Tom Butynski & Yvonne de Jong: Wild Solutions (Kenya)

Charles and Jon talk to conservationists and primatologists Tom Butynski and Yvonne de Jong from their base in Kenya.

Tom and Yvonne run the East African Primate Diversity and Conservation Program and research primates and other mammals in East Africa.

After explaining how their rural childhoods fostered a love for nature, Tom and Yvonne outline very varied career paths that took them around the world and eventually to Kenya - and each other - 25 years ago.

They talk about the importance of citizen science and describe some of the work they are undertaking on a range of species, including the critically endangered Southern Patas Monkey. And they outline the process they have followed to describe the several new primate species and subspecies they have described.

Charles is delighted to hear that if people looking for a new purpose in life then "dik-diks are the way to go", while Jon is shocked when Yvonne claims that she and Tom are not yet "as cool as the birders"!

The episode begins with Charles and Jon taking about their March 2026 weekend in Florida featuring a Florida Mouse and a very lengthy wrong turn!

Notes: Tom and Yvonne's Wild Solutions website is a goldmine of mammalwatching information, including some excellent free pocket guides to African primates, and a sound library of vocal profiles of many galago species (the calls of which are often indispensable to species identification).

Jon and Charles's weekend in Florida report is here.

If you would like to submit you own notes from the field then please get in touch with Jon at [email protected]

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Cover art: Tom & Yvonne in the field by Rick Strooper.

Dr Charles Foley is a mammalwatcher and biologist who, together with his wife Lara, spent 30 years studying elephants in Tanzania. They now run the Tanzania Conservation Research Program at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago.

Jon Hallset up mammalwatching.com in 2005. Genetically Welsh, spiritually Australian, currently in New York City. He has looked for mammals in almost 120 countries.