Finding a publisher This was my first book and I was very pleased to get offered a contract by CABI Publishing. I initially approached a well-known (Oxbridge!) University Press, but they decided it was not for them; however, they kindly passed me on to the commissioning editor for CABI, who invited me to send them…
Capturing animal behaviour in a photograph (or even a video) is never easy. The wonderful natural history programmes we see on television, have often taken the film-makers months, if not years of work to obtain! Interesting behavior in nature, can be short-lived, fleeting, and is therefore, quite difficult to capture sometimes; but it is very…
Last year I came across these beautiful Indian purple emperors (Mimathyma ambica) at the, now famous site, for viewing mud puddling butterflies in northern Thailand. There is something about the sandy soil at this site in Chiang Dao, which attracts many butterflies from the surrounding forest. It is almost entirely males of each species which…
We are all phenotypes! A phenotype is what is produced by the interaction of our genetic code (genotype) with the environment. That is, the environment in the fullest sense of the word; i.e. all of the biological and non-biological things that surround us from the moment we start to develop; from egg to adult. Males…
Ray Cannon's nature notes 