I’m off to Kenya at the weekend for a very short trip, and I’m really looking forward to it. Why? Because despite the fact that I’ll only be spending about thirty hours in Kenya in total, this is the weekend I’m scheduled to meet up with Luca Borgesio and Dominic Kamau Kimani (and hopefully also Dr Muchane of the National Museums of Kenya) and then get whisked off to the Aberdare Mountains outside Nairobi to see exactly where the money we raised for the “Small African Fellowship for Conservation“!

Yes, it’s this weekend that I get to hand over the rest of the money donated by the generous readers of 10,000 Birds to the team working on protecting one of Kenya’s rarest passerines - the Sharpe’s Longclaw (the first tranche was delivered a few weeks ago as detailed here).

I will also be delivering to Dominic a brand new pair of binoculars donated by the wonderful people at Eagle Optics, visiting a village school in the region where Dominic undertakes his fantastic education work - AND I’m going to give the team a fully-programmed laptop I managed to obtain for them thanks to Jo Mowday and the Peter Mowday Conservation Fund! It should be quite a day…(I may even get a minute or two to look for the longclaw as well). I can’t wait.

Quite rightly people already comment that I’m one lucky so-and-so (I’ve never denied it, and I’m not starting now), but even I recognise that there really is something incredibly special about taking part in an overseas fund-raising project and actually being able to deliver the money to the recipients personally. And on top of that actually get to visit and see for myself where and how the money will be spent!

I hope also that having such an opportunity - and blogging about it (which you can absolutely be sure is something I will be doing in great detail as soon as I get back) - will re-assure everyone who donated to the “Small African Fellowship for Conservation” that when we at 10,000 Birds ask for your support for a project unlike the world’s banks we don’t use your money to buy ourselves a corporate jet (sorry, I couldn’t resist that…) but that we do exactly what we say we’re going to do and we do it transparently and entirely properly. Which is very important to us (and hopefully everyone else), because we aim to make involvement in community-based or small-scale conservation projects like these very much a part of what we do as a blog - and (as you’ve probably guessed already) we’re very likely to launch more fund-raising efforts in the future. What might those be? Watch this space for future announcements…

In the meantime, have a great weekend yourselves, and if you’d like to leave a comment or well wishes to Luca, Dominic and the rest of the survey team please do and I’ll print them out and take them with me. Believe me no-one should ever doubt how much of a boost it gives to underpaid local activists/conservationists working in developing countries when they discover that someone else cares about their threatened birds as much as they do: any comments left will be extremely well-received, and it will be my great pleasure to pass them on.