USFWS Wildlife Without Borders grant received! I’m overdue to acknowledge this fantastic grant, which I received last month. This is the first time Wildlife Without Borders has requested applications for their new Africa regional program and I’m very excited that my work in Gabon was awarded this funding! This is my largest single grant to date and it will focus on capacity building in Gabon: […]

A few wildlife shots from Ghana (sorry, no manatees) Although I didn’t see a manatee myself while I was in Ghana, my priority was working with the participants to ensure they have the skills they need when they return to their countries. We often split the group in two: one group stayed at camp with me for lectures while the other half went out on

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