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Is travel back on hold?

Just a few days I put up an article talking about how tourism could start up again particularly in places like Africa.

It would appear that the omicron variant of Covid is going to make that sound very premature.

Pfizer is predicting boosters will protect populations from this new variant within 100 days. 

Assuming that it doesn’t start spreading Europe out of control, this would allow any traveller to be vaccinated before they leave. 

My family are booked to go to the Kruger national park in South Africa next August. I am confident that we will still go -assuming restrictions lift as things improve. Unfortunate comments from health representatives in South Africa about premature banning of travel do seem rather foolish, however in terms of wealth South Africa is on different category to pretty much all of the countries in Africa and are likely to be able to get a grip on this relatively rapidly. While it is true that South Africa has had more cases of covid than anywhere else on the continent, their numbers of dramatically lower than the UK’s (and virtually all other European Nations).

In short, well this is an unfortunate second blow on the travel industry in southern Africa my hope is that it will be short enough lived that it will do far less damage to the natural world in this part of Africa than the first one did.

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An American kingfisher has turned up in the uk

As a bird usually seen in the USA, a shaggy crested belted kingfisher is a rare sighting in the uk

This Kingfisher is thought to have been blown across the Atlantic during an ocean storm. Indeed there have only been a few records of this bird in the UK in the last century. Usually migrating between the USA and Caribbean/Mexico each year, they are not birds that are expected to regularly fly the Atlantic. It is the fifth occasion since 1908 that one has been seen here. Of more interest to “twitchers” this is the first time that one has hung around for any length of time, having been first spotted in October. It is also even rarer, as it is only the second sighting beyond the isles of Scilly or Cornwall, where they usually first make land (it is currently living in Lancashire).

It appears to have found an area that is good for it to live in, and due to its size it cant hide easily so continues to be spotted regularly. Given its size and lack of any knowledge about migrating across the Atlantic, it may well live out its life here. Whether it will start migrating into Europe is anyones guess.

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Happy new year

Apologies for the pause, holidays are increasingly busy.

Happy new year! I hope that everyone had a relaxed and healthy Christmas. It was wonderful to have a Christmas where I saw all my siblings and sat down to a large gathering for food. I just hope that the price we pay for relaxing the rules is not too high.

There are many new things in the pipeline.

We are close to unveiling our members areas. One will be for those who are listed on the website as one of our wildlife destinations – there are many positives to sharing your vicinity with wildlife but there are also plenty of problems. The other will be for those who regularly visit the site and are keen to support our work.

The other will be for readers such as yourself. This area will cost a small amount to join (£5 per month at the lowest level) and will allow you to interact with other members, bring wild news of interest to you to the attention of the website, and join us in our quest to save the natural world – there will be a way for you to submit wilderness destinations (obviously this will be helpful to the site, but you will also be recognized for this and I hope that you will be keen to join our effort.

We are also close to adding the ability for people to build their own page to list wild places. The aim is for this process to be incredibly simple, however as you can imagine, if this site is to reach its potential I cannot write all the pages. My hope is that as we leave the strange world of COVID, people will start to find this and add destinations across the world.

On a personal note, my family will be travelling to South Africa this summer (so long as COVID does not cancel plans) to visit the Kruger for 2 weeks. There are a variety of reasons for this trip. Firstly, we intended to visit regularly but due to life, have not been there for 15 years. Secondly, we are keen to show our children the place. Thirdly, we want to add all the public rests stops to our site and need to visit to be able to do this. Fourthly, we are keen to test the live sightings board that we created and is listed on this site – check that it is working and make sure that it does prove useful, and finally fifthly, I am hoping to go on one of the wilderness trails. We hope to return with many wonderful stories to write up and videos to add to our youtube channel.

I am hoping that our tickets have not been booked too early – they are fully refundable or delayable if COVID makes travel impossible this year. However, I hope that I am not the only one who is keen to start travelling again. If you are looking at doing some wild travel this year, do consider some of our locations. While many of them are quite pricey they can all be combined with some self driving safari, which brings down the price dramatically.

Anyway, do keep reading our news, I hope that it is of interest, and have a great year


Tim Welby

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Sainsbury has stopped selling all or some beef from Brazil along with 5 others

In Brazil, one of the main drivers of deforestation is for pasture for beef. It is therefore completely foolish for those in developed countries to eat Brazilian beef – if we do, we are paying them to do the world (and therefore us) incalculable harm.

Importantly, these people can wait. If we have a moratorium on grazing on newly deforested land, the land owner can wait a few years or a decade then its value jumps. This move was taken after it became clear that “cattle laundering” was going on.

