Illustration by Anna Higgie “I smell snow,” Lee Schofield says as we leave the car and step into the UK Lake District’s magnificent and numbingly cold Swindale Valley. When I point out that he’s quoting a famous line from the Gilmore Girls, a TV show set in fictional small town America, he smiles with (understandable) bewilderment at the reference. He is not a natural people-person he later confesses, being drawn to the region for its quiet expanses. Yet much like the landscape itself, this self-effacing, reflective ecologist also finds himself in a position where responding to human narratives and emotion has become a defining part of his world. At RSPB…