Vagrant Mind

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 wet, […]

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 under […]

Occasional diary entries from a naturalist, whereabouts unknown, behind the Covid curtain. Sunday February 7, Year One PC Thankfully we now live where the westernmost peninsula of Asia almost touches Africa. It’s a bottleneck for life, because Iberia is nowadays separated from the dry old continent by only the dozen deep kilometres of a Strait. […]

The BGB safaris will operate, at the costs which will be quoted by our agents, in the low seasons only.  Fortunately these are the months when migrant birds, from Eurasia and Southern Africa pass through Tanzania in phenomenal numbers – November 1 to December 15 and from April 1 to May 15 each year.   […]

These safaris will operate, at the costs quoted, in the low seasons only – happily these are the months when migrant birds, from both Eurasia and southern Africa, are passing through Tanzania in phenomenal numbers – November 1 to December 15 and from April 1 to May 31each year.     Day 01 We aim […]

We have lived in Arusha, the city the ecotourism business likes to think of as Africa’s “safari central”, for eleven years. And I’ve been birding, actively and virtually, throughout that time. On any one day there is anything up to 600 bird species “on offer” within a radius of about fifty miles from the summit […]

If you are planning to come to watch wildlife in Tranzania and want some avowedly impartial advice in order to fit your desired nature schedule with the most appropriate ground agents here and you wish for up-to-date help so that you can find the best birding sites, best birding accommodation, the best not-only-for-big-game safari routes, […]

Last Friday evening I took a stroll from the centre of town, at the New Arusha hotel, to the even newer Mount Meru hotel up on Nairobi road. For peace of mind I went by way of a stately and well-timbered route along Haile Selassie road. This is the old diplomatic quarter of Arusha where large […]

An African lepidopterist friend (from central Europe) just wrote to me : “We have to fight to protect every single hectare … and every single tree in a city.” I asked if I might quote him, to post his words, beneath a superb photo of one forest bird species that has viewed ‘man’ as prey. […]