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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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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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Ghost Birding at the Edge of Euroland under the pall of Cop26
Comparing 2005 with 2021 – by James Wolstencroft : a student of Ecolo-nomics at the Universidad de las Vegas, Andalucia! In late January 2005 I had returned to our little blue cottage in Spain refreshed by having converted my ecological experiences of an ecologically impoverished midwinter up-there into the sub-equatorial wealth of a warming…
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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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Birding intelligence: finding endemic birds and animals in Tanzania’s Eastern Arc mountains
The person with the greatest exposure to the needs of foreign birders and those of other serious ecotourists in the mountains of Northern Tanzania is Martin Joho. A resident of Muheza Martin is a well known face in and around Amani as well as at the lodges and forest reserves above Lushoto. Everyone there…
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Essential Tanzania – Bird Safaris over the years with Sunbird-Wings
Tour Narrative – Tanzania November 2019 The unique Sunbird-Wings Safari Birding Route has evolved over nine years to become what this ‘Designer Naturalist’ feels is a succinct introduction to the ecological wonder land of northern Tanzania. Here’s my tour report from 2019: And thus we started our November tour this year (2019), as has…
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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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An Africa that’s beyond our temperate dreams: Sunbird-Wings Safaris to the wildness in November 2016
For the tour operator Tanzania remains a unique and challenging destination. The more so because world travellers hope to find here a savanna Africa of their dreams. Yet with a little luck a well-planned safari here really should become that “holiday of a lifetime”. A safari here is always going to be expensive, on…
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With the Ravens of Asciscar
A sweet and healthy spot at a freshwater spring on an olive-studded yellow hillside in Andalucia. It’s nine in the morning, an east wind blows off the nearby craggy grey wall of the Serra del Turco. I am sheltered from the wind and shaded from the brilliant morning sun by a clump of old…
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Ways to Rewild your Mind – Gardening with Serpents
Part One: How it began, a life project to become re-immersed and, by the same token, a way out via open domestic wildness. I became a ‘rewilder’ in June 1967, aged eleven. Molly, my maternal aunt, helped me by driving us to a disused limestone quarry at Trow-Barrow in Silverdale, North Lancashire, England. Here…
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A tale of two (or is it three) Caprimulgids – Goatsuckers to some
Shortly after sunset yesterday three bird brains here got vixenated. In the twilight of June’s quarter waxing moon, after a wait of sixteen years, I became properly reacquainted with the Red-necked Nightjar. Andalusia’s “Chotacabra pardo”. And we were introduced by a familiar fox. I first heard the Nightjar from the bed, for he was…
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Time out of mindfulness
Moments out of time, immersed in Nature Natural companions in the poztho field … June 12, 2021 There hasn’t been a Blackbird around the crumbles, where we live, since late December. That was when our ‘wintering’ birds departed, presumably to establish breeding domains in the neighbouring dehesa (here that is wild olive savanna). Only…
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Archive notes – Sula mountains, northern Sierra Leone, 5 May 2013
It’s streaming swifts! “ Birder’s Log: Sunday May 5, 2013 0950 until 1250 GMT Have you been hoping for some Vis-Mig in Africa? Yes indeed! A Sunday morning. So admittedly I came somewhat late, scrambling and occasionally stumbling, to the ridge line in the clear, above and far beyond – The Mine. I am…
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Walking as Nature Wishes
Sunday March 14, 2021 Eighteenth Anniversary of ‘Snake-Eagle Down’ at the Isla de Tarifa on 14/03/2003. In the bright light of spring there are patterns of process, virtually unseen, glimpsed across the sky.A dry and sunny day. Only a week ago, the deluge. Today, there’s scarcely a breeze under a super blue sky. Life…
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Strays focused – Nature Noted – out and about in Andalucia
Unseen patterns in a spring sky When we are no longer fit and able isn’t it comforting, if not essential, to review our former lives? Remember my friends : Nature will never be Locked-down. It’s early morning. Despite welcome bird song, and a lone Black Kite quartering the paddock, there’s gentle rain. It’s uncomfortably…
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Nature Notes from the end of Europe
Do you ever feel there’s a little bird inside your head telling you something, whilst fluttering to escape. Trapped, just dancing there. Tied to a perch in your heart? For me, recent months, the regime of a year almost, have truly brought such feelings home. Yesterday, for example, was another grey and cloudy day…
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Black Kites over Gates of the Underworld
Last Saturday was a perfect one in which to be alive and ‘free’ in wonderful Al-Andalus. In the new moon of February, at the birth of the Ox Year, the first flock of migrant raptors crossed over ‘our farm’. Their line was stitched for a few moments into a sky of immaculate blue. Moments…
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Vagrant Mind 