The slowing of the car as it pulled over shook me from my drowsy haze, and I looked out through the palm trees and across the rice paddies that stretched out below us. Sluggish but eager, I jumped out leaving sunglasses and hat strewn somewhere on the back seat. My binoculars though, were firmly in […]

Variable but always khaki, cream and often grey capped. Frequent migrant at coast and numerous inland, especially from November to March. Often seen in large social groups, chattering nearby waterholes but can be common in all habitats. This is the predictable bird watcher in The Gambia. As the red-faced or bronzed fleshy migrants flock to […]

  Some thoughts after doing 26 days of MCS’s Plastic Challenge: I miss cucumber. I’m pretty good at baking my own my cookies (almost every day). I can bypass at least half of the products in my local shop: bread, cheese, cake, milk, chorizo, dried apricots and each and every fruit and vegetable (down to […]

This has passed me by in previous years but over the last couple of weeks I noticed a lot of striking and imaginative pieces of ink art cropping up on my Twitter feed. It made me think two things: one is that social media is more than a platform for people to share photos of […]

“We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.” – Aldo Leopold Alongside the earliest inklings of spring – when the first buds, chiff chaffs and lawn mowing enthusiasts make […]

We eat plastic, we wash in plastic, we surround our lives with plastic. We just can’t get enough of the synthetic malleable polymer. It amazes me how we’ve so readily accepted plastic. How those old enough to remember the days without it have embraced it fully into everyday life. And yet we all know the […]