From mountain tops to wadi beds. 2019 in 19 photos.
Fieldwork Stories
Stories and silliness from the field
What I’ll miss most about living in Borneo’s rainforests
One week ago, I landed back in surprisingly sunny England after a month and half spent in the rainforests of Northern Borneo. We were continuing our previous work looking at how macheting vines could be used as a strategy for speeding up the recovery of heavily logged forests. For me, […]
Conservation Podcast: Resilient Rainforests and Fighting Extinction
A few weeks ago, it was my pleasure to be jointly interviewed on the Conservation Careers and Wild Voices Podcasts. It’s been a while since I dabbled in the podcasting world myself and I keep meaning to get back into it. So, it was great fun to talk with Nick […]
This is what extinction looks like
Three days after the tragic death of Tam, the last male Sumatran rhino in Malaysia, I travel two kilometres down the logging track to the only place nearby where I know I can still come close –at least in spirit –to a rhino. Here, surrounded by the logged and old-growth […]
Meet the scientists that use poop to catch rainforest dung beetles
This post was originally published on Mongabay.com Dung beetles have emerged as one of the most intensively studied animal groups in tropical rainforests. They are very easy and cheap to survey and are strong indicators of the health of rainforests and the presence of diverse mammal communities. Dung beetles also […]
A few things I learnt in Colombia
I’ve been back from Colombia a week now and there’s nothing like a week of English rain and chill to spark up a reflective mood. So on the day I head to Oman to join a cool project tracking the distribution of rare and endemic plants (more on that soon) […]
Fieldwork flops: from collapsed bridges to cloud forest cults
When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. And when fieldwork throws up problems, write a blog post about it. I’m a big fan of people that talk about failures. It’s probably a British thing. Truth is, fieldwork has so many moving parts, so many things that can go slightly awry—or […]
Crouching bull, hidden bear
The bull didn’t lower its horns or scuff its front leg in the soil, like they always seem to in movies. One second it was looking in my direction. The next it was charging full-tilt straight at me. This field season in Colombia is the first that I’ve worked outside […]
Conservation is bloody complicated
Forest restoration on Colombian cowlands is a great idea…but how can we actually do it?
Canoeing with caiman in search of anaconda
On our weekend off, we drove out of the steep mountains, cow fields and landslides of the Andes and into the pan flat grasslands of the Llanos. The Llanos is a strange biome found only in Colombia and neighbouring Venezuela. It’s sort of savannah-like with patches of forest that have […]