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 Dismus […]
Category: bird migration
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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 birders […]
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The Nightingale Gardener
For over a month I’ve been getting the garden ready. Our wilding wedge beneath the steel grey pyramid of Meru. A rented hectare outside Arusha in East Africa, at a kilometre and a half above the sea. It’s an ever-changing tangled patchwork of exotic, alien hard-browsed Lantana camara in glade-thicket-and-brake. An experiment in non-racist eco-gardening, style […]
Are there easily observed birds whose fluctuating status exposes changes in the underlying ecological circumstances – revealing the true health – of an environment, be it a village, a district, or a nation? Apart from at the freezing Poles I suggest that we should look at Swifts and Swallows! Now you may think this a wee bit perverse. After all these are not creatures of the terrestrial environment. […]
As a lover of nature, with even the mildest interest in birds, you will definitely fall in love with Tanzania. It’s truly a superb destination with well over 1,100 bird species to look for. Of the ten endemic bird families known in Africa, eight can be found here. This safari has been carefully designed for those […]
Vagrant Mind 