Please tell me you have read Watership Down by Richard Adams! Even if you haven’t, you might be familiar with silflay for this word from Lapine, the fictional rabbit language he uses, means ‘to feed’. More precisely, to come out [from their burrows] to feed. I recently showed a photograph of a Scrub Hare with its long ears highlighted by the sun:

Usually Scrub Hares (Lepus saxatilis) are nocturnal, although they can be seen early in the mornings too – especially if the day happens to be overcast. This explains the dullish light in the following photographs of this one breakfasting in the Addo Elephant National Park:

Unlike rabbits, these hares do not live in burrows, instead the Scrub Hares tend to make a shallow depression in the sand or long grass – known as a form – under bushes for protection and move out from there to…

In my last post I said my next one would be about the discussion with the oncologist. I’ve changed my mind. I’ll put up a cancer update soon, but in the meantime, I want to introduce you to a special person who is part of my extended Afghan family. In fact, I’m going to let her do the introduction herself but before she does, I’ll fill in a bit of our shared family history.

I met Sausan’s grandfather, Jawad in the Jaghori district of Ghazni province in 1989, the year the Soviets left Afghanistan, when he came to work as a driver for the leprosy/tuberculosis NGO (non-government organisation) for which I was joint co-ordinator. Later, he moved to an administrative role in Quetta, Pakistan, which was, at the time, our operational base.

His family joined him in Quetta. They were among the first visitors when my son was born. I…

A volcano is a rupture in the crust of a planetary-mass object, such as Earth, that allows hot lava, volcanic ash, and gases to escape from a magma chamber below the surface.

The word volcano is derived from the name of Vulcano, a volcanic island in the Aeolian Islands of Italy whose name in turn comes from Vulcan, the god of fire in Roman mythology. The study of volcanoes is called volcanology, sometimes spelled vulcanology.

On Earth, volcanoes are most often found where tectonic plates are diverging or converging, and most are found underwater.

The Stromboli stratovolcano off the coast of Sicily has erupted continuously for thousands of years, giving rise to its nickname “Lighthouse of the Mediterranean”

For example, a mid-ocean ridge, such as the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, has volcanoes caused by divergent tectonic plates whereas the Pacific Ring of Fire has volcanoes caused by convergent tectonic plates.

Volcanoes…

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