In addition to the 3 species we sampled in the Debresena church forest on our first day here in our second week of the expedition, we are focusing on a species in the same family as cherry trees. It is called Prunus africana (Prunus is also the genus of cherry). This Prunus is very important […]
We were so happy to find a newish hotel in Debre Tabor, complete with showers! However, last night was a huge and blustery rain storm, closing the noisy disco in the alley next door (a blessing!) but also flooding some of our rooms and also cutting off electricity. So we awoke to no showers, no […]
We have finished our first church forest, called Zhara. Today we travel about 4 hours by four-wheel drive to a small town called Debre Tabor where we will work in a second church forest called Debresena. Ambitious students can probably locate them on Google-earth. We look forward to comparing the differences between the two, and […]
Dr. Neville Winchester, our acclaimed micro-arthropod expert who managed not only to climb the church forest trees, but is harvesting many new records and (doubtless) species from this unexplored place on the planet, writes about his experiences so far: “On the boat and out into a monster of a lake… Lake Tana, the source of […]
Our sampling has been very exciting. It would appear from the scientific literature that almost no records exist about insect biodiversity in the Ethiopian church forests. So almost everything is new. We have beetles from the canopy and ants from the tree bark, and amazing micro-arthropods from tiny bits of soil up in the tree […]
It is now Day 3 and the internet was down for the entire town of Bahir Dar. But we are alive and well, and collecting amazing biodiversity in the church forest. Even the iPhone would not work from this town, despite the fact that I signed on for international connections. So we are working steadily, […]
As a canopy biologist, I am intrigued by the nature of scaffolding in other countries which appears slightly akin to scaling trees and dangling on branches. Here at the Bahir Dar Airport, the traditional Ethiopian tree-branch scaffold spanned upwards of three stories, with a team of young boys but mainly women working atop this rickety […]
We all arrived, except for one person late by one day, one suitcase lost in Washington DC, and several pairs of underwear pinched from the hotel laundry in Adis. Not bad, considering that we are a dozen passionate conservation biologists, on a mission to survey the bugs of the church forests in Ethiopia (photo is […]
Church forest near Debre Tabor, Ethiopia. Google Earth 3D and Google Maps 2D view:
Short pictorial guide to our first “base camp”, Hotel Ghion, in the town of Bahir Dar in Ethiopia:
