Nature's Avian Architects

This week, I share photos of the weavers at San Diego Zoo, namely the Taveta Golden-Weaver and the Baglafecht Weaver. Both species are native to the grasslands of Africa and are known for their intricate nests and bright yellow feathers. In building their nests, males carefully assemble long blades of grass in an attempt to capture the attention of a mate. No two nests are exactly the same: the individual fibers and leaves chosen for in their construction affect the look and feel of the resulting nest.

Africa Rocks Aviary at San Diego Zoo

It’s time for another big life change - we’ve made the move from San Diego in California to Baltimore, for a new postdoctoral position I’ve taken up. As we take the time to settle into a new city and get accustomed to our new surroundings, I will take the next couple of weeks to share some photos from my archives. In particular, I am excited to share some animal photography from the world-famous San Diego Zoo, where I spent many sunny days chasing birds with my telephoto lens. This weekend, I am sharing images from the African Rocks Aviary, featuring an assortment of species that inhabit the African continent, from the elegant North Carmine bee-eater to the oddly-named red-cheeked cordonbleu.

A Nostalgic Feeling

I was lucky enough to spend three years studying for my undergraduate degree at the University of Oxford in the UK, and I still miss it at times. The city is a charming mixture of many architectural styles, dating as far back as the 1000s, when it was founded. My college was more modern than most, built exclusively with the purpose of accepting women as students and academic staff at the University in Victorian times, but I still got to explore almost every other college in my time there. The collection of images below is a little longer than my usual blog post length, but I hope it will be a fun one to scroll through.

New Caledonia

This year I spent two months living and working in New Caledonia, where I studied New Caledonian crows. These incredibly intelligent birds use tools in the wild to retrieve grubs from crevices in trees. Our work with them involves catching them in the wild and training them in captivity for a few months out of the year. They surprised me with their fast learning and incredible flexibility to solve problems.

During my time in New Caledonia I also had a chance to check out a few touristic spots, including a paradisiacal deserted island, a beautiful double waterfall, and a luxuriant tropical forest. The trip involved a fair bit of bird watching. Below are some of my favourite images of the wildlife and landscapes of New Caledonia's Grande Terre.

New Year, New Website

As some of you may have noticed, my website has been down for a couple of months. I just recently moved from the UK to New Zealand, where I am now undertaking a doctoral degree at the University of Auckland. Together with this huge change in my life, I have also decided it was time for a few major changes to my business, starting with my website.

I have modified and overhauled the design and flow of the website, and added brand new images from my most recent work. There are also more new interesting features coming up over the next year. As with my domain, I will also be changing my business cards to include my new domain at .com rather than .co.uk.

There will be new travel blog posts coming up soon in place of the old ones, which as usual I will be linking to from my facebook page. So far, travel plans for this year are mostly research-driven, but should be incredible nonetheless: I will be spending a couple of months in Christchurch, in the South Island of New Zealand, followed by a few more months in New Caledonia.

In the meantime, I hope you enjoy the brand new images and design on here! Let me know if you have any suggestions or comments as well.