Amazon Adventure.  August 2-14, 2010. Please check for details, under Tours. We will take a boat tour up the Solimoes and Rio Negro, searching for wildlife and learning about the great rivers.  Our boat is an ideal base for exploration, and the forests and rivers provide tremendous inspiration. SORRY -SOLD OUT!

Argentina and Chile. November 1- 16, 2010. All new Tour! We’ll visit the pampas in northern Argentina, staying at an estancia in the heart of the Ibera marshes, then fly to Peninsula Valdes to see Southern Right Whales with young, Orcas, Guanacos and a host of sea and land birds. Next we head to Los Glaciares and Torres del Paine, with some of the most spectacular landscapes in the world. We’ll be tracking Puma and watching Andean Condors, along with many southern hemisphere endemic birds. SPACE FOR ONE SINGLE WOMAN (SHARED ROOM).

Costa Rica. Feb 11-24, 2011.  All new tour! We’ll visit the dry northwest, the Atlantic lowlands, Arenal Volcano, and the highland oak forest. This is a fabulous trip, with an amazing diversity of habitats, birds, mammals and other wildlife, big and small. SPACE FOR ONE SINGLE MALE (SHARED ROOM).

Natural History Illustration Workshops. Sophie Webb, illustrator of Birds of Mexico and northern Central America, and I are planning several wildlife-watching tours that will also explore the world of nature illustration, with demonstrations and time for participants to practice their own work. We plan to take groups to Trinidad, Chile and Ecuador in the future. Ask for more details.

Please contact me for further information.

This one is a captive, I must admit. The views we had of the 4 wild individuals the group as a whole saw were short and sweet.

We saw a lot of wallabies and their smaller relatives, pademelons, plus the wonderfully named Long-nosed Potoroo. Eastern Quolls were sighted at three different reserves, and we watched one out hunting at Cradle Mountain. Duck-billed Platypus, a ton of wombats, all the endemic birds, and an assortment of herps rounded out the trip.

 This is a Bennett’s Wallaby

One of my trip favorites was the Echidna (shown below) - and we saw a total of 12 individuals! You can get right up to them when they are feeding, shoving their narrow snout into the ground and spinning it like a jackhammer in search of ants.

 I’m planning to return to Tasmania with mammals uppermost on the agenda. Let me know if you are interested in coming along!

I was really fortunate in being invited to colead (with Merlin Tuttle and Geoffrey Gomes) a Bat Conservation International Founder’s Circle Tour to Trinidad in January. It was an amazing trip! We stayed at Asa Wright Nature Centre the entire time, and went out visiting bat and bird areas throughout the island.

There is a second trip in May - contact BCI (www.batcon.org) for details. In May we will also see breeding leatherback turtles!

Here are some of my favorite images from the trip:

Silky Anteater - fantastic!

Jamaican Fruit-eating Bats in a tent

Bats exiting Tamana Hill Bat Cave

Green Honeycreeper - one of many fabulous birds seen

Special thanks to George Jett and Gwen Brewer (shown below) for letting me use their wonderful photos. I took the Silky Anteater image, they took the rest. Gwen has a Davy’s Naked-backed Bat flying over her head!

The weather has been really warm for two days and only tiny shreds of snow remain, hidden under deep conifers. Yesterday I took a quick walk in the woods and many wildlflowers were already in bloom. As I reached our first pond I heard a great splashing as three or four deer raced out of the water. I expect they were enjoying the new succulent grass in the marshy streambed that feeds into the pond. Today I returned to take pictures of the flowers and in place of the deer, a pair of wood ducks left from the same spot, making their high whistling call as they departed.

About 2 weeks ago, Don Scallen and I watched a number of Jefferson’s salamanders laying eggs. This is one of Don’s pictures - much better than mine - nicely showing the egg mass below the female. The egss had not had time to swell. Note the leach on top of the lady’s head!

Today I photographed some egg masses that have developed quite a bit. The white ones are infertile eggs, the darker spots are healthy, developing embryos.

Some of my favorite woodland flowers are already in bloom. Hepatica comes in a variety of colors. I have one patch that are almost blue, and sometimes striped, others are purple, some are pink and many are white. You can see a few of last year’s three-lobed leaves around the flowers, the new leaves will not appear for at least another week.

Blue cohosh is such an incredible plant when it first appears, with its deep blue-purple leaves and yellow centred flowers. Bloodroot appears with a dramatic white flower and a single leaf clasping its stem. By tomorrow the petals will have fallen off this one.

I love the tiny yellow blossoms of the leatherwood tree - a little bonsai in the forest with amazingly flexible branches.

The book should be available in May or June 2009, the price has dropped to $45.00 US, so pick up a copy soon!

. Sophie Webb will talk about wildlife surveys and studies, and daily life on research vessels off the West Coast of the US and the Eastern Tropical Pacific.  Sophie is a world renowned illustrator, author and biologist who spends up to 6 months a year at sea censusing marine life for the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and several non-profit agencies.

May 12, 7:30 p.m. Halton North Peel Naturalist Club meeting, at St Andrew’s United Church, 89 Mountainview Road South (at Sinclair) in Georgetown.

Sophie is visiting from California to co-lead a workshop with me - see the header: Nature into Art - a new workshop

Spotted salamander

I went to Uganda with Bat Conservation International in November 2008. We saw an amazing number of bats and also ejoyed close looks at large mammals including these elephants, chimpanzees, gorillas and many birds including Shoebill

Shoebill