About Me
I am a naturalist, bookworm, cat owner and occasional blogger.
I live in Bristol, where I am attempting to create a wildlife-friendly garden. As I rent and my garden is covered in pebbles, this means I am somewhat limited to pots and raised beds, but I live in hope!
Latest Blog Posts
So much fluffiness, dead to the world and trendy mattress hats
Recently the other researchers and I took another busman’s holiday, being taken on a game drive on the nearby Karongwe reserve with a researcher there. We are a bit used to the normal game drive animals, and luckily the researcher was looking…
A note about photography
I’ll be honest, my photography skills are very amateur. I tend to take photos for memory and for the sake of identification purposes with birds and insects. I don’t really know anything about exposures, aperture or iso. Or even how to edit…
Kruger Part Three - A slight tangent and causing a traffic jam
After having just seen four different species that all made me very aware of my own lack of power by being a human (elephant, lion, crocodile, hippo), you might consider the next species to be somewhat uninspiring but I beg to differ. It was…
Kruger Part Two - Youngsters and Power
Hopefully you’ve read Part One and know where I’d got to in describing our sightings in Kruger so far. If not: we were spending our day off in Kruger National Park, sightings so far include: giraffes, kudu, zebras, wildebeest, hippos, crocodiles,…
Kruger Part One - Off on another adventure
At the dwarf mongoose project, we work 6 days every week and the day off is always something to look forward to. Now that’s not to say I dislike the work, in fact it’s the complete opposite. I love working with the mongoose, how could I…
Competition, presents and a busman's holiday
With work taking up 9 hours/day for 6 days/week, and early nights from all the fresh air induced tiredness, we tend not to have too much free time outside of fieldwork. And that’s not adding in the mundane stuff – cooking dinner, data entry,…
SA Animal Profile – The Dwarf Mongoose (an introduction)
If you’ve been reading my blog posts, you will hopefully have noticed that the common thread, or my current raison d’être, is a particularly lovely species, the Dwarf Mongoose (Helogale parvula). Similar looking to a mustelid, such as the…
These aren't the mongoose you're looking for
Also known as, the frustrating third week. It started off hopefully, looking for a dwarf mongoose group I’d not yet met. However, after two days of walking through the bush without finding them, my mood was not so cheerful. That isn’t to…
Scientifically Macabre - examining skulls and bones
From 1st July 2013The start of a new week and I was hiking through the bush, fruitlessly trying to find the dwarf mongoose. To keep my mind occupied, I begun a rough outline for a blog post. It was going to be “The Sorabi Skull”, about the…