New edition of the Mathews Range Plant Guide

Hello all!

This is just to let you know that a new edition of the small field guide to the Trees and Shrubs of the Mathews Range is out! It is an entirely revised small book, featuring more than 50 among the
woody plant species found in one of the most beautiful and well-preserved forests in East Africa. The guide is illustrated by more than 120 full color high-quality photos and summarizes the most useful characters for telling the species in the field, as well as the interactions between plants, animals and the human communities in the region.

The guide has been produced in collaboration with the Cheli and Peacock Community Trust, and will be distributed free of charge to school students, villagers and tourists visiting the area - because awareness and knowledge are essential steps for loving and protecting our environment!

One of the colour plates - click to enlarge!

The front cover page

Paradise in the forest

The journalist Rupi Mangat recently paid a visit to us in our camp site in the middle of the forest in the Mathews Range ... and she was delighted!

You can read her impressions on our study site on the following link. Enjoy (and be envious, maybe...)

http://mobile.nation.co.ke/lifestyle/Paradise-in-the-wilderness/-/1950774/2001024/-/format/xhtml/-/8835cfz/-/index.html

News from the Mathews range

Hello everybody! August is vacation time here in Kenya, and as usual I am in the Mathews range with my team and we are busy busy busy on our forest bird research.
The big news is that birds are again in trouble this year, another big drought is impacting the forest very strongly and our data show that bird populations this year are hitting another the all time minimum more than -50% decrement since 2005, the year when we began this study.
Lawrence and Sammy as usual are using mist nets to obtain very accurate information on the biology of the forest birds, and their results are clear - some species, even common ones like the Grey-backed Camaroptera, this year did not breed at all, as it shown by the fact that the number of juveniles that we caught this year was more thna 50% than the number we got last year. Clearly, the drought is hitting very badly on the birds, and one wonders what will be the long term consequences of this.

A Grey-backed Camaroptera in the nets. This year we caught almost no juveniles of this species. A clear sign that the breeding season was a failure due to the harsh drought conditions

Talking of global climate change might seem like shooting too far, but the fact is that the most recent research suggests that droughts like the one of this year (and the one of 2009) will become more and more common in East Africa in the future. No doubts that this will have a very bad impact on the forests and their fauna.