University of Exeter students from the Tremough Campus, Penryn, have returned from a field trip to Kenya, which they have described as life changing.' Sixty-two students and eight staff members from the University of Exeter's School of Biosciences spent two weeks touring Kenya's national parks seeing wildlife conservation in action. The tour included visits to Meru National Park, Samburu National Park and a 14,000 foot hike up Mount Kenya, Africa's second highest mountain.

"The trip was a life-changing experience," said MSc Biodiversity and Conservation student Robert Fennelly. "Seeing such poor communities living in close proximity to the national parks brought to life the human-wildlife conflict issues that were the subject of so many lectures and discussions back in class in Cornwall. From our buses we saw people cutting into forest margins, and locals selling bags of recently burnt charcoal on the roadside. As a conservationist, it is easy to hold strong views about preserving wild areas in tropical regions, but seeing the direct opposition between the needs of impoverished populations and wildlife first-hand has certainly diluted the strength of my convictions."

The group saw elephants, buffalo, giraffes, rhinos, leopards, zebra and colobus monkeys. The highlight for most, though, was the sighting of a wild dog on the shore of Lake Nakuru. Our tour guide hadn't seen one for seventeen years,' said Robert Fennelly, so this was an incredibly rare sighting of an endangered species.' "Over two weeks the students saw almost everything they have learned about in their studies first hand' said Dr Brendan Godley, senior lecturer in conservation biology. "From animal behaviour to evolution and ecology, we were surrounded by biology in action for two weeks. There's really no substitute for seeing these things first-hand to open your eyes and challenge your preconceptions."