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Seeing an Auspicious 13 Birds before breakfast: a Baker’s Dozen, on any day in any place, wherever you may be!

A morning discipline of observation, contemplation and/or meditation if only for an hour or two – without any electronic stimulation of our brain – has become increasingly rare in the debilitated digital environment of our times. But don’t despair! Why not watch some Birds? Warning: eBirders perhaps you should look away now! You see…

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Ghost Birding Up Memory Lane

Monday, March 10, 2003 WMD: Snake-Eagle Down! Foreword: Just as now, in the ongoing “Black & Baltic Seas” War, in 2003 our family was based at Tarifa, a maritime choke point known as The Strait of Gibraltar. Gibraltar is Djebel (Jebel) Tariq, the northern pillar and Djebel Mousa the southern one of the fabled…

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Mes Amis Amur ~ meeting the Amur Falcon in Africa

  This essay was a “Birdman” first, posted in 2006 and entitled: “Mes Amis Amur”  A thunderous tropical rain storm was arriving, most unusually out of the north. A tsunami of cloud breaking against the great black massifs of Mount Meru and Kilimanjaro in the early hours of November 23, 2006. Shortly after daybreak…

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Birding in Tanzania (unfinished)

Finding “Your Needed Birds” – my suggestions after eighteen years of Tanzania birding Udzungwa Forest Partridge (EN) this mountain forest chicken, kuku in Kiswahili, is very difficult to get on your list, as it requires a dedicated forest tramp and camping trip; please note it’s a tough walk in, and they are super skulkers…

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Birding at Home, Forever Now

Fabulous few hours today, culminating with a potter round the two tone patch in the VW with Elsie. A very blustery yet bright Levantine afternoon. No sign of our rare “ruby-face” a wintering Red-throated Pipit (whom we discovered only yesterday), nevertheless we were treated to a feast of sumptuous winter bird sightings. And there…

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A kiddie’s parable: The Glorious Mountain Forest Fowl (2015 to 2023)

Or:How have benefits that accrued from international ecotourism to remote villages in the tropics, (ie ecotourism revenue from “high income economies” to the backwoods of the “Global South”) been destroyed by the lockdown response to a Coronavirus pandemic over the past year and a half?I’m talking here primarily about grass roots private ecotourism initiatives…

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A pair of Lappet-faced Vultures at Serengeti Simba Lodge by Alan Fersht

The Wings Tours Tanzania Wildlife Safari with James Wolstencroft

This classic nature tour has been running twice a year, in early March and in the second half of November, for ten years. Or rather it was running, prior to the Coronavirus global health crisis. As a result of that crisis Sunbird (the UK ‘wing’ of Wings) has ceased trading, so that any enquiries…

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Camel Safari to Lake Natron

I wrote this article in June of 2006 immediately after participating in a film project for an Italian development NGO named Oikos. I had just returned to Arusha from a very special safari experience, a five day pilgrimage by camel, camping across Tanzanian Maasailand. Our little band of fifteen people parted with contemporary civilization…

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Stray Feathers, Wings upon the Wind – our nature remix

An essay first written in the autumn of 2004 … Each year, even in “the same place”, my one man’s dialogue with nature is different. Not just through each changing season but during each day that is spent in the field. Each experience is unique when compared with ‘the same’ winter, spring, summer or autumn day of seasons gone by.…

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Samhain and the Vagrant Mind

Each autumn, of my premature retirement in the late seventies and early eighties of last century, was given-over to worshiping the gods of migration. Non-human migration that is. It was my personal homage to birds and to what I consider the most beautiful wonder of the known world – perhaps best evoked (in most…

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Wolstencroft’s Insight Safaris

Tour report : Ecotourism Safari in Tanzania with James Wolstencroft – Ngorongoro Crater, Kilimanjaro, the Serengeti, Tarangire, the Great Rift Valley : Just being there is often enough, the powerful experiences in unique locations, where Wild Nature and Cultures Converge. It could be said some Eco-tourists come to ‘Tanganyika’ as pilgrims in the hope…

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