Madagascar, the world’s fourth largest island, is often described as ‘a laboratory of evolution’; due to it splitting off first from Africa and later India, 135 and 88 million years ago respectively, there was a lot of time for the fauna and flora of the island to evolve in isolation. The resulting variety...

Glen Valentine recently returned from Rockjumper’s very popular winter South Africa tour – and what an immensely successful tour it proved to be! The trip scored an impressive 436 species of birds and 59 mammals! These tallies included an array of wonderful creatures (many of which are endemic to South...

The world’s 28 Ibis species form the bulk of the family Threskiornithidae (Ibises and Spoonbills), and comprise an interesting group of long-legged, long-beaked, wetland, grassland and forest species. Some are on the brink of extinction (for example Crested, Sao Tome and Giant Ibis), yet others have taken to...

Barbets are a group of medium sized, chunky, generally colorful, frugivorous, hole-nesting near-passerines, that are popular targets for anyone birding in the tropics. They occur in three biogeographic regions: the Neotropic, Afrotropic and Indo-Malaya ecozones, basically tropical South and Central America,...

(This blog first appeared in 10000birds.com) “There is, perhaps, no better place in the world for birds than this country. Even in the tropics there are few birds that excel some of our own in elegance and beauty of plumage and we have an unusually large number of species considering the smallness of the...