Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast. I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence

Magazine, located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Mewalk people of present-day

Marin County. Each week, we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Cal Flynn is an author and journalist from the highlands of Scotland.

Her books include thicker than water and islands of abandonment.

In this essay, Cal explores the orchestral intricacy of patterns of change in the migration

of butterflies.

As animals, fish, birds, insects and trees migrate northwards on an unprecedented scale.

She faces the haunting knowledge that some voices are rising as others fade away.

Scotland's Orkney Islands, where I live, occupy a kind of climatic border zone.

I grew up only a hundred miles or so to the south, but the difference between the two points is marked.

As one travels north, one passes from a landscape of rough pasture, woodland, and fertile floodplain

into the smooth rolling countenance of peatland and blanket bog.

The few trees that do grow here in Orkney tend to cower and hunch, braced against the wind.

Fields are tussocked and marshy, rimmed with reeds. The higher ground wears a sackcloth of heather and thin grasses,

sometimes a creeping willow that grows not up but across, wreathing the earth in catkins, clambering over boulders.

Gardens too tend toward the Spartan. The weather is cold enough and wild enough that many popular British bedding plants struggle to survive.

It's partly thanks to this harsher climate, and partly due to our separation from mainland Scotland by the treacherous Pentland Firth,

a six-mile straight notorious for tidal races and swirling whirlpools, that we have relatively

few animal species here too. There are no foxes, no badgers, no squirrels, no snakes.

Our biggest land animal is the hare. Though at first, when I arrived, I grieved for the loss of those

not present, I've come to for the loss of those not present,

...