A couple of summers ago I went for the first time to the Northumberland coast. For non-British readers, that’s the northeast coast of England, just south of the Scottish border. I went because, each July, thousands of puffins nest on the Farne Islands, two miles off the coast...

When the Russians tell “idiot” jokes, it’s the Chukchi who take the flak. Chukotka is an impossibly remote land – there are no roads to connect it to the rest of Russia, and almost no roads within the region itself – and the rest of the country perceives it as backward. Certainly the area’s had its troubles: following the fall of the Soviet Union, when state subsidies ended, its people experienced a poverty that left many starving and some suicidal. 

Pine martens have a bit of a thing for crunchy peanut butter, but they won’t touch the smooth. They love sultanas, but turn their noses up at raisins. ‘Their taste is very refined,’ says Alan, my guide from Speyside Wildlife.

Tuktoyaktuk, or Tuk as it’s more commonly known, is an Inuvialuit (part of the Inuit family) community on the shores of the Beaufort Sea. During the summer, its thousand residents can only reach the nearest town, Inuvik in Canada’s Northwest Territories, by air or sea. In winter, though, a 194-kilometre ice road is carved into the surface of the Mackenzie River and out across the frozen ocean itself.

The Yukon Quest used to be called ‘the toughest dogsledding race in the world’ until the marketing brains decided the tag line was putting off would-be participants. It runs each February for a thousand miles between Fairbanks in Alaska and Whitehorse in Canada’s Yukon Territory...