Wildlife Archives - TravelsFinders.Com ®

African Wildlife Foundation Travel

editor — Mon, 22 May 2017 19:34:14 +0000

Incredibly, at least seven other species of bat are known to hunt by night in the pastures, woodland, gardens and streamside around the old mansion, a reflection of the rich insect pickings that abound here. None of them, though, mix with the Lesser Horseshoes to breed in the cosy cellars. With flying bats hunting down their minute insect prey in the dark by echo-location – giving out tiny sounds and assessing the echoes that return – an insect that gives off tiny pulses of light in the dark is presumably no more vulnerable to getting eaten. And given that the

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Wildlife International Travel

editor — Mon, 22 May 2017 19:08:09 +0000

A scatter of soil thrown in the air from a patch of bracken, a quiet wheezy grunt, and out on to the Bluebell-spangled turf emerges Britain’s most endearing bird a couple of metres from where I’m sitting. An adult Puffin, its multi-coloured, outsize beak glowing in the sunshine, takes a few glances at me then waddles its way like a diminutive penguin to the cliff edge where Irish Sea breakers thud into the rocks below. It’s spring on Skomer Island, a National Nature Reserve off the west Pembrokeshire coast, and on the edge of one of its Puffin colonies the

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My Wildlife Travel Story

editor — Sun, 21 May 2017 20:52:17 +0000

We must have retraced our steps back down to the Lauterbrunnen later that day to meet up with our teachers. Whether we told them where we had been I have no idea. All I can say is that thank goodness they had given a few 15-year-old lads a free rein. Otherwise we would never have had such an experience. The repercussions if one of us had fallen at that elevation are best left unwritten. Several times through the day on the Schynige Platte I couldn’t help contrasting its profusion of flowering plants with that of the mountains I know best,

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Wildlife Nature Travel

editor — Sun, 21 May 2017 20:48:07 +0000

It wasn’t only the plants that proved to be an attraction up here in the mountains. Later that day, walking along the top of a steep slope, I heard an occasional whistlelike scream from somewhere below. Scanning with my binoculars, it took me a while to find its source: an Alpine Marmot sitting on a low rock presumably acting sentinel to warn his companions of trouble (me) nearby. I didn’t spot the rest of his – or her – colony so I assume they had dived for cover when the sentinel gave his first whistle. I’d seen colonies of marmots

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Wildlife Travel To Florida

editor — Sat, 20 May 2017 16:49:49 +0000

On the dusty track of the Turner River Trail in Florida, the sauna-like, midsummer air is alive with the vibrant hum of squadrons of colourful dragonflies. Centuries-old Bald Cypress trees, their feet immersed in the turbid water, are draped with garlands of Spanish Moss. Flame-flowered bromeliads sprout from their damp, fissured bark. Star-shaped Swamp Lilies and a scatter of Cabbage Palms enliven brown expanses of tough sawgrass sedge. Butterflies the size of small birds do flypasts. In the plant-choked, water-filled shallows, huge, grey-as-slate, knobbly-skinned alligators rest uncannily motionless between Spatterdocks. Large turtles swim sluggishly or sun themselves on a protruding

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Wildlife Travel Packages

editor — Sat, 20 May 2017 16:26:46 +0000

All smiles when they got close, Lentaaya and Lendiki chatted to them, they said hello to me and we all sat down for a while under the trees. They had been upriver to check their cattle and were running back maybe 10 km or more to their village before returning to the cattle later that day, a bit like an office worker popping home for lunch. Fitness might be relative, but my mind wandered to thoughts of the great Kenyan and Ethiopian long-distance runners that seem to win no end of Olympic medals. Suddenly, their athleticism seemed less surprising. As

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Wildlife Photo Travel

editor — Sat, 20 May 2017 16:13:24 +0000

When I returned from Kenya I contacted both Oxfam and Save the Children, both of whom have programmes of work in Kenya. I explained the issues, not as an ecological problem but from the viewpoint of helping the pastoral Samburu to help themselves to secure a more reliable lifestyle. I suggested that excavating small ponds and building some low dams on seasonal streams would hold water for their cattle (maybe drinking water too) in periods of drought. It seemed a simple and relatively cheap idea to me. Maintenance would need no advanced equipment. The reaction from these two NGOs? The

