A tropical rainforest, apart from being galalactically important, is also just a swell place to be. Sure it’s sweaty, sometimes there are leeches, and sometimes those leeches wriggle into places they shouldn’t. But for the most part a rainforest is one of the best places you can ever visit. Here […]
If you want to get into wildlife conservation, whether it’s as a career or as a side project, the most important thing is to take the first step. Send that first email to a researcher you admire expressing an interest in joining them on a research project. Follow up on […]
Towards the start of our Borneo fieldwork, I bumped into Nathan Trowbridge walking through the forest. We would eventually record a pretty funny podcast, the highlight of which was Nathan’s story of his pet lungfish with an anal prolapse. But for starters, Nathan wanted to know what our project was […]
This is how Redmond O’Hanlan starts his fantastic book Into the Heart of Borneo: As a former academic and natural history book reviewer I was astonished to discover, on being threatened with a two-month exile to the primary jungles of Borneo, just how fast a man can read. Powerful as […]
Perhaps the most common criticism targeted at conservationists and the environmental movement more generally is that it is anti-development. I find this frustrating, because from my experience, it’s exactly the opposite. Most of the conservationists I know: Don’t want to ban new oil palm plantations. They recognise that oil palm […]
There are certain conservation issues that always seem sexy to the documentarian. Anything to do with rhino or elephant poaching. Anything where there are two clear polarised sides–say trophy hunters vs animal rights activists. And stuff with apes, some nice shots in a rescue sanctuary and a good corruption scandal […]
Picture this if you dare. I’m less than halfway through a morning of traipsing through the rainforest collecting dung beetle traps when the sudden urge to empty my bowels hits. To many a tropical ecologist this is not a problem. Simply drop your sweaty trousers, pick a suitably unprickly leaf […]
Here are two facts that are rarely put together, but which I think should be much more often. 1) Tropical rainforests today cover around 16% of Earth’s land surface but harbour an estimated 50% of all terrestrial biodiversity. 2) So far, Earth is the only planet in our galaxy that […]
Our little car chugged through the mist. In the summer, this mountain pass overflows with cyclists–the legendary route up the Col de la Madeleine is amongst the steepest and most challenging in the Tour de France. The road was empty though in the October chill and as we ascended a […]
We had one very unimportant question. So unimportant—and yet precise—a question, in fact, that we might be the very first people in history ever to have asked it. Does homemade apple tart taste nicer when eaten at 8202 feet? There was only one way to find out. We started our […]