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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Forest restoration on Colombian cowlands is a great idea…but how can we actually do it?
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 […]
When the mist rolls in and all you can see are the silhouettes of ferns and tree trunks, you’d be forgiven for thinking that you’re standing in an ancient forest. But once a gust of wind lifts the blanket of white, you start to notice things. The trees aren’t so […]
This is a re-post of an interview I did with Terra Inconita after winning wildlife blogger of the year. On 31 December 2018, Gianluca Cerullo’s story The rare jungle cat that thrives in degraded rainforests, featuring a bag of his own poo-for-research, won the 2018 Wildlife Blogger of the Year competition […]
I’ve been lucky enough to be involved in running or taking part in a number of conservation research projects and expeditions, from mist netting birds and macheting vines in the rainforests of Borneo, to rooting through Madagascar’s treetops to sample canopy frogs, to catching dung beetles in the Colombian Andes. […]
Disrupting catastrophic wildlife declines won’t be easy. But by focusing conservation interventions on a small set of disproportionately important places and projects, we can still leverage our way out of the sixth mass extinction. This is exactly why conservationists have long preoccupied over “biodiversity hotspots”–35 areas that jointly cover just […]
Last year, for the first time in its history, Tesco announced a three-lettuce ration on the purchasing of icebergs. A few months later, Brazil Nuts suddenly vanished from one of the UK’s favourite cereal bars, replaced with a package printed apology that read “Sorry no brazils!”. Some 7 years before […]