In defence of wallowing on the past…
Tag: Fieldwork
In the footsteps of one of the world’s rarest mammals
Probably the closest I’ll ever come to Borneo’s hairy, singing rhinos.
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, […]
Scouring cliff sides for rare flora
Some rare plants sure take some finding.
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 […]
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 […]
From cowlands to cloud forest
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 […]
Wildlife blogger of the year: behind the story
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 […]