Dear All Many greetings. Am very pleased to share with you a book featuring and celebrating pollinator diversity in East Africa. You can download the book through link by clicking on the cover image below: To whet your appetite here’s a sneak preview of some of the pages from the book: You can … Read more
Hello – Pollinators are responsible for about ONE IN THREE bites of food that we consume. Some two-thirds of all flowering plants on the planet are dependent on pollinators, most of them are wild insects and many of those are bees. Here’s the contribution of pollinators to my breakfast yesterday: I had a bowl of … Read more
Dear All I recently participated in National Moth Week, which is a fantastic initiative to get people more interested in insects and the world around them. To learn more about National Moth Week and see fabulous pictures of moths from around the world, please visit this site: http://nationalmothweek.org To look at moths in Turkana this … Read more
The forests and woodlands of Nairobi have been looking particularly lush and green for the last couple of months. This is all thanks to the more-than-generous ‘short rains’ that we experienced late last year. Nairobi is an interesting city for wildlife and nature as it has both forests and savannahs right next to traffic jams … Read more
With recent rains on the plains, the bush has sprung back to life and there are flowers and insects everywhere. On a recent evening walk I noticed a lot of hawkmoths whirring about a flowering Turraea bush. They were feeding on the nectar with their long tongues – the proboscis – which can be uncoiled … Read more
Pollinators hard at work! “One in three bites of food can be attributed to a pollinator”. This statement is often quoted by biologists around the world when talking about pollinators and their importance to our lives. In Africa pollinators are primarily wild insects that travel between farms and natural habitat, and are extremely … Read more
Hello – this morning I discovered a pair of mating hawkmoths sheltering on leaf in the garden. Just as I was photographing them, the female lifted the male, who is attached to her, into the air. As she flew clumsily (I guess he was rather heavy), I waited for them to land again so that … Read more
Hello – sorry for not posting more often (again!). In response to the question about the moth’s tongues – they can be very long up to 12″ or even more! There are mainly two groups of hawkmoths – those with medium-length tongues and those with super-long tongues… Here you can see examples of both a short-tongued … Read more
Hello – sorry for not posting more often. Have mid-term exams coming up this week! I’ve been wanting to run a series about pollinators. This is the first of them. Pollinators, many of them insects, are one of the most under-appreciated groups of useful creatures in the world. Like the dung beetles they are toiling … Read more