Mark Cocker
'It takes a whole universe to make the one small black bird'
Photos of the month
It’s a weird Namibian-desert-dwelling relict of the Jurassic but this Welwitschia plant was probably growing when Vasco de Gama sailed past in the late 15th C. 
This huge female spiny toad was as big as my two out-cupped hands and may have been 50 years old. 
the oldest female (called ‘Grandma’) royal albatross in NZ had her last offspring in her 60s. But … 
a medium-sized albatross not dissimilar to this one (shy albatross, also from NZ), called a Laysan albatross, is 71 years old and bred successfully in 2021. 
The Galapagos tortoises are among the longest-lived terrestrial vertebrates and can survive to be 175 years. Although finding humans who can keep exact count is tricky. This tortoise lived on the lip of a volcano on Isabella. I photographed it in 1994 and it’s probably still there. 
These black-tipped reef sharks are the closest I can get you to the 1-tonne 5m-long Greenland shark which lives deep down on the Atlantic Ocean floor and is the oldest living vertebrate on record. Some may be 400 yrs old. 
We often think of big things when we think of longevity, but it was single cell phytoplankton called coccolithophores living in the Cretaceous (c100 mill y a) that built these 100m-tall cliffs at Flamborough. Not quite longevity but they have certainly endured. 
lichens are subtly coloured, modest and seemingly insignificant (tho’ these in the Villuarcas mtns in Extremadura, Spain are none of these things). But they can be amazingly long-lived and some Arctic specimens may have survived since the thaw at the end of the last ice age, ie 12k years old. 
Finally, all life originates with sunlight and the Sun has been beaming it out across the solar system for 4.8 billion years. Yet the light you can see here – while taking c8mins to arrive from the photosphere – originated at the Sun’s core. The average journey time from that source is about 170k years, the age of our entire species,
Longevity
Peter Thomas’ fabulous New Naturalist (Collins) on Trees has got me thinking about the inverse of our seemingly ever-more transient times (ministers of state who last a week and prime ministers a month): namely the durability of the other parts of life. Trees are our favourite long-lived organisms, and here are three of Britain’s most ancient specimens. The first, the Big Belly Oak (1) from Savernake forest in Wiltshire, is said to be older than the post-Norman English state. Then there is the Cathedral Oak (2 with a slightly younger PMC) also in Savernake, the very epitome of a veteran tree, and finally (3) the Doveridge Yew, Derbyshire, said to be 1,200 years old. The other nine images all carry captions and feature plants or animals whose longevity may pass unnoticed, but is nonetheless remarkable. Please note that if you are looking at this on your mobile some of the captions may slightly obscure the images, but turning your device on its side usually improves visibility.
Mark Cocker 