All oncoming traffic had their brights ablaze, yet I was being impetuously rude by not turning mine down on approach, provoking a barrage of anxiety enhancing light flashing and horns blowing. An aging truck, heaped with a patchwork of tarps and choking over slight hillocks,… Read More
All posts filed under “Conservation”
Danum Valley
Have you ever been to tropical rainforest? While exploring this part of the world, one is sure to eventually encounter a resemblance to the primeval forest of their imagination. Tumultuous vines, ethereally green, fundamentally impenetrable. Here, this run-a-muck growth is often the result of plants… Read More
Sabah’s Mighty Kinabatangan River (Long)
(The problem with seeing much is finding time at the end of the day to write about it all. It takes a fair amount of time to prepare an entry! This is a bit tardy and I haven’t been quite as frequent as I’d like… Read More
KL, Kuala Lumpur, Selamat Datang
As the self-aggrandized old hand of the Southeast Asian urban landscape, you’ll peer about joyfully bewildered. You aren’t enveloped by partially peeled cement walls and blackened exhaust. Writhing, verdant walls of vegetation veil cyclone fences and railings. The scene outside the window of your cab… Read More
Bukit Lawang Literally Means “The Door to the Hills”
There are a lot of hills in Northern Sumatra. Some are functionally inaccessible and a few are just down a potholed highway from Medan. Being my first sojourn to the land of palm plantations, Orangutans, and horrible natural disasters, I settled for a realistic… Read More
Pak Thale and Spoon-billed Sandpipers
Sometimes I question my sanity. Here I was, halfway around the world, standing next to fields of salt. I wasn’t lost, I intended on arriving here at some point. But did I really need to come to Thailand to feel desiccated? The answer in this… Read More
Pai(land)
Pai could easily be seen as just another town on the tourist track. It used to be a sleepy town in a valley in Mae Hong Song Province until recently, when a couple Thai movies were filmed here and tourism exploded for the wealthy Thai.… Read More
Interview: Ben Freeman and a Spine of Papua Biodiversity Pt. 2
Brendan McGarry: I’m guessing that you were working hard for a short period of time and that was about it – did you have any time for recreating or was it just eat, sleep, work? Ben Freeman: We were pretty regimented due to the amount… Read More
Interview: Ben Freeman and a Spine of Papua Biodiversity Pt. 1
Just in case you didn’t snicker enough in the last interview that my initials are BM, here’s another, equally fascinating and envy inspiring conversation. A benefit of starting out young as a birder is that it’s a small world. You inevitably meet some people who are headed… Read More
Interview: Ben Winger – On Expeditions and the Importance of Museum Collections
I interviewed Ben, a fellow bird nerd and real deal Ornithologist, this fall about exciting expeditions he’s taken in the name of science. Enjoy! Ben Winger is a graduate student in the Committee on Evolutionary Biology at the University of Chicago and the Division of… Read More