Belize: Bye-bye Mangroves – Viva Vacation!

On a recent trip to Belize, the mermaids - that would be my wife and daughter, sought out any excuse to immerse themselves in the Caribbean Sea; and my daughter's desire to swim with a whale shark featured prominently on her list of reasons for our visit. It's a rather hopeful wish on her part, but if you don't think big there's not much chance of experiencing anything out of the ordinary. Alice had booked her place on an organised whale shark trip months in advance, and when the day arrives we all make the road trip to get her…

Belize: Mayan Temples and Howler Monkey Business.

The 17th May 2017 is another beautiful day in Belize and one that turns out to be rather special. Up for an early breakfast with my wife and daughter I eat scrambled eggs and tropical fruits, heaping both onto the same plate to save time. The view however is altogether more subtle than my inelegant attitude towards the functionality of food, and we gaze out across the smooth metallic expanse of the the Caribbean Sea warming from silver to gold as the sun rises. Within half an hour, we are moving along an empty road, the sun now throwing the…

Belize: The Down Side – Deforestation.

During a recent visit to Belize with my wife and daughter, it was impossible not to appreciate the beauty of the flora and fauna of what many regard as a a sub-tropical paradise. "But, there is something missing", said my wife, "and I'm not sure what it is". I thought about this for while and if I had to put it down to one particular thing, then it would have to be a lack of primary forest. Figures for deforestation are sketchy for Belize and what we believe sometimes depends on where the figures come from - certainly it would…

Belize: From the Forest to the Sea.

I was recently on holiday in Belize with my wife Jen and daughter Alice, and as usual had nothing to do with selecting either our destination or how we would get there. Jen decided to travel United Airways because they had recently dragged a customer off of a flight to worldwide condemnation. She thought we might get a better deal in the wake of the bad publicity... and we did, along with great treatment from cabin staff, evidently trying to make amends. Our cabin attendant, said that the day before he had told passengers over the intercom, to raise their…

In Search of the Unexpected Trogon.

Far away and long ago I was filming wildlife close by the small community of Portal in southern Arizona, travelling daily across the border to New Mexico; what I remember most vividly is having to get up an hour earlier each day to be in good time crossing into a later time zone... Getting up early has always been painful to me, especially if I'm missing breakfast! I remember this minor inconvenience better than almost anything about Portal; certainly it wasn't over developed - but maybe now, things have changed... I hope not, because out of the way places are…

Often the size of an insects eyes, give a clue as to how important vision is to them, although it is difficult to imagine quite what an insect see once it has converted the many images that its compound eye sees into something useful.

Before We Had Brains 2 – Of Arthropods and Other Things.

Long before humans developed the brains they have today, a great many other animals had already evolved co-ordinated nerve centres completely effective in directing their everyday lives. In 'Before We Had Brains 1', I considered what might have been our earliest vertebrate ancestor - probably a worm-like creature that lived in the sea; and before that we must have passed through a variety of preceding invertebrate stages - it's been a long road. Almost as extraordinary is that while we were on the evolutionary march from comparative simplicity to our present complexity, many other animals hardly changed at all. Once a…

Before We Had Brains 1 – The Worm That Turned.

As a child I spent many happy hours watching animals, especially the odd ones that other people mostly avoided... and it wasn't long before it all made perfect sense to me. When I was old enough, I would train as a zoologist. "What will you do with that?" people would ask. "Work in a zoo?" Well, not exactly. Rather stupidly, it had never occurred to me to ask how zoologists make a living - I'd never met one, but I was certain it wouldn't be a total waste of time; and when I finally managed to get qualified I was determined…