Manatee Conservation Workshop at Lake Volta, GhanaI’ve just spent the past two weeks co-teaching an African manatee conservation training course run by Earthwatch and the Nature Conservation Research Center (NCRC) of Ghana. My friend and colleague Dr. Patrick Ofori-Dansen is the Principal Investigator for a manatee research project on Lake Volta, and I assisted him in teaching the course. Unlike Earthwatch projects where participants pay […]
Ghana Today I drove from Lome, Togo to Accra, Ghana with colleague Patrick Ofori-Dansen, with whom I’ll co-teach the Earthwatch Manatee Training course for the next 2 weeks. Tomorrow morning we head up to Lake Volta where we will camp for the next 2 weeks with the 8 students. There’s no internet access there, but I’ll have lots of good stories when I come back
CMSI’m in Togo to attend the Convention of Migratory Species WATCH (West African Cetaceans and Their Habitat- yes, manatees got lumped in with cetaceans). The meeting is being held at a nice hotel in Lomé, the capital of Togo. Woman walking along the beach front road in front of the hotel. Building upon the work we started at the meeting last year, the goal for
TogoOn September 29th I flew back to Africa. It’s always an exhilarating feeling taking off, knowing that I’m on my way (and that whatever I forgot, I’ll just have to live without!). At JFK in New York I ran into Dr. Bill Perrin, a colleague who was also heading to the Convention of Migratory Species meeting in Togo. We had a 12 hour layover in
The good folks at Idea Wild have just notified me that they are funding my request to buy a VHF radio receiver and antenna for manatee tracking work in Gabon. This is a really nice small grant that will allow me to buy a vital piece of equipment, so that once I put satellite tags on manatees, I can follow them to document their travel
Survivor For those of you in the USA, the reality TV show “Survivor” filmed in Gabon this past summer and will air in the USA starting this week. I won’t be here to watch it (and I dislike “reality” TV anyway) but it may give some nice glimpses of my favorite African country for those of you who are interested. MSNBC also wrote an article
Next I’m back in Florida for 3 weeks, preparing to return to Africa for the next 6 months. Lots of exciting plans are on the horizon: – On September 29 I’ll fly to Lome, Togo to participate in the United Nations Environmental Programme / Convention of Migratory Species (CMS) meetings. This is the same conference that was in the Canary Islands last year and representatives
CAMPing in Mayumba Flying into Mayumba on Monday. From the plane we also saw a humpback whale just offshore. My online silence this week is due to being in coastal and marine planning (nicknamed CAMP) meetings all week in Mayumba, a national park on the southern border of Gabon. These meetings were conviened by WCS to unify species and habitat work and fundraising all along
Happy Returns Last night I arrived in Libreville, Gabon after 4 days of travel from Angola. To get here I spent 2 nights in Luanda, the capital of Angola, followed by 2 nights in Johannesburg, S. Africa. It always takes awhile to get anywhere in Africa. Luanda was very loud because their elections are coming up, so people drive endlessly through the streets waving flags