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African Wood Owl on its way to roost at “Farm 510” below Mount Meru, November 14, 2014. All three leaf species visible are from ‘exotics’, including that dreaded invasive Lantana camara. Zooming-out: African Wood Owl on its way to roost at “Farm 510” today. All four plant species are ‘exotic’: a Javan Weeping Fig – […]
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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. […]
“East Africa is unique. Tanzania especially so! One might argue that no other nation has so much natural variety to offer a visitor who’s interested in wildlife. For in no other part of our planet is there such diversity of large mammals nor superabundance and variety of birdlife in locations that are easily accessible and quite safe and usually highly comfortable too. […]
Feathers from a Birder’s Garden (1) Mount Meru, Tanzania – September 30, 2014 Phew! … I, we both, we’ve made it, back to the plateau of East Africa and before September’s end. The above photo of a Willow Warbler was taken on St Mary’s, in the Isles of Scilly, and is likely of the nominate form trochilus rather an […]
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Silent Running in the Land of Larks
This is the September Equinox. Here on the upland plateau of East Africa we’re pulling-away in dusty conditions (that this year are perfectly tolerable) from the long cool and dry of “our winter” which reduced soil moisture and constrained plant growth in the three months just passed. Meanwhile from the North Pole the sea ice begins a glacial creep. Perhaps it will […]
Falteringly I have become a gardener. Although not in any sense a typical gardener. I’ve become a Gardener for Nature. It started, at what was then our family home in Cumbria in northern England, in January 1983. But I now see it as every sensible person’s duty, in this Age of Extinctions, to welcome Nature back into our garden, […]
In mid June 2007 I returned to Arusha from a very special safari experience, a five day pilgrimage by camel, camping across Tanzanian Maasailand. Here is my write-up, from that time, of that wonderful journey. Our little band of fifteen people parted with contemporary civilization (i.e. the East African mobile phone network) at the foot of […]
Vagrant Mind 