From Sept. 9 – 26 we traveled to central Amazonia with Field Guides, Inc. The trip, led by the remarkable team of Bret Whitney and Marcelo Barreiros, was based from Manaus, located close to the most biogeographically important crossroads in the entire Amazon: the confluence of the Amazon River and its largest tributary, the Rio […]
Category: Natural History
California to Colorado … via Washington
Since hitting the road after our birding tour to Borneo, it’s been somewhat hectic, as our target plant genera have been rather widely spaced, and so we have been racking up the miles. In our post-retirement 2017 – 2022 road trips, we averaged 75 – 100 miles per day, and in the first two months […]
Borneo!
We spent the three-week period from June 17 to July 8 traveling to, in, and back from Sabah, Malaysia, on the northeast portion of Borneo. This is the third largest island in the world, after Greenland and New Guinea. It has the most diverse forests outside Amazonia, and in addition to being a fine birding […]
Great Basin Searches
We left the North Rim of the Grand Canyon on May 31 and spent most of the day driving to reach the Calcareous Mountains district of eastern Nevada. This is part of the basin and range topography that characterizes much of the Great Basin. We reached our target area around dinnertime but while driving over […]
Land of Grand Geology
This blog post covers May 18 – 30, during which time we traveled through Utah, with short forays into the Arizona Strip. We had had good botanizing in northwest Colorado, but it got even better once we reached the Moab area, in east-central Utah. Our first stop was at Utahraptor State Park to look for […]
Colorado Challenges
I don’t normally issue two blog posts in rapid succession, but my draft post seemed too long, so I split it in two and sent out the first half (Texas Genera) yesterday, intending to have the second half go out a week from now. But WordPress, which has always handled picture captions inconsistently and unpredictably […]
Texas Genera
We started our main road trip for the year on April 14. We plan to visit 11 western states, with an emphasis on finding new plant genera, and then finish up the year canoeing in Minnesota. During the six months we’ll be gone, we will take two breaks for birding tours to Borneo (June) and […]
Guyana
We left on March 24 for a 13-day trip to Guyana (formerly British Guiana) in northern South America, slightly north of the equator. This birding tour, run by Field Guides, Inc., was led by Marcelo Barreiros, and co-led by local expert John Christian; they made a very effective team. Guyana has become a popular birding […]
Natural History Goals
We’ve just returned from a 12-day camping trip, visiting west Texas and the southern reaches of New Mexico, Arizona, and California. On this trip, wedged between two birding tours to South America, we reached a milestone that has me thinking about the various natural history goals that Eileen and I have had over the years. […]
Northeastern Brazil
We took two back-to-back birding tours from Jan. 18 – Feb. 18 with Field Guides, Inc. (Nowhere but Northeast Brazil and Bahia Birding Bonanza). These tours visited the states of Pernambuco, Ceara, and Bahia in northeastern Brazil, with the bulk of the time spent in the latter. These areas are well southeast of the mouth […]
Nomadic Naturalists 