In early 2018 I was back in my second home, Madagascar, to get my fix of sambos, lemurs and other wildlife. Once again I had the pleasure of spending some time with SEED Madagascar’s conservation programme in Sainte Luce. SEED provide unique volunteering experiences working with the fabulous endemic wildlife and people of Madagascar – […]
Barely twenty minutes had passed before we had unexpected visitors: a herd of six elephants coming up fast behind the loudspeaker car. Frantically, we signalled to cut off the recording, as the elephants didn’t look happy. Seeing our urgent semaphore, the occupants turned, and noticed the herd approaching. Cutting the sound off they froze, the […]
Earlier this year I embarked on a daft quest to defy social norms, experiment with a new diet… and stop eating “real” food. Why on earth would you do that? Cooking bores me. Eating isn’t particularly interesting either, or washing up. If someone devised a cybernetic upgrade or Faustian contract which did away with the […]
I’ve finally finished uploading photos from the last year in Madagascar over on Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/danielgwood/collections/72157639075496673/.
Perhaps naïvely, I didn’t think the situation was anywhere near this bad. In fact, of the 13 lemur species I saw last year in Madagascar, only one is listed as “Least Concern”, i.e. the green slice of the pie chart. Most of the rest are listed as Endangered or even Critically Endangered by the IUCN […]
For the last two weeks of the January Pioneer scheme, we once again joined the Azafady Conservation Programme (ACP), to help out with the research and other activities there. Always a popular placement with the volunteers, it’s also one of my favourite parts of Pioneer – spending time in the beautiful littoral forests of Sainte […]
We started from Azafady’s Sainte Luce campsite shortly after dinner, under the slowly darkening sky. This evening we were heading to forest fragment S8, almost an hour’s walk away, to do a night transect looking for lemurs. Azafady’s Conservation Programme (ACP), carries out a number of these every month to monitor the lemur population, amongst […]
In June I spent a fantastic month in the Tuli Wilderness of Botswana. An isolated nature reserve in east of the country, it is one of the few places left in Africa where truly wild animals can be seen. Bordering on the Limpopo and Motloutse rivers, it offers amazing views, diverse wildlife and a spectacular […]
In June I spent a fantastic month in the Tuli Wilderness of Botswana. An isolated nature reserve in east of the country, it is one of the few places left in Africa where truly wild animals can be seen. Bordering on the Limpopo and Motloutse rivers, it offers amazing views, diverse wildlife and a spectacular […]