Short Story Example About Nature: A Complete Story and a Breakdown
Quick answer: An original nature short story, a swift nesting in a thirtieth-floor air conditioner in Guangzhou, with a breakdown of how to keep nature specific and unsentimental.
Nature stories go wrong in two directions: the pastoral, where everything is beautiful and nothing happens, and the sermon, where the story exists to deliver a warning. The way through is a person with a practical problem that the natural world causes. The original story below puts a swift's nest inside an air conditioning unit on the thirtieth floor of a Guangzhou tower block and gives the woman who lives there a deadline. The breakdown afterwards shows how the story keeps nature particular.
Unit 3014
The noise started in April, a dry scratching inside the wall unit above Wen's bed, and by May it had become a chorus. Swifts. She had seen the adults come screaming round the tower at dusk, dozens of them, and she had not thought about where they went until one went into a gap behind her air conditioner with something in its mouth. Building management sent a notice. Residents were reminded that external units must be kept clear of obstruction. Maintenance would attend Unit 3014 on the 20th. Wen worked for an insurance company and knew what a notice like that meant: someone had complained about droppings on a balcony below, and someone else had opened a file. She rang the office and asked how long swifts took. The man on the desk laughed and said he was not a bird person. She looked it up herself. Six weeks from hatching to first flight, sometimes seven. The eggs had been laid, by her count, at the end of April. It was not going to be enough. She could not stop the maintenance. She could, it turned out, reschedule it, once, for a fee, which she paid. Then she could report the technician sick, which she did not do, but thought about. In the end she did the thing she was good at. She wrote to management, on company letterhead, citing the municipal ordinance on protected species, which she had found at one in the morning and which mentioned swifts by name in a subclause nobody had read since 2009. Maintenance was postponed pending review. The review took nine weeks. On the fifth of July, at 6.40 in the morning, Wen stood on her balcony in her work clothes and watched something small and dark drop out of the gap behind the unit, fall for a heart's length, and then not fall. It went round the tower once, close enough that she felt the air, and did not come back. The scratching stopped that week. She left the gap open.
How the story keeps nature specific
Swifts, not birds. Six weeks, not a while. A subclause from 2009, not the law. The story earns its subject by knowing it, and the knowledge arrives through Wen's research rather than the narrator's, so it reads as character rather than lecture. The natural event is measured in the units Wen understands: files, notices, fees, deadlines. That collision between a bureaucratic mind and a nest is the story's engine.
The fledging is the climax and it lasts two sentences. 'Fall for a heart's length, and then not fall' is the only lyrical phrase in the story, and it is permitted because everything before it was plain. The ending is an omission, a gap left open, which tells you what Wen has decided without a reflection on what the birds taught her. They taught her nothing. She simply wanted them to live, and used what she had.
Writing your own nature story
Pick one species and learn three true facts about it that most readers will not know. Put it somewhere it is inconvenient. Give your character a skill from their ordinary life and let them use it on the problem. Ration the beauty to one sentence, placed at the moment of most tension, and end on a small practical choice rather than a change of heart.
What writers can take from this
- Name the species and get its habits right.
- Put the natural world where it causes a practical problem.
- Let the character solve it with their own trade, not with wisdom.
- Allow yourself one lyrical sentence and spend it at the climax.
- End on an action the character takes toward the world, not a lesson from it.
Try it yourself
Write a story of under 600 words in which an animal or plant appears somewhere it should not, a flat, an office, a hospital corridor, and a character with an unrelated job has to decide what to do about it within a deadline.
Questions
Does a nature story have to be set in the countryside?
No, and the city is often better, because nature there is a disruption rather than a backdrop. A fox on a railway platform gives you conflict for free; a fox in a wood gives you scenery.
How do you avoid preaching in a story about the environment?
Remove the narrator's opinions and give the character a personal, even selfish, reason to act. Wen wants the swifts to live because she has been listening to them for two months, not because of biodiversity. Readers accept a person's reasons far more readily than a page's.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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