Back from Illovo Beach

I spent the last week at the Zoological Society of Southern Africa meeting in Illovo Beach, outside of Durban. The conference was a lot of fun and my talk went well. The meeting was in a resort overlooking the Indian Ocean and I had a nice view of the sunrise each morning from my room (the picture was taken from my window). I made more new contacts than at any meeting I've ever attended and I set up collaborations on bats, birds, and elephant shrews with some of South Africa's top biologists.

We also had some fun outside of the meeting. We took a route known as the Midlands Meander, which is a two-lane road along the face of the Drakensberg Mountains. The Drakensberg are a very cool range of very steep rocks sticking up out of a rolling prairie...unlike anything I've seen in North America. We also skipped out on talks one day to visit Vernon Crookes nature reserve where I saw a bunch of new species. All told, on this trip I got plains zebra, blue wildebeest, vervet monkeys, blesbok, reedbuck and exactly 50 new bird species. I'm back in Pretoria for two days before I'm heading off to the field for 3 weeks, so if you want to contact me, Monday is the day.