The wonderful thing about driftwood is the way the action of the sea etches the softer wood between the lines of grain, revealing the sinews, bleaching it to a pale grey, smoothing it, rounding all edges and corners. You want to pick it up and handle it. Responding to just this impulse, I lifted one side of a handsome slab of pine twice the size of a loaf, with beautifully sea-rounded corners. . . Beneath it in a hollow was a long-tailed field mouse and her nest. She stood her ground beside it as two or three of her young, half grown already, did just the right thing, escaping efficiently into the cover of the next-door clump of samphire. Embarrassed to have disturbed the family. . . I gently returned their roof into position, wishing there were some way of reassuring them that this was a genuine mistake and they were quite safe. The look of hurt, uncertainty and puzzlement in the mouse’s face has stayed with me. So has her courage in standing by the nest, decoying us from her young. It is salutary to be reminded of the extent of your own power and your potential for accidental brutality.

And here’s another:

I drive down Castle Cary, where the evening before had been calm, and I had witnessed a posse of badgers sauntering nonchalantly along the street beneath Lodge Hill, knocking the tops off dustbins like teenagers and rifling them, even pausing to tip over the ice-cream sign outside the newsagent’s. Emerging early from the snouting dingles of the town at dusk, they went their rounds with impatient efficiency, jogging from house to like council workers on some lucrative bonus scheme.