists, wanted to find out how the mind behaves when it is given nothing to do, so we arranged to spend two months at a large regional postal depot. The working lives of the sorting staff there vary enormously. In the weeks before public holidays the depot is frantic: parcels arrive faster than the machines can swallow them, and everyone works flat out. In quieter periods, however, an employee may spend an entire shift feeding envelopes into a scanner and watching them slide away, a task that offers nothing new from one hour to the next. These swings between activity and monotony presented the perfect setting for an experiment on what idle time does to our thinking.
We found that a spell of monotonous work acted as a trigger for daydreaming, and that this wandering of the mind improved the staff's performance on tasks requiring imagination — but only when they had let their thoughts drift instead of filling the pause with a distraction.
This is how we arrived at these results. At the end of both busy and quiet shifts, we asked members of the sorting staff to complete a widely used test of creative thinking: in five minutes, they had to propose as many uses as they could for an everyday object, such as a brick or a paper cup. Two judges then rated every suggestion for originality. Crucially, the two judges were given no information about the shifts the workers had just finished.
The pattern was hard to miss. Workers coming off a monotonous shift produced roughly a third more ideas than those coming off a hectic one, and their suggestions were judged distinctly more original. Yet there was an exception. Staff who had spent every quiet moment scrolling on their phones showed no advantage whatsoever; their scores were indistinguishable from those of colleagues who had been run off their feet.
Back in our lab, we observed the same pattern in students. We asked one group to copy long columns of numbers from a telephone directory for twenty minutes — a task selected precisely because it is stupefyingly dull — while a second group watched an absorbing nature documentary. Immediately afterwards, both groups tackled a different creative exercise: listing the possible consequences of an imaginary situation, such as a world in which nobody needed sleep. The number-copiers imagined a far wider range of consequences than the documentary group.
Why should a bored mind produce better ideas? When nothing outside the head demands attention, the brain does not power down. Brain imaging reveals that a collection of regions, known collectively as the default network, becomes more active the moment external demands fall away. This network is engaged when we recall the past, imagine the future and combine stored memories in unfamiliar ways — which is, in essence, the raw material of creative thought.
Such an arrangement could have helped prehistoric humans to survive. An animal entirely content with the familiar would never search for new feeding grounds; one addicted to novelty would take endless risks. Boredom sits between these extremes: it is a signal announcing that the present situation has nothing further to teach, and it pushes its owner towards exploration.
Yet we now engineer idle time out of existence. Every queue, bus ride and lift journey can be filled instantly, and almost no pause is too short to plug: surveys find that most adults check their phones well over fifty times a day. The pauses in which minds once wandered — waiting for a kettle, walking to the station — have been sold off, minute by minute, to the screen.
Curious about what this costs us, we returned to the depot for a follow-up study. Half of the staff agreed to leave their phones in their lockers during quiet shifts; the other half kept them as usual. The difference was striking: those without phones reported far more daydreaming and once again achieved higher creativity scores, while several admitted that the first day without the device had felt distinctly uncomfortable.
None of this means that boredom is always a friend. Chronic boredom — the long-term sense that nothing in life engages you — is associated with gambling, overeating and dangerous driving. The advantage we measured came from brief spells of idleness, not from weeks of monotony. Nor is the empty moment itself enough: a mind allowed to wander drifts towards memories, plans and half-formed ideas, whereas a mind desperate for any escape will simply grab the nearest stimulation, however unrewarding.
The practical lesson costs nothing. Before tackling a problem that needs a fresh idea, do something undemanding: walk without headphones, wash the dishes, sort a drawer. Resist the itch to fill the pause. Being aware of the close relationship between empty time and imagination can help us plan our days more effectively — and treat the occasional dull moment not as a failure of modern life, but as one of its neglected resources.