Award-winning, non-profit and ethical wildlife conservation volunteering. Advancing citizen science and conservation since 1999 – for nature, not profit.
Weather:
18 deg C, overcast during the day, positively beautiful in the evening, no rain! Forecast not so good – see http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/2635754. Looks like we’ll be feeding the fish with lots of wind an wave action. And the midges are flying high.
Preparation:
The boat is coming in from a research outing as we speak. This year’s first basking sharks sighted.
Video update:
See you Wednesday, och aye – innit?
Here’s now Kate’s welcome.
As you can tell, Kate’s not too comfortable in front of the camera, so we have also added a video of someone who is VERY comfortable, in fact could probably not survive for longer than 48 seconds without a camera lens being pointed at them, to the blog.
You must watch this extremely interesting video of utter relevance to the future of our planet until the end and expect to be tested during the expedition. Or you could watch http://youtu.be/pGifZhozLVA and really learn something.
4 June
Hello everyone and welcome to the Scotland diary. This is just a quick prologue with a video message from the big cheese below
More admin and an emergency mobile phone number in the next diary entry, which will hopefully also contain a message from your expedition leader Kate.
We hope your preparations are going well and we look forward to seeing you in Scotland, laddies and lassies!
We have added quite a few more photos of our 2013 expedition below and to www.facebook.com/biosphere.expeditions1 | https://plus.google.com/103347005009999707934/ | http://pinterest.com/biosphereexped/. Thank you to Wouter Kingma (www.wouterkingma.com) for providing the bulk of them. Come and join us again in January 2014 if you can!
Hello everyone. My name is Vera Menges and I am the brand new Namibia field scientist who will work with lead scientist Joerg Melzheimer and all of you expedition participants on our Namibia expedition – “A game of cats & elephants: safeguarding big cats, elephants and other species of the African savannah, Namibia.”
I have just hit the ground running in Namibia, arriving a few days ago and learning the ropes with people here on our Okambara study site. My flight with SAA to Windhoek was great, but their broccoli and beans vegetarian meal takes some getting used to. But brocolli and beans was followed by a leopard and two cheetahs within a couple of days. The leopard needed some attention from a vet and my colleagues here captured and collared two cheetahs just in time for my arrival – what a welcome to Africa and incredible piece of luck!
Anyway, over the next three months, I will be sending you some irregular updates of my work here and the preparations for the expedition, starting in August. Watch this space and the links below.
Best wishes
Vera Menges
Field scientist Namibia
Tomas has sent in some more results of our camera traps.
First from the wolf carcass camera where this year’s expedition found a dead deer (probably killed by a single wolf). Apparently there were a lot of pictures of foxes and pine martens, but in the middle of March a really big bear also started to check the carcass.
The other pictures are from traps placed on the ridge close to lake Blatne.There is a really nice example of a wolf hunting with first deer and two minutes later a wolf passing the trap. With your help we have found that this location is very good for camera-trapping wolves.
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Snow leopards are critically endangered throughout their range. Threatened by poaching, retaliatory killings and habitat loss, there are only a few thousand left in the wild! We need your help to protect them and win a snow leopard conservation grant from EOCA (European Outdoor Conservation Association) through an online vote. With the help of this grant we will be able to give snow leopard conservation a powerful boost through research, community involvement and education, and by generating local income through nature-based tourism.
The more votes we receive, the more likely we are to win the conservation grant, so please share this message across your social networks and tell your friends to vote for snow leopards too.
The Altai’s snow leopards need all our help. Please vote now!
Biosphere Expeditions (www.biosphere-expeditions.org) is an international non-profit conservation organisation that has been working in snow leopard conservation in the Altai Republic for over a decade (www.biosphere-expeditions.org/altai). Our biggest achievement during that time was contributing to the declaration of a protected area for snow leopard. The work of not making it a paper park (these are protected areas that exist on paper, but are not enforced and therefore meaningless on the ground) has only just begun. We need your help to win the EOCA grant for this work.
Update: The vote organisers tell us we are in second place behind a very large organisation, so please help us achieve the unexpected, become David and beat Goliath! If you have not done so yet, then please vote now – it only takes a few seconds to support the Biosphere underdog and you do not have to register, pay or reveal your e-mail to vote.
Tomas tells us that the camera trap that we placed on 14 Feb has taken some excellent pictures of lynx between 16 and 17 Feb. Have a look at the brilliant short video
Here is the final picture update for the 2013 conservation holiday volunteering with lynx, wolves and wildcats in the Carpathian mountains of Slovakia.
We are just about to head out on the last day of surveying. We all have tired legs, but we are ready for one last push! Yesterday was the most eventful day yet on the expedition with clear signs of lynx and wolf, as well as carcasses in the valleys. It seems the wolves are hungry after a week of difficult hunting in deep snow. Tomas’s group spent a gruelling day yesterday tracking a wolf pack through thick forest eventually finding a carcass lying beside as stream.
Lynx tracks were found on Wednesday and yesterday. Milos, John and Helen found lynx kill in the neighbouring Mala Fatra national park, as well as signs of wolf activity. Yesterday afternoon we were busy placing a camera trap on the carcass by the river, so we will see if the wolves re-visited it last night.
Biosphere Expeditions: blogs from the frontline of wildlife conservation and the fight for a more sustainable planet 