This is Gordon J. L. Ramel

Hi Folks, thanks for visiting my site.
Here is some basic information about me.
My full name is Gordon John Larkman Ramel, though you may call me Gordon, and I am the sole creator of this (the Earthlife Web) site. I was born in London England, brought up as a child in Australia and am now living in England again. I am currently employed working as a night attendant in an ESSO petrol garage after finishing my M.Phil. I live in my flat in Okehampton, this is on the edge of Dartmoor and the surrounding countryside is really very pretty. I have a CD stereo but no Television. Instead I have around 1000+ books and many journals and must confess I am addicted to reading. I also have the office I run my web site out of, officially the spare bedroom, which is filed with books and camera and computer equipment. In my living room I have a 3 foot by 18 inch tropical fish-tank, with tropical fish in it. I am 6 feet tall and devastatingly handsome as you can see from my photograph.

I was until recently (since my M.Phil) doing some biochemical analysis of soils at the Institute Grassland and Environmental Research. I am available to design your website for you if you wish, contact info below. Apart from being fascinated by all forms of natural history, and my rapidly growing addiction to computers I like to play tennis, cricket, 5-aside football and basketball though not all at the same time, I also enjoy running (about 8 miles in hour) and visiting the beach during the summer. I drive a lovely Powder Blue 1982 Vauxhall Cavalier.

Despite all these points in my favour I am horrendously single, so if you are a good looking young lady you loves nature and kids and can put up with all these insects why not drop me a line at g.ramel@earthlife.net.

February 18th 2001 :- Update

I now live in the village of Kerkini on the edge of Lake Kerkini in Northern Greece where the weather is great, but the littering is awful, really they throw their garbage everywhere. I put up with it gladly though for the sunshine and the birds. I only have half my books with me, this is all the important ones though, and the fish-tank got left behind in England. Now I am working full-time on the website when I am not out getting to know the local flora and fauna or helping in the local visitor centre identifying mosses, setting insects etc. More later.

September 2003 :- Update

Well, I have moved around a bit since then, I went broke in Greece rather quickly and in September I left to take up a job as an English language teacher in Bulgaria. I lived there in a city called Sliven beneath a mountain called Karandilla for 22 two months, meaning I taught 2 academic years. I not only taught conversational English but also Biology (Human Anatomy) in English. It was a fascinating experience, working with so many beautiful young people was very rewarding. It was also hard work, learning to be a teacher is not easy.

Despite enjoying myself in Bulgaria, I was still in love with the area of lake Kerkini, and as I was making no money in Bulgaria, barely enough to live, so I returned to Greece at the end of June 2003. Now I am living in a village called Himmaros on the opposite side of the lake to the village of Kerkini. In two weeks I will start work here in a number of small private schools, again I will be teaching conversational English. I also teach students privately. I have a large garden here, something I missed very much when I was in Bulgaria because I lived in a 4th floor flat. I did mannage to grow 120 Oak trees on my patio however, in the autumn of 2002 we (my ecology club students, Girgina Daskalova the local zoologist and my self) planted them out along the bank of the Tundja river.

I have written a lot of poetry over the last two years, a novel for young people and a book on breeding invertebrates. Not much is published, except one small volume of poetry for children and their parents. I was accepted by a literary agent in January, who seemed quite pleased with what I had written, then a few months later he decided to give up being a literary agent (a little worrisome) and as of yet I haven't found the time to make any new contacts. I am currently surveying the Kerkini area for insects, small mammals (using Longworth Mammal Traps) and Reptiles and Amphibians as part of the process of writing a book about the area.

February 2009 :- Update

Six years is a long time to catch up on in 1 or 2 paragraphs. In a nut shell the 'surveying of Kerkini' got a bit more serious when guido Van de Weyer sent me two malaise traps courtesy of the Taxanomic Museum of Gembloux: Belgium. I set up a desk in the 'Centre for the Promotion of Ecotourism' in Lithotopos after Kostas and eleni invited me in. Then AnESer bought a microsope. This allowed the biodiversity survey to get really going. With Kostas, Eleni and Stratos we made an empty room in the Centre into an Insect Information Display for Schools (The already had one room devoted to birds and another to plants). This was very successful. I was teaching through 2004/2005 and 2005/2006 to keep myself alive, this and the biodiversity work meant this website got seriously neglected. On top of this I started organising volunteers to come out in March April and May to monitor the passerine migration along the river and passed the lake, and I made another insect display for a museum in Serres (I actually got paid for this). Furthermore Theodoros and I started going to England in August to represent Kerkini at the Bird Fair in Rutland UK, this was fun, but used up more time as we made all out own display. I also wrote two pamphlets about the area, one of which I designed as well.

