100th post!

Safari Ecology comes of age with this, it's 100th post! It seemed like a useful moment to review progress so far.

We set out to be a resource primarily for guides in East Africa, posting things about the ecology of the area and recent scientific studies that might make for useful or interesting information. With that primary purpose in mind it makes sense to announce that Ethan has organised a whole set of new guide training activities for April and May - as well as the obvious comprehensive 6ish week training course on natural history, ecology and the like, there are courses on first aid, psychology for guides and others too! The course should be suitable for anyone with a bit of guiding experience and should get you to a level that, once the syllabus is finalised, will be ready for testing under the new Tanzanian guiding standard that's being developed. Check the dates and things here and if you want to know more contact Ethan directly.

Daily visitors from the three top continents: Blue = Americans, Red = Europe, Green  = Africa

Ecology for safari guides

This blog was set up originally to be a resource for safari guides around east Africa, and I hope it still fills that purpose. (We're coming up to 100 posts soon, so that might be a suitable moment to see how well we're doing...) Over the last couple of weeks we've been talking with a bunch of folk about forming a society for Interpretive Guides which could develop and maintain a qualification for guides in Tanzania - at the moment there's nothing widely recognised in the industry. With the assistance of the PAMS foundation, we're collecting syllabuses and guiding standards from around Africa and trying to develop something that may be seen as defining 'best practice' for guides in the region. As part of this process I've been putting together the things that I consider guides should know about ecology, and I thought it might be interesting to post the rough ideas I've got here for comments. There's much more that will go into the syllabus of course, this is just going to help contribute to the ecology module we're putting together, there's got to be lots more natural history modules in the course, covering mammals, birds, reptiles, plants and all the rest. And there's also likely to be as much about guiding ethics, psychology of groups, etiquette, etc., as well as the hard skills like proper driving, first aid  and (if you're walking) firearms. So don't worry about those bits just now, I'm just doing the ecology bits.

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!

Welcome to Safari Ecology!

During two weeks of guide training in Tarangire National Park for Asilia we realised how useful it would be to keep the information flowing, offering safari guides in East Africa and other interested people the chance to continuously learn more about the ecology of the places visited on safari. We're hoping that between us we can blog about a whole range of things from interesting stories to tell about specific species, through a bit of geology, to articles developing a deeper understanding of the ecology that holds these ecosystems together.
Between us, we've experience both of professional safari guiding and academic research throughout East Africa, and we hope we'll also be able to persuade others to contribute their expertise to this blog too! Whatever your interest in the ecology of East Africa, we'd like to hear from you and suggestions of new topics to cover are particularly welcome (as will be offers to write them!), so please do comment. If we get enough interest from readers we'll keep this blog going - otherwise it will dwindle and fade into a quiet and dusty corner of the internet (we're busy people to other things to do too!).

In our guide training we covered the ecology of different habitats, stories about particular species and a list of things to talk about when the big five are being elusive. At least to start with, we'll be sticking with tags related to these main topics to manage the content. If you want to follow any particular part, use the labels on the sidebar to navigate.