A visit to one of the King Penguin colonies on the island of South Georgia is very much like going to a huge rock concert. Everywhere you look there are thousands of penguins, on the plains that fringe the seas and higher up on the tussock grass looking down at it

I came across this python last week while paddling through a mangrove forest on an island off northern Indonesia. At that time a tsunami was sweeping across the Pacific in the wake of the devastating Chilean earthquake.

I’ve just returned from Finland which has had such a bitingly cold winter that I was able to take long walks on the frozen Baltic sea ice right outside Helsinki.

Polar bear hung up to dry, Resolute. Photo by Alun Anderson

Up in the Arctic a polar bear can end up as a skin on a washing line. Indigenous communities rely on hunting animals, and to avoid conflict we need close cooperation between hunters, scientists and enviromentalists.

Photo by Alun Anderson

With the Copenhagen conference over and efforts to combat climate change having run out of steam, my thoughts turn to a female polar bear that I ran into on the Arctic ice just 800 miles from the North Pole.