The teaching looked like dying out in 2006/2007 so I took the money the County council paid me for the biodiversity info, a list of more than 1300 invertebrate species and went to Thailand in September 2006. Whilst here I did a highly intensive one month CELTA course to improve my qualifications as an TEFL teacher. So by October I was broke again. I took a job with BFITS, a company that sells educational packages to schools there in Bangkok. There are simply too many people in Bangkok, what else can I say. The food is great, the people friendly and the weekend birding is amazing. The job was no good however, I worked 12 hours a day trying to rewrite the courses, I was teaching Maths, Science, English Lit. and Health to 13/14 year-olds (In English, a language they did not know any where near well enough). In the end I got caught between BFITS and the private school's political machinations. On Christmas day I got food poisoning and the sack. Work actually finished on January 8th 2007.

I had made some birding friends, especially Klokos with whom I did some winter raptor survey work in December. I spent the New Year Weekend with him and his family birding in a National Park in western Thailand, very nice except I was still rather sick, and I broke my binoculars. Theodoros had been trying to get me to return to Kerkini to do more biodiversity work since November, he said he had money to pay me for two years work. Even though I found another job, I didn't take it. Instead I opted to spend some time birding and return to Greece. So Klokos took me to Khao Yai where I camped for 17 days and then arranged for me to stay a week in the Mangrove and Coastal Marine Research Centre before going further south to LamPak Bia to help a PhD student studying Long-toed Stints for a few weeks. With a competant assistant he would be able to observe peck rate and steps per 3-minute on the same bird at the same time. It was all fun, I met some great people, learned ringing the fast and dirty way in two weeks and then returned to Bangkok

I landed back in Greece on February 23 2007, and Theodoros did not have money to pay me, just a plan to get some. Believing the money would be there in a couple of months I elected to stay and do the work. As of today, 2nd February 2009, the job is pretty much done, but I still have no idea when, if ever, the money is coming. I am very broke, as always, and in 2007 I was pretty depressed once I accepted that the combination of Theodoros' deception and the Greek government's utter incompetance meant I was stuck, without a car or money to fly to a paying job. To be honest the biodiversity work was pretty exciting, I was given traps again, this time by the NHM in London through Max Barclay, Theo bought some others from Czechia and I made more. In the summer of 2008 I had nine flight traps running plus wine traps, pitfall traps and banana traps. I bit excessive actually, I now have 4 bottles of materials from the summer left to sort and I have been working pretty much 10 hours a day 7 days a week this year. Somehow the fish pages of the website got done as well.

On the good, besides killing hundreds of thousands of beautiful insects, I have met and made friends with a lot of wonderful scientists. Over 100 have now collaborated on Project Kerkini and the species list just keeps growing, we have nearly 1400 species of Diptera recorded now, more than everything combined before. We have nearly 600 new records for Greece and 50 species new to science, several of which are being named after me, which feels a bit strange. Now I am finishing up on the insect work, gratefully, and I am organising the Passerine Migration Survey for this year. Also I am redsigning this website, I hope the new look will be finsihed before it has its 15th birthday next year.

Here are some more images:-
Me as an undergraduate = pic 1 with a stick insect
Me working on my MPhil = pic 2 a man 'out standing' in his field
Me working on my MPhil again = pic 3 shredding dried straw and cow dung. What lovely stuff slurry is I dried it, shredded it, ground it into a powder, sieved it, centrifuged it, weighed it, reconstituted it, studied it under a microscope and spread it back on the soil. Not to mention feeding it to Collembola and growing bacterial plates from it.
Me finishing the Chagford Two Hills race = pic 4

 

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