Back from Mauritius.

I'm just back from Mauritius - the flight's twelve and a half hours each way, so we are feeling tired. But it is good to be home, even though we loved Mauritius and its neighbour island Rodrigues.   We travelled around a lot and saw so much, including some of the conservation work being done.

 I didn't blog much about this before I went (too busy, too nervous).  But all this is part of my research for a book about Gerald Durrell and Mauritius.  The island meant a lot to him and the intervention he planned with huge care thirty five years ago has been quietly developing and flourishing.

One result is the saving of five species of birds, birds so close to extinction that they were down to 12 or fewer individuals. There are other notable successes too, which make Mauritius a pretty remarkable story. 

Anyway, I talked to many people in Mauritius, went into protected wildlife areas and had some memorable experiences, like being in the middle of the forest surrounded by some of the birds that everyone thought would be extinct by now.  These are two pink pigeons...

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and these are echo parakeets, the only native parrots left in the whole of this section of the Indian Ocean. They are a cousin of the Indian green parakeet but quite different from them in many ways. 

Part of the rescue strategy for these birds is to release them into the wild, and also supplement their diet while their numbers continue to build. This keeps them wild but gives them the best chance to reproduce and thrive.   A bit like we feed birds in the garden, I suppose.   

Apart from having several expeditions with naturalists, exploring the island and meeting up with some old friends who live on Mauritius, we also visited Rodrigues island. You reach Rodrigues by a small turbo prop plane which buzzes over the ocean for an hour and a half,  finally landing at an airport where very free range chickens roam about.

Rodrigues is part of Mauritius but has its own assembly, a bit like Scotland or Wales in relation to England. It is said by many mainland Mauritians that Rodrigues is like Mauritius was 30 years ago, laid back, easy going and unsophisticated.  Most of the population is descended from African slaves, and they're noticeably charming, friendly and public spirited compared with almost anywhere else I've been.  And although they might not be considered sophisticated, they certainly seem to have their heads screwed on about looking after their very special island. So far they've stood out against the building of luxury hotels and resorts, they've rejected the polluting fish farms that are now being planned in mainland Mauritius.

It was clean, it was safe and many of the local people live in traditional ways. Here are some of them gathering seaweed to use as fertiliser.  The time was 7 AM, and they were already hard at work before it got too hot.  Since Mauritius is in the tropics, by 11 AM the sun is directly overhead and anyone with any sense then goes home. 

 Now, back in London in November, it's time for me to start transcribing some of my interviews, preparing for more interviews (in Jersey and the West of England early next year) and also get down some of my personal impressions of Mauritius and Rodrigues before I forget.

Wild Florida

Some old friends who live in rural Florida had us out to stay for a week. It was so good to see them again and VERY good to escape from the sad, stressful and depressing stuff that has been going on here.  It's so restorative, too, in a cold, dank, dark English February, to suddenly be somewhere warm and bright and full of natural life.

I'll warn you now, I'm no wildlife photographer. It's hard for me to get any pictures of any wildlife at all. In fact,  I hardly even SEE wildlife when I'm walking along in England, let alone manage to photograph it.  So I don't have fancy camera equipment or one of those long lenses. But even with my little pocket snapshooter I got some shots of Florida's wildlife. So much of it is so big that you'd have to be blind not to spot it.

So here are a pair of sandhill cranes, above....

And below, I managed to get a shot of a roseate spoonbill before it flapped away.

And, of course, there are gators galore.... most of them hastily leaped into the water as we approached but these ones decided to stay put in the sunshine and keep an eye on us.   We stopped about 30 feet away but they didn't move - just kept looking.

Later, when we canoed down the river, a big gator followed us along, but luckily we didn't know till after we got back to shore.  I had been more concerned that little A might fall out of the canoe, but if I'd realised there was an alligator following us I'd probably have fallen out of the canoe in fright myself.

 I'm no canoeist either, so I didn't take many photos while we were going along, but I did want to take a row of turtles sitting on a log, as they love to do.  They made such a lovely picture.  But - too late!  By the time I'd got my camera out, they'd taken fright.

 If you look close at the log there below, though, you might just spot the last turtle preparing to jump off that log to hide beneath the water lilies.

Last time I saw turtles in Florida, I was able to watch one laying her eggs in the sand. Fascinating.

Little A was impressed by the wild manatee. These are huge endangered mammals that live in Florida and they grow up to thirteen feet long. In the winter they often congregate.in warmer places and you can spot them easily - this shot was taken in Blue Spring State Park.

And I believe these fish below are long nosed gar, two or three feet long, I estimated (below) although there were so many huge fish swimming around that I lost track of what they all were.



I regretted not taking a better camera - or at least a polarizing filter to cut out reflections - when I watched some tilapia making their circular nests in the shallow water. Tilapia are an invasive species in Florida, but it was still fascinating to watch them swimming around the bit of river bed they had prepared, gathering up any stones and debris in their mouths and dumping it outside the circle so that the nest is perfect.

All of Central Florida was a pretty wild place till the 1970s, when D*SNEY came along....

I was amazed at how Orlando has spread and developed even in the ten years or so since I was last there, and I was very glad I didn't have to find my own way through it.

As I looked at the sprawl I found it hard to believe that it was totally rural well within living memory; I've spoken to people who remember the cattle market at then-sleepy little Kissimmee!. Although Florida has been a tourist destination for over a century now, it's important to strike the right balance between people and nature, development and wilderness.

Well, now I need to get over the jet lag and research an article about Malta by the end of the week  I'll be catching up on blogs as I go, and I'm looking forward to seeing what everyone has been up to.