Bruce Byers
Bruce Byers is an ecologist, writer, and international ecological consultant. His creative nonfiction writing tells stories of science and conservation from around the world. As an independent consultant, he assists government agencies, NGOs, and the private sector in the United States and worldwide with strategies for conserving biodiversity and improving the human-nature relationship.
24 September 2012. After our unsuccessful attempt to find the medicinal plants market in Phuza, near Ponta do Ouro (see The Map Is Not the Territory blog), the forest expert on our assessment team, Mario Falcão, promised to take me
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14 September 2012. We drove onto the small twelve-car ferry just before 6:00 AM on a Friday morning, heading across Maputo Bay for Catembe past the brightly lighted docks under grey dawn skies. It was already starting to sprinkle a
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August 10th, 2012. Learning about John Muir’s obsession – it probably deserves to be called that – with the ancient tree family Araucariaceae, and especially Araucaria araucana, the “Monkey Puzzle Tree,” I became very interested in Muir’s story and in
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June 2012. The Udzungwa Mountains rise steeply above the valley of the Kilombero River, their eastern face almost an escarpment. These are one of the mountain blocks of the ancient Eastern Arc Mountains, which stretch from the Taita Hills in
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12th of August, 2012. Old English is full of “terms of venery,” words for groups of animals: a pod of whales, a pack of wolves, a herd of deer, a gaggle of geese, a murder of crows, a pride of
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July 12th, 2012. If they are blood relatives, the connection is distant, and untraceable. But they are some of my intellectual and philosophical ancestors, and this past weekend I made a pilgrimage of sorts, to Philadelphia, to visit the old
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The Rufiji River is Tanzania’s largest in terms of flow. Its catchment in the southern highlands stretches from Mbeya in the southwest, to its mouth at the Rufiji Delta, inshore from Mafia Island on the Indian Ocean. The Ruaha River,
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The Freetown Peninsula is one of the only parts of coastal Africa, and the only place in West Africa, where mountains meet the coast. When Portuguese explorer Pedro de Cintra sailed past this coast in 1462 he imagined he saw
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Few people know that John Muir – nature writer, champion of Yosemite, and a founding father of the American environmental movement and of our system of national parks – traveled to South America in 1911, alone at the age of
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Walking along the shore of the Arctic Ocean in a stiff cold wind… were those patches of white just offshore clusters of sea ice? Maybe… No! Those white objects suddenly rose up in a noisy cloud, swirling above the water
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