We begin our mission to spot an endangered monkey not at the gates of a National Park but by a corrugated iron shed that pongs of cow manure…
Tag: Adventure
Nigeria’s last savannah elephants
Purple starlings flit overhead. Verdant tumbles of vegetation whisper in the mid-afternoon breeze. As our rifle-toting convoy snakes along a game trail through Yankari National Park in North-eastern Nigeria, it’s a picture of tranquillity. Until we’re flanked by a stampeding herd of cattle…
Listen in to the noises of the rainforest
How to travel to a rainforest from the comfort of your chair.
Reaching the summit of Gunung Danum
Osou has the endearing quality of always saying “I’m old and tired” right before powering off at breakneck speed up a forty-five percent incline, machete in hand, slicing open a fresh trail as he goes. I grin, shake my head, and take off after him…
Into the heart of Danum Valley
Into the Heart of Danum Valley
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) […]
How climbing trees can save species
Remember the good old days of secondary school biology? You used to just grab a quadrat, throw it on the floor and count how many ladybirds were inside. A lot of conservation research isn’t all that different from this. Simple is good. Quadrats are pretty. But when your study organism […]
The rare jungle cat that thrives in degraded forest
My nostrils has already been assaulted by months of trekking through the Bornean rainforest with an Aldi bag-for-life full of my own poo. Such is the price of conducting research on dung beetles. The one bonus? I thought I had become immunised to bad smells. But the putrid stench of […]
Hammocking under the canopy: an adventure gone wrong
I’ve always wanted to sleep in a hammock on my own in the rainforest—it looks so cool in that “Filmmaker Diaries” bit at the end of nature documentaries. Last night I came the closest I’ve ever come to fulfilling that dream. But then it all went wrong. The day before, […]
Climbing a jungle pylon
As a general rule, climbing tall things is fun. When those tall things happen to be slap bang in the middle of a rainforest…well these are the best things to climb. Today, Paddy and I headed to a tower we’ve been to many times before to watch the sun rise. […]