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Wildlife Photography Travel

editor — Sat, 20 May 2017 16:07:40 +0000

Acting as a kind of camp overseer was Robert Lentaaya, a Dorobo who was also a knowledgeable naturalist (see Chapter 11); both he and Luca had helped me put together the story of honeyguides leading tribespeople to wild bee nests. That first morning in the forest, Lentaaya soon exhibited his remarkable animal identification skills. He was taking me (with accompanying rifle-holding guard) along the path that meandered above the Ngeng River. Within half an hour he had pointed out Bushpig, genet and elephant tracks, droppings from lion, porcupine and Olive Baboons plus a host of birds in the trees including

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The Forest Thats Fading Away

editor — Sat, 20 May 2017 16:00:46 +0000

It was my first night in the tent and I had slept surprisingly well although that might have been the result of a two-day journey to get to this particularly isolated forest in central Kenya. It was early morning, still dark at around 5 a.m. when I woke up all too suddenly. Some incredibly loud, almost blood-curdling screaming quite close to our campsite had roused me, a noise I was soon to get to know each and every pre-dawn morning I was there. And it always sounded as if some animal or other was dying in utter agony, maybe in

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Wildlife Travel To Hortobagy

editor — Fri, 19 May 2017 17:58:37 +0000

Stepping Out on “the Steppey As we walked along the rutted path, olive and brown striped frogs, from tiny to large, legs stretched out behind them like free-fall parachutists, dived headlong into the murky ditch water a couple of metres below. All we could hear was a rhythmical plop, plop’; it even drowned out most of the bird song around. It was as if someone had fired the starting pistol for a staggered amphibian Olympic swimming final. Most summers in the Hortobagy – the vast, pancake-flat plain or puszta (meaning bare’ or bereft, though in reality it’s neither) of eastern

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The Best Safari

editor — Fri, 19 May 2017 17:48:23 +0000

Bunches of leathery, green-stemmed Water Crowfoot plants rooted in the shallow, gravel riffles, floating their gorgeous, white-as-snow flowers on the water’s surface, decorated our idyllic riverine route. Straining ahead to distinguish river from sky, we suddenly spotted a tiny bow wave reflecting the evening sun, a bow wave followed by V-shaped ripples heading across the river. The canoe yawing wildly as we grabbed our binoculars and dropped the paddles (thankfully, inside the boat), a full-grown beaver came into focus. It eyed us cautiously, circled in the water, its metre-long, chestnut-brown body hardly breaking the surface. It swam off downstream and

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Norway Wildlife Travel

editor — Fri, 19 May 2017 17:46:02 +0000

The Curse of Stein Stein Erik’s buoyant optimism was sinking fast. We had been grinding along dusty forest tracks in first gear for nearly two hours, the minibus lurching to a gravel-spraying halt whenever anyone thought they saw something vaguely resembling a large animal in the increasingly murky forest clearings on either side. The trip was becoming a tad boring. In the descending late evening gloom, the silhouettes of trees were playing Elk-shaped tricks with our eyes. But we hadn’t even spotted a squirrel. Earlier that evening I had assembled with five or six others in a somewhat nondescript, shop-lined

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French Wildlife Travels

editor — Fri, 19 May 2017 17:40:43 +0000

But Wojciecowski is not convinced that the French Government’s determination to bolster bear numbers while giving money to farmers to reflect their extra cost is going to work. Paris imposes bears in the Pyrenees. They don’t ask the farmers; they have no understanding of the issue from the farmers’ viewpoint. Most farmers won’t even come to a meeting to discuss bears because they are afraid to appear that they agree with the policy. It’s a war between farmers and bears; city people who like to think there are bears here and country people who don’t want them,’ he argues. Wanting

