Contributors to the Curious Arts Festival at Pylewell Park, Hampshire, next month (July 20-22) will include Adam Weymouth, talking about his debut travel book, Kings of the Yukon (Particular Books), for which he canoed 2,000 miles down the river to see how dwindling salmon numbers are affecting the lives of locals; Miriam Darlington, whose latest book, Owl Sense (Guardian Faber), tells of her journeys in search of every European species of owl, and of how her narrative “became braided with two ecologies – the ornithological and the personal”, when her son fell ill; and the comedy writer Daniel Maier, whose show “Ideas Man: The Stranger Notions of Francis Galton” takes a new look at a brilliant Victorian oddball who also happened to be an intrepid traveller.