Its hard to believe that I arrived in Ecuador only yesterday afternoon. At 4 in the morning of that day I dozed numbly in the back of a taxi rolling through the deserted streets of Buenos Aires, and at dusk on the same day I sat in an open air restaurant in Salinas - on Ecuador´s southern coast – staring at the Pacific Ocean and eating seafood with the country´s premier seabird expert. I discovered Ben Haase´s name in a book I pulled off ...

Life on the Wing: Traveling Pole to Pole with the Arctic Tern Quarterly Report 2 Sept 11 - Dec 2, 2006 Third World Fall Passage: Morocco, Senegal, South Africa When I sat in Waverly Station, in London, waiting for the train that would carry me through France and Spain to Gibraltar (and to a boat bound for Tangiers), I felt a sense of relief at the thought of leaving the UK. The high cost of living in Scotland and England was not impossible or even v...

This one is a little over due. Sorry for the delay... I was resting one day in my hotel room in Agadir, in the company of the flies and cockroaches that happily shared my living space and probably enjoyed the viciously scorching midday heat as little as I did, when Mohammed Farai, a manager of that particular establishment, knocked on my open door and announced that I had a visitor. I had not been expecting any one and indeed knew not a soul in the city, so y...

Situated on the hillside rising north - up and away from the bustling harbor and downtown of Ushuaia - the small second-floor apartment with orange walls is brimming with warm afternoon sunlight. I sit and work at a kitchen table in front of a massive south-facing window that reveals a vista of the city, the docks with huge cruise ships heading to Antarctica, and a vast stretch of the Beagle Channel, the waterway arching around Cape Horn named after Darwin's ...

LIST OF BIRDS SEEN, SOUTH AFRICA OstrichJackass PenguinGreat Crested GrebeLittle GrebeWhite PelicanCape GannetWhite-breasted CormorantCape CormorantBank Cormorant?Reed CormorantDarterGrey HeronBlack-headed HeronPurple HeronGreat White EgretLittle EgretCattle EgretBlack-crowned Night-heronHamerkopBlack StorkSacred IbisBald IbisGlossy IbisHadeda IbisAfrican SpoonbillGreater FlamingoWhite-faced DuckEgyptian GooseSouth African ShelduckYellow-billed DuckCape TealRed...