The Lost Art of Reading Nature's Signs Use Outdoor Clues to Find Your Way, Predict the Weather, Locate Water, Track Animals—and Other Forgotten Skills

Garter snakes hunt toads, frogs, fish and newts, and like all of these creatures will only be found in water or near it. Snails need a lot of calcium carbonate to build their shells, so snails spotted away from a pond are a clue to a chalky landscape. Scientists have found that periwinkles can orient themselves using the sun and will sometimes leave an oval track as the sun swings around the sky. This offers up the opportunity to do some truly bizarre tracking: by noticing the direction of the periwinkle track you can work out, from the angle of the sun and its relationship with time, exactly when it passed that way. By this point, you might decide it's time to get out less.

In 1900, a French astronomer called Camille Flammarion conducted an interesting test. Flammarion asked readers of an astronomical journal to draw maps of the full moon by looking at it with the naked eye. Forty-nine people took up this challenge and sent in their hand-drawn maps of the moon's surface. There was not one single feature on the moon that appeared on all forty-nine. We all see our own moon.