Quite a bit of our camping in recent years has been in areas at times of year that were quite uncomfortable, often because that was when and where interesting plants were flowering. This year we made a pretty successful attempt to travel when and where amenable climate is expected, using National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration […]
Category: Natural History
Papua New Guinea
Papua New Guinea (PNG), the eastern half of the island of New Guinea, has been our top priority destination for the last four years. The top draws here are seven bird families endemic to New Guinea (found nowhere else); and the birds-of-paradise, most of which occur only here. It took us three attempts to get […]
Angola
We spent three weeks in Angola on a birding tour in late May and the first half of June, not counting five days of travel. Angola is on the west coast of Africa, a bit over halfway from the Cape of Good Hope to where the continent bulges westward. It is roughly 800 miles north […]
Southeastern Saga
Our basic plan for 2025 was a spring road trip in the Southeast; birding tours to Angola and Papua New Guinea during the summer; and a fall road trip to Michigan and Minnesota for paddling, and Missouri for botanizing. After returning from South Africa last fall, we decided to winter near Tallahassee, in the Florida […]
South Africa
We traveled from October 4 – 27 to South Africa with Field Guides, Inc. The trip had two excellent leaders, Terry Stevenson, with whom we visited Kenya in 2006; and Tarry Butcher, who we met on this tour for the first time. We enjoyed generally good weather except on one day of blustery rain in […]
Road Trip Wrap-up
This post covers the last 24 days of our 2024 road trip, Aug. 18 to Sep. 10. It took us three days to drive from Rochester, NY to Alabama, to visit my niece Sara. She is an Assistant Professor at Auburn University doing research on alcoholism using tools such as functional magnetic resonance imaging. It […]
Ninety Percent
Since retiring in late 2016, each of our annual road trips have had some sort of theme that strongly influenced the broad itinerary, and to some degree tied together the field work being done that year. In 2017, the theme was grasslands; in 2018, new vascular plant families; in 2019, the western Arctic; and in […]
To the Keys
Our 2024 road trip, which may include a short summer break in El Paso, has several themes: trying to reach our goal of seeing 90% of native plant genera in the Continental U.S. and Canada (hereafter, CUSC); getting in a good dose of canoeing after a lean year in 2023; visiting Civil War battlefields from […]
Infraspecies
I am writing this blog post while camped in the Flamingo Campground in Everglades National Park, Florida. As a testament to how hot, humid, and buggy the region is at present, only six of over one hundred sites in the campground are occupied, whereas it fills to capacity in the winter. We left El Paso […]
The Caribbean, At Last
Incredibly, neither Eileen nor I have ever been to the Caribbean. We have been saving the region as a place to explore later in life as the travel and birding are easier than many of the destinations we visit. There are three archipelagos (groups of islands), collectively known as the West Indies, within the bioregion: […]
Nomadic Naturalists 