For some of us in humankind birds are quite uplifting. Have you ever wondered how different our ‘development’ might have been if we, the most manipulative creature to evolve upon this planet, had been able to fly rather than to simply run? Instead of which ‘our’ Earth has suffered most terribly from the hands-on brain approach […]
Olosiva Oasis – My Life in the Peri-Urban Afro Birders’ Garden. The latest news from this strictest of strict Nature Reserves at the beginning of May 2015 What with all the torrential rain – think surging equatorial highland luxuriance – there’s not much bare ground remaining, and I simply don’t have the time, or energy, to root […]
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Save Our Poo-Shifters!
Belatedly we fear what will happen as our pollinators are poisoned by our farmers. Unwittingly most farmers are the foot soldiers of the “Murdoch-Men” – the Agri-Pharma-Media-Bankers. Maybe it’s because of prejudices concerning “poo” that most of us have never noticed, let alone challenged, the demise of our Dung Fauna for the sake of the […]
Our tour commences of an evening at the relaxed and peaceful Kilimanjaro International Airport. That is when the daily KLM direct flight from Amsterdam Schiphol (and hence other capitals) arrives in Tanzania. Here you will be met by both James, your global-standard bird guide, and your Tanzanian driver-guide and taken, in a customised Toyota safari vehicle with […]
From three huge Verreaux’s Eagle-Owls, snoozing away the heat of the day in the shady canopy of a great fever tree, as we drove from our arrival at the airport toward “Hatari” our first lodge, hidden away at the foot of mighty Mount Meru; to the mother Cheetah who had been teaching her three cubs […]
Try to arrive in Day Time and please bring a pair of binoculars with you – a pair for each participant! When (not if) you come on safari to safe, secure and often courteous Tanzania try to make sure that your chosen airline will, with well-planned foresight, deposit you at Kilimanjaro International Airport – JRO. And choose one that deposits […]
A native of the UK, James Wolstencroft now lives in Arusha, Tanzania. He guided his first East African safari in 1976 while he was a student at Cambridge; before that, his pursuit of birds had already taken him around Europe, across North America, through Russia, and to Turkey, Iran, Israel, Arabia, Nepal, and the Himalayas. James’s […]
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A Seldom Spotted Flycatcher
1957: Ernest Woods in A Zen Dictionary (sic!) What the birds in the garden have in their daily life, and which I don’t have in my daily life, actually becomes mine when I come to know what it is like to be what they are. Pretty plain, grey-brown of plumage, yet the long-winged “Spotted Fly” is graceful in […]
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Confessions of a Lantana Braker
Anticipating the first rain in ten days and thanks to protracted daily power cuts, Dismas and I have attacked the Lantana brakes with a vengeance, in the week just passed. This rioting alien once known as the American Bramble has, since the plentiful Long Rains of March-to-May, completely choked the finest glades in my garden. It has surged in […]
The White-eyes remain highly successful birds. Morphologically very similar to one another, they are a group of primarily ‘Austral Old World’ passerines that have adapted, by virtue of a filamentous tongue, to exploit a wide variety of nectar sources in forest, woodland, scrub and garden. However unraveling the evolutionary relationships within the Zosterops is a complex […]
Vagrant Mind 