Evaluating Safari Ecology blog...

This is a brief  cheating blog, as I'm away (again!) and I've just scheduled it for whilst I'm off. We started the blog back at the end of May, and I promised we'd try and keep things going if we had enough interested visitors. So, I've just been having a look over the stats for the first little while to see if we can justify carrying on, and I think we probably can. So, who are you all, and where do you come from?!

Firstly, about 1/4 of you come direct to the site, which is a good sign I guess - you're following fairly regularly and have a bookmark or similar. Another 2/3rds come from referring sites, some fairly regularly, others just once, never to return. And the rest come from search engines where the most popular search is for information about Vachellia tortillis. Some of the search engine arrivals even stop to read the page, which must be good news too!

And, probably most importantly, where are you all? First on the list (by a very narrow margin) is Tanzania - hurrah! (I don't think its all me either, as I've met a couple of guides in the bush on my recent trips who've seen the site and read it regularly, plus we have visitors from all over the country who regularly read lots of pages...) With around another 1/4 of the visitors, it's the US next and whilst that wasn't our intended audiance it's lovely to see you - though most US visitors seem to have found us by mistake and move quickly on! Then there are some regulars out in the UK and Sweden before we return to Africa, with nearly 10% of our visitors from South Africa - whilst our East African focus probably isn't exactly what you're looking for, at least many of the processes are (or should be) similar. We've also had visitors from a further six African countries, so I think we're meeting some local needs at least. We've also had steadily growing visitor numbers and followers, which is enough to keep me tapping for another few months at least.

Having made that decision, you'll see I've added a few extra things to the right-hand side. There's a list of sites I've used to identify birds, butterflies and dragonflies in the last few weeks that might well prove helpful to anyone looking up beasts in this part of the world - do send me more sites if you find anything else handy that others keen on nature in East Africa should know about. And I've added an opportunities section that so far has only one link to a bird training programme (not run by us, but I'm sure it will be good!) - as other opportunities for training come up in East Africa we'll try and publicise them here, so again, let me know if you hear of anything. Ethan will be doing things in November too, and I know of at least one other course on the go as well, so once I've got details they'll go up there.

Let us know if you want more from the blog in other areas too!