The Plover

The people who head up the ENHG committee are too busy bringing us the best in natural history programming and field trips for self-promotion, which is why it is high time for a profile of our co-chairs, Nessrine Al Zahlawi and Arabella Willing. Arabella and Ness on any given weekend in winter Both long-term UAE residents with backgrounds in marine science, the two became co-chairs in 2016, and their leadership focus is very much on including and welcoming as many people interested in nature in the UAE as possible. Arabella said, “It’s a lovely community spirit where everyone is helping everyone else learn. There’s no other agenda. It feels very authentic. I love that everyone is so curious, and everyone is so interested in the world around them and appreciative of nature, and excited to go and explore and learn more.” Arabella has said before, “outdoors people are the best kind of people,” and ENHG is a great place for them to meet. Arabella and a ...

At the end of our season last year, we had the pleasure of a lecture from Dr. Mark Beech, on the UAE's most prominent archaeologists, who gave us an overview of his top 10 discoveries during his time as a paleo-archaeologist in the UAE, from 1994, when he first fell in love with the country, to the present day. Dr. Beech is of course well known as a member of the team that discovered the Sir Bani Yas church and monastery complex, which now numbers 40 sites, among them courtyard houses, a monastery and villas. (Incidentally, the site was first discovered by an ENHG member, Caroline Layman, who found plaster in a llama pen on the island during a joint ENHG-DNHG field trip!) However, many of us are not aware of Dr. Beech’s ground-breaking discoveries in paleo-archaeology, which put the UAE on the map for some very significant finds. In this post, then, we will look at numbers 6-10 on his list of top 10 discoveries. We guarantee you’ll learn somet...