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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
I love to go on little adventures. Whether it’s climbing a jungle pylon, or trekking in a river, or running down Europe’s biggest sand dune or trying (and failing) to hammock overnight in the Bornean rainforest, a day with an adventure in it always feels like a day well spent. That’s […]
Walks next to rivers are nice. Walks in rivers are better. You get a different perspective when your legs are freezing cold and you keep stepping on jagged rocks. And it’s usually a more memorable one. When a few friends and I spent a week in France, we trekked a couple […]
Bored? Go and feed some cows. Wherever you are, chances are there are some nearby. There are around 1.5 billion of them on our planet and they’re mostly pretty friendly creatures. The grass usually is greener on the other side so you can normally find big tufts of the stuff […]
The best thing about being a student at the University of Sheffield is the small piece of plastic you get given when you enrol. On this piece of plastic, you might look like a 9-year-old fluff head. But it doesn’t matter because with this humble piece of plastic, you can […]