Cattle laundering means we can no longer tell which meat from Brazil is safe to eat
Continue reading “Sainsbury has stopped selling all or some beef from Brazil along with 5 others”
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First millipede to fully justify the name has been found

Millipede (if you want to be precise) is a name that cannot fairly be ascribed to any previous millipedes! Millipede means “thousand feet”, which means that all previous millipedes do not deserve the name. The “millipede with the most legs before this animal was a Californian millipede species with 750 legs.

The new species has been named Eumilipes Persephone had grows to about 95mm long, and has more than 1306 legs along its body. You are unlikely to stumble on this creature as it was found almost 60m under ground in Australia.

The animals scientific name means true thousand feet. As with most animals that live below the surface, the animal is colourless and without eyes. It is thought that it only eats fungi. Leg number does not appear to be a constant, with other specimens having 998, 818 and 778 legs.

This new species joins a list of more than 13,000 different species. Millipedes are an ancient lineage going back 400 million years. It is thought that millipedes were the first land living species.

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Google profited from climate change deniers despite promising not to

” DO NO HARM” is googles motto, yet they are failing. It is quite true that google cannot police the whole internet. It is also true, that we should not expect it to. However, we can expect it to not advertise or direct traffic to mistruths.

Yet, they have been placing ads next to content promoting climate change denial.

There are 10 fringe publishers who’s content is included in 69% of false posts on the climate – this number is small enough that google should be able to deal with it. It is estimated that google made $5.3 million in just 6 months from google ad revenue (according to the CCDH).

Climate change denial seeks to push off the time when we will have to make the hard changes, yet this makes the ecological disaster we are trying to avoid all the more likely.

In 2019 more than 11,000 scientists from more than 150 countries declared a climate emergency. The problem is that this was followed by the whole world closing down because of COVID. It seems that google has been helping spread misinformation.

When this challenge was put to google, it basically pointed at its policy and then stopped serving adds on the page in question. This is not good enough. Google can well afford a handful of people searching the web for content of this sort, and making sure that they do not profit from it. It is likely that there will always be people who refuse to believe the planet is warming (there are still so called “flat earth” societies around the world)

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Could Bialowlieza forest be destroyed by forests on borders?

Around the world we are in a period where there are lots of people struggling where they are. Whether due to weather or war or crime, there are significant numbers of people who are on the move. Perhaps the most famous is the border wall that Donald Trump ran on. Given that almost all of the people who are illegally in the USA arrive legally and then fail to leave, cutting off the stream of people fleeing violent crime in central America will make little difference to what is going on.

As elsewhere, the wilderness either side of the USA border wall is likely to be badly damaged
Continue reading “Could Bialowlieza forest be destroyed by forests on borders?”
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Should being sued be a sign you are doing the right thing?

Mongabay, one of the best websites about the natural world, has had one of its writers sued. This happened after the reporter in question reported on illegal deforestation by a Peruvian cacao company.

For this company, it appears that this is a decision that they have taken, having sued several other outfits in recent times. The suit has been thrown out. The company had also sued the 4 members of the local environment ministry, including the one which lead the prosecution of the company. This suit has been lost, but the company is appealing.

This sounds like extreme wrong-doing. If you are prosecuted and found guilty, clearly those who prosecuted are right.

Increasingly, companies that are involved in illegal acts will sue anyone who uncovers it – wrongful judgements can move them forwards, and even if not, the court process can keep everyone tied up for years – if anything survives of the forest at the end of that, it is surprising. The judgement for the original crime of destroying forest, was clear and final with 3 sentenced to prison for the “crime of illegal trafficking of timber forest products and aggravated obstruction of justice”. They also had to pay fines of over $4 million.

Unfortunately, despite overwhelming evidence all of the sentences were overturned by the supreme court – freeing the way for the attack on Mongabay. Indeed, 4 days after the original publication a notarized letter arrived requesting the article be corrected – in particular, claiming false claims were made in the article. Mongabay Latam published an article refuting each point in turn. Some of the points were absurd, with the company complaining about the turn deforestation being used – as they had not been found guilty of this. More foolishly, despite forest destruction being deforestation by definition, the website had only quoted one of the officials prosecuting.

This back and forth continued, but suffice to say their arguments are stupid: talking about logging and deforestation are completely interchangeable.

Stupid moves in court must be publicized, as only ridicule and financial loss will force companies like this to behave.

Thankfully, this website is not a big enough thorn to have to face similar suits, but that may come.

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