Words by Amy Woodward | photo by Chris Marchant

There is something about the entrance to a museum. A threshold between worlds. Outside, the world is busy with traffic building impatiently. As the doors swing open and welcome me in, the noise becomes a deliberate hush. Not silence, but the kind of quiet that gathers when you step into a place built to hold what has otherwise slipped from the world's attention. Museums are often described as archives, but today, it felt more like entering a dream preserved in glass. The air has its own temperature, its own gravity; it asks the body to slow down. In the softened atmosphere that smells of history, a truth reveals itself: before you even reach a single specimen, the museum has already begun teaching you how to listen to the quiet lives of those forgotten, waiting to be met again.

The entrance hall becomes a liminal space, neither the bright tumult of the living world nor the still finality of death. It is something stranger, a gateway to the otherwise forgotten, where the past continues to breathe faintly through feather, wing, fur and bone. As I work my way through the galleries, anticipation builds as I become closer to the lepidoptera display. The cases glow faintly, wooden boxes of colour, pinned constellations from around the globe. Butterflies and moths held in the stillness of the afterlife. Their wings, impossibly delicate, seem almost to vibrate with memory of movement. Noticing fragility first, persistence comes second. These creatures, whose lives once lasted days or weeks, have outlived entire human generations through the simple act of being noticed, collected, and preserved.

I leaned toward a case of swallowtails, my eyes exploring colour and shape. The silence of their wings is not mute but full of everything I cannot hear: the tremor of migration routes, the brush of dusk meadows, the soft shock of light when chrysalis first cracks. These specimens, fixed in their glass sanctuaries, become portals. They return me to landscapes I have never walked, to ecological rhythms that continue without me, or no longer exist at all. In their stillness, they remind me that the natural world does not vanish simply because we stop paying attention to it.

As I travel down the gallery corridor, imagining the world of each creature, the atmosphere shifts within when I see the dodo in a cabinet of its own. The most famous absence in natural history. A bird whose story has been told so often that it risks becoming a metaphor that is too symbolic to be felt. But up close, it refuses that fate. The dodo is the museum's great companion to grief. It is not tragic, not grotesque, simply present in a way that makes the loss more real. Lewis Carroll was onto something when he put a dodo in Wonderland. Where the butterfly hums with what remains, the dodo speaks for what is gone, yet both teach the same lesson: connection is not dependent on the living body. We learn from them because they open a channel to the more-than-human world, asking us to imagine what was once ordinary, such as wings in a forest clearing, or heavy footsteps on island soil, and to see the present as something equally fragile.

Standing before the specimens, I understand that none are just remnants or warnings. They are invitations. Through their silence, they ask us to listen to the Earth that we have inherited, altered, and at times failed. They remind us that the forgotten natural world is not truly lost but waits for us in these quiet rooms, ready to take us on a journey of re-connection.

If specimens speak through silence, literature becomes the medium that lets the silence resonate beyond museum walls. Writers like Caspar Henderson, who capture the wild beauty of living forms and invite us to better imagine the precarious world we inhabit, remind us that naming is not an administrative act but a conjuring one. To describe a creature with precision and care to let it rise, however briefly, from the darkness that threatens to swallow it. In language, the vanished and the vulnerable recover the textures, the powder from an Atlas moth, the heavy softness of the dodo's gait, the shimmer of the scarab turning in its own small universe of colour.  

To write about the more-than-human world is to insist that it matters enough to remember, to translate its presence into narratives that humans can hold. Literature turns observation into understanding, into empathy; it restores agency to beings that we can no longer meet. Words become a vessel through which ecologies continue to breathe. Equally, conservation is a kind of storytelling. While science measures populations and ranges on maps, conservationists also rely on narratives that explain why this species matters, what its future might hold, and the impact its loss would have if it were to disappear from Earth today. The stories we tell determine what we choose to protect. A wolf is only evil because a bedtime story told us so. Every habitat restored and every species reintroduced begins as an act of imagination, where a belief is held that a damaged landscape can remember itself, that an ecosystem can return to resembling wholeness.

In this sense, specimens, literature and conservation form a triad of voices. The specimens hold the physical memory, and it is the literary animations that give meaning to that memory. Conservation then turns this meaning into action. Each responds to the other, and together, they create a chain of influence, a lineage of attention. To write about the natural world, especially what is lost, is to participate in this lineage by refusing the idea that absence is the end of their story. In the hands of writers, ecologists, curators and archivists, the forgotten natural world becomes heard again. Even extinction does not silence everything; it leaves traces of scales, pigment, stories, and warnings. Literature and conservation give voice, not by speaking for the tree of beings, but by carving space in which their presence can still be felt and kept alive. They teach us to listen, not just to specimens under glass, but to the living world struggling beyond the museum doors.  

As I leave the galleries and step back into the entrance hall, the hush of the museum lingers. The world outside feels different now. It's as though the specimens have lent me their senses, a quiet gift. The butterflies, the dodo, the creatures held in glass, they don’t exist only to mark what has gone, but to sharpen our awareness of what remains. Their stories return us to the present with clearer attention, the kind that can recognise beauty before it slips past us. This is important because, despite being vulnerable, the natural world is not silent. Moths still gather around porch lights, the spider is still an artist, and seedlings push cracks in the pavement. Conservationists amplify these fragile signals, and literature carries them further. When we choose to listen, truly listen, we join them in this tapestry of life that we are a part of.

Outside, I'm greeted by the autumn sun. I'm peaceful, but something in me has shifted. I notice how the living world threads itself through every gap. How the wren trills and the leaves dance. I'm struck by how much wilderness remains, woven into the ordinary and not seen by so many. What the specimens offered wasn’t a lesson in loss, but an invitation to pay attention as though their stillness sharpened my senses. The forgotten world isn’t sealed behind glass; it's here, persistent and surprising, waiting for us to see it. Noticing matters because to notice these things is a form of participation, a quiet alignment with life. The museum is a preservation of beauty, wisdom and science, holding a door and giving life meaning, and a voice to what's gone, and where we need to pay attention.