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Wildlife Travel To Slovenia

editor — Fri, 19 May 2017 17:37:39 +0000

Softly spoken and charming, Francois Arcangeli is a most unlikely recipient of death threats. And Arbas, the tranquil and somewhat forlorn village tucked away in the foothills of the French Pyrenees, seems an unlikely location for violent demonstrations. Testing the boundaries of incredulity yet further, the cause of this violence is an animal that inspired the cuddly teddy. Arcangeli, an architect, has been Mayor for many years in Arbas, 80 km east of Lourdes, and we met in his Mairie (Town Hall) where I interviewed him for a Telegraph Magazine feature about the huge and often vicious fracas a few

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Kenya Luxury Wildlife Travel

editor — Wed, 17 May 2017 19:51:20 +0000

Depressing though all this is, the ultimate safeguard is perhaps the sheer number of sites with drawings and, maybe, the presence of some yet undiscovered, known to the Tuareg but no Westerners with tendencies to remove or copy them. One day when our group was taking a long midday break to cool off in the shade of some shallow cliffs, I wandered off to another set of rock outcrops a kilometre or so distant. There were no vehicle tracks nearby so I assumed they were off any hardy tourist’s trail. To my surprise, as I examined much of the rock

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Kenya My Wildlife Travel Story

editor — Wed, 17 May 2017 17:50:52 +0000

These early Saharan native people may have been the first in the world to domesticate cattle. Today the semi-nomadic Tuareg still build small rock shelters against shaded cliffs to contain young goats they rear. Around this time there was a drier climate period which might have stimulated their move from hunting and gathering to more livestock domestication,’ Jeremy Keenan, a Visiting Professor of Archaeology and Anthropology at Bristol and Exeter Universities tells me. It could be that water, becoming scarcer, was concentrated at fewer lakes. And there were probably lower flows in the rivers. So animals would more naturally concentrate

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Kenya Wildlife Nature Travel

editor — Wed, 17 May 2017 17:43:25 +0000

Arid and inhospitable, with summer temperatures approaching 50°C and an annual rainfall so low that it all but defies measurement, the Jebel Akakus -eroded sandstone mountains in the far southwest corner of Libya – is a demanding environment today. But it is most certainly a stunning place. Tolkien-like sandstone pillars, arches, chasms and monster-cut shapes eroded by sandstorms crouch high over wide wadis, the pancake-flat valleys of pale terracotta sand – where water flows if it ever rains – with their scatter of viciously thorny acacias, scrubby bushes and ground-creeping Wild Gourds which tantalisingly resemble melons but are dry and

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Kenya National Wildlife Travel

editor — Wed, 17 May 2017 17:34:36 +0000

I must admit that it was a very far cry from a normal art gallery. In the scorching desert heat, the sandy wadi behind me as dry as dust and the nearby sun-drenched rocks too hot to touch, I’m admiring walls covered in artistic images of crocodiles, giraffes, elephants, herds of antelope and hunters giving chase with spears and clubs. It’s a pretty unlikely location for any of these images. Because here in Libya’s Akakus Mountains (the Jebel Akakus) in the very centre of the Sahara Desert there is no chance of a giraffe surviving in today’s arid conditions. And

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Kenya Wildlife Travel Photography

editor — Wed, 17 May 2017 17:29:39 +0000

This close inter-relationship between birds and people has probably been in existence for thousands of years. There are written accounts of it in the 17th century and early religious missionaries in Africa were surprised by birds that came to their altars and took pieces of wax from their beeswax candles. In Asia, 3rd century Chinese scribes wrote of little birds of the wax combs’ based on reports about the Yellow-rumped Honeyguide of the Himalayas, though they are not known to guide. So how might their guiding habits have begun? There have been suggestions that the honeyguide/human link-up derived from a

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Africa Wildlife Photo Travel

editor — Tue, 16 May 2017 21:33:28 +0000

The next bit of this story is going to sound rather esoteric and twitcher-like, not adjectives that I take pleasure in using. Whatever, being in Mali (see Chapter 6) I thought I should try to spot one. That, however, is not easy. The Mali Firefinch and the much more common African Firefinch (of which I saw many) are very similar. Extremely similar. The only way to be sure to differentiate them (wait for it) is to look at the extent of brown, or red, on their heads! The African version has a brown back and cap extending right over its

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