Together with Natalie Uomini at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, we hosted a two-day online workshop on “Human-Wildlife Mutualisms”. We were joined by 40 colleagues from 14 countries to share experiences and findings, and improve our understanding of what is known about these unique partnerships. We were delighted to meet colleagues with shared interests including anthropologists, historians, conservation practitioners, and honey-hunters, as well as fellow biologists such as our colleagues in Brazil who study the fascinating cooperative partnership between fishers and bottlenose dolphins. David, Dom, Jessica, Laltaika and Claire all presented talks on our honeyguide research in Mozambique and Tanzania, as did our close collaborators Brian Wood and Anne Kandler. Several additional honey-hunter colleagues and a fisher from Brazil participated via subtitled videos.

David Lloyd-Jones was reunited with our main study population of honeyguides, and colleagues in the field at the Mariri Environmental Centre in the Niassa Special Reserve, when a brief visit to Mozambique became possible. After a three-day motorbike ride from his home base in Tanzania, David met with our honey-hunter colleagues and repaired their equipment, and checked in our study area which was looking lush and green in the early rainy season. This is a time of year when food supplies are low in the village, and many of our honey-hunter colleagues are busy tending to their crops whilst only going on the occasional honey-hunt.

Eliupendo Laltaika is back in Moshi after successfully completing his Masters fieldwork in northern Tanzania, studying the human-honeyguide mutualism across four honey-hunting cultures (the Maasai, Ndorobo, Hadzabe and Sonjo people). Laltaika overcame many logistical hurdles and car breakdowns to collect a wonderful dataset from interviews and honey-hunting trips, and is now analysing his data and writing his thesis. Thank you to all the communities he interviewed for their generosity in sharing their honey-hunting experiences, and to TAWIRI, COSTECH and the NRCA for their support.