Africa, we are told, is our original home. It appears that fully modern humans evolved on the land mass we now call the continent of Africa. We were so successful there that we had to walk out, invent the wheel, build boats and make money; feats which would encourage us to try to subjugate the […]
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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 Rubeho […]
‘Bio’ for James Wolstencroft British by birth, James Wolstencroft made his first long haul trip to the tropics, to Malaysia, in 1969. Immediately he was hooked! His first East African safari was in 1976 whilst a student at Cambridge. Fifty years of full time searching for birds (and other creatures) has carried him around Europe, […]
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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 were […]
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 in […]
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 should […]
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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 (i.e. […]
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 Northern […]
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. That […]
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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 […]
Vagrant Mind 