Common birds (1)

Speckled Mousebird, Arusha. Cute, and really quite interesting...

OK, I've been away from here for too long (sorry!), but to encourage me to actually get down and do something, I've decided to start a new little mini-series here on common birds. As any of you who knows me is aware, I happen to rather like birds and will happy spend hours sitting wathing birds at a pond, or even trudging through kilometers of rift valley lakes to count waders. And I have a secret theory that actually, everyone loves birds, they just down all know it. The problem is that there are a lot of different birds out there (do watch Ethan as he tries to see as many as possible this year and records his exploits over here!), they often move rather fast, and people can be easily confused at first. So I thought we'd break it down into some very simple stages and try and start with 50 of the most common / obvious birds on safari or about towns in Tanzania. For each one my challenge is to briefly describe the key features to help you identify it, and then to say something interesting about it. If all goes well, I might even expand my remit to include non-birds, but we'll start with 50 common birds and see how that goes. Rather than throw it all at you in one go (and because there's no way I could write that much in one sitting!), I think I might try three species a post. It might also get a little interactive this way, if anyone wants to help me identify the top 50 species, that would be great,a nd if you've got your own preferred 'factoids' about any of the species, please do chip in!

So, let's start today, in no particular order, with the Speckled Mousebird.

Ground Pangolins and Convergent Evolution

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On a recent safari I was fortunate to get my first ever sighting of a Ground Pangolin. This animal is quite fascinating.

1.     What is it?

Kakakuona (Swahili) is a mammal that belongs to its own Order called Pholidota. It is a monophyletic order which means there is only one family Manidae.

2.     What is it doing?

Cycads and more botanical revolutions I've missed...

Lake Natron Cycad, near Loliondo. Cycads look rather
palm-like, but are not true flowing plants at all.

Back in April I headed to Loliondo for a few days with a bunch of guides from Thompson Safaris. Along the long and bumpy route I was really pleased to spot some Cycads and jumped out to take a few photos. Spotted in action, I was forced to explain why I was taking pictures of some random tree. My answer at the time was based mainly on the evolutionary history of plants that I'd been taught at school and then probably on into university: Cycads form a remarkably early split from the branching evolutionary tree of seed-bearing plants, their ancestors somehow linking ferns to the much more modern flowering plants.  I was also keen to see this particular species (according to the IUCN commonly known as the Lake Natron Cycad) because it's one more of those remarkably restricted range species that fascinate me.

Now I have a confession to make - once again I was completely wrong!

Do fires stop the Serengeti migration?

Dr Kate Parr lighting a controlled fire in the Serengeti Ecosystem

There's been a bit in the East African press recently claiming that Tanzania has been deliberately setting fires in the Serengeti NP to block the migration. The Tanzanian National Park Authority (TANAPA) have, of course, denied this. Reading the articles and press releases there's obviously both some serious ignorance and some seriously bad journalism going on here, and I thought it might be useful to share a few of my observations.

East African Butterfly families and corrupt, singing caterpillars

Citrus Swallowtail, Papilio demodocus, is very common in Tanzania

We're rarely short of butterflies in Tanzania, but they're a sadly overlooked group. Except, perhaps, when they're swarming by the million as earlier this year most people will, at best, only notice a few in passing. For a hugely diverse group (there are over 18,000 described species), they fall into a relatively small number of readily recognisable families. Unfortunately, all the nice identification books are out of print (and wickedly expensive to buy on ebay!) for East Africa, but there are some resources out there that will help once you've figured out the families. The relationships between the families have recently been the subject of some serious work. It turns out that the family relationship were rather difficult to pin down because they all evolved relatively quickly in the Cretaceous (yes, dinosaur time, 100 - 75 Million Year Ago). But our best guess at the moment sorts them into 4 main groups split into a total of 26ish main family groups, only a few of which are at all diverse. So it's not too hard to get to grips with the main families, and the main change to the traditional taxonomy, if you've been into that, is that the big group Papilionoidea is actually two, rather distantly related groups. I'm going to describe some of the common families here (together with some of my favourite stories about them - yes, including corrupt, singing caterpillars) and hopefully will be able to show how the various families fit together at the end. So, here goes...

More on management of protected areas: the human dimensions.

Public relations are a huge part of conservation work

In the previous post I described two of the ten lessons that we, a bunch of conservation managers and researchers from eastern and southern Africa identified at a workshop in Serengeti. I started with the big lessons on making sure you start with boundaries that make ecological sense - and what can happen particularly to migrations if that's not done. There's more to learn on that score too, but I'll skip to one of the most important lessons we identified, that will come as no surprise to anyone working in the field: don't neglect public relations!

On managing protected areas...

Spot the scientists! Prizes for anyone who can name at least 4...

In  a very rare burst of finishing things of, I've managed to submit two papers this week (wow!). One is on climate impacts and I'll blog about it in time, the other is something I've been working on for a some time that reports the deliberations from a workshop that I was invited to 18 months ago now, at Sasakwa Lodge in the Grumeti Game Reserve. This was a fascinating experience, and not only because it's the only way the likes of me will ever get to stay in Paul Tudor Jones' house and be looked after like a real guest! We brought together several senior researchers and conservation practitioners from Tanzania and Southern Africa, to see what would happen. And what did happen (as well as the lodge running out of whisky), was an attempt to identify the ten most important lessons for conservation that could be learnt from the mistakes of southern Africa. As they say, it's a wise man who learns from his mistakes, but it's an even wiser one who learns from the mistakes of others! So, given that the population pressures in east Africa are now similar to those experienced in southern Africa when lots of conservation interventions started to happen down there, we thought it would be a good time to see what we could learn.