The piece opens with a conjuring trick every good nature writer knows: slow the reader down before the spectacle. Sea and sky merge, a motorboat draws a zipper across the water, garfish snake along in a dark line. Then — detonation. A bluefin tuna erupts into daylight, silver underside lit like a billboard in headlights, and crashes back down, swallowed by its own whirlpool. The writing earns that image by making you wait for it. The factual skeleton here is genuinely remarkable. Atlantic bluefin tuna — animals that grow to 3 metres, live 50 years, and hit 40 mph — were common off England's south coast until the 1950s. Overfishing pushed them to the brink. In the early 2000s, strict international catch regulations were introduced. By 2021, the IUCN reclassified the species from "critically endangered" to "least concern." That's the conservation equivalent of a full resurrection. The writer doesn't dodge the complication. Chris Graham of the Marine Conservation Society names the "background issue" of global warming: warming waters are shifting tuna and prey migration patterns. Devon's post-heatwave coast is now warm enough to feel like tuna heaven. So the return is partly genuine recovery and partly climate-driven range shift — a distinction the piece handles with a light touch rather than collapsing into either triumphalism or doom. What makes the diary entry work as writing, rather than as a press release with scenery, is the physical specificity. The garfish scatter "like sequins." The narrator forgets to breathe. The ocean surface returns to twinkling stillness so quickly that the whole eruption feels hallucinatory. These details are not decorative — they're the observational evidence that this person was actually standing on that cliff. The piece is honest about its own emotional strategy. "The multiple catastrophic effects of the climate crisis on ecosystems are … well, too horrific to look at head-on. So let's focus, if only for today, on this astonishing good news story." That's a deliberate editorial choice stated plainly, not smuggled in. You can disagree with the choice, but the transparency earns respect. As nature writing, this is a small, polished thing — a diary entry, not a book-length investigation. It does exactly what the form demands: it puts you on the cliff, gives you the facts, and gets out. The book it's drawn from, Under the Changing Skies, collects six years of these Guardian Country Diary entries, which is the right container for work that accumulates meaning through repetition and seasonal rhythm rather than through any single entry's ambition.
