From our South African connection

Many of our members will remember Laurel Serieys who, partly sponsored by SMBAS, completed her PhD at UCLA and often presented us with inside information on the felines of the Santa Monica Mountains. She then left for South Africa and is conducting similar research there. Below is an email she recently sent to Chuck And Lillian Almdale with a plea for assistance in her current project which is facing a competitive crowd-funding deadline. SMBAS does not fund outside our general area, but we thought a number of our members might be interested in contributing to this project. The link is toward the bottom of the text.

Hi Chuck and Lillian-
I hope you are well. How is the Audubon group going? Have you found any other good students at UCLA to support?

Things are well for me in Africa- I am loving it so much that I actually don’t want to leave! It’s really captivating me to work here, and it seems my life may be taking an unexpected detour.

To help fund my work here to wrap up the last leg of the fieldwork, I am running a crowd-funding campaign. There’s a couple caveats to this effort:

The project is part of a cluster of cat-related studies, and the project with the most donors (not the most money) gets a bonus of $1000 on June 10! We are in the lead, but barely! So I am calling on all potential supporters to donate, no matter how small, it will get us very far!

The project funding is all or none- we reach our goal within 2 weeks or we don’t get any of the cash. So every donation is crucial.

Would you mind circulating amongst the group and just let them know- any amount no matter how small could easily turn into $1000?

Thank you so much for your ongoing support!

The link:
https://experiment.com/projects/the-urban-caracal-project-exploring-how-wild-caracals-persist-in-a-rapidly-urbanizing-landscape

Please let me know if you need more info- I’d be so grateful!

Much love to you guys!
Cheers
Laurel