Sightings by post
We have two forms which you can download for printing:
The Species Check-list
The Species Check-list includes all the wild mammals’ species excluding rodents, bats, insectivores and marine mammals and is designed to provide basic presence/absence information. This kind of information will allow us to map the distribution of mammals across the country and to monitor species for range contractions or expansions. We are asking for the sightings within grid squares ( see here for more detail) that are a quarter square degree of latitude/longitude, an area of roughly 50km square.
Please fill in the check-sheets even if you are just passing through a grid square, particularly if you are driving at night when nocturnal species are more likely to be seen. Road kills also constitute valid information, and sadly, many mammals are killed on the roads.
The Sightings Sheet
The Sightings Sheet asks you for more detailed information on individual mammal sightings. It would be wonderful if these sheets could be filled in every time you see a mammal, but we realise that this may be asking a lot of you! Instead, we ask that you fill in these sheets whenever you have unusual sightings of mammals; for example, whenever you see a species that you see rarely in a particular area. Thus the Sightings Sheet allows us to gather relatively detailed information about mammals that are seldom seen in a given area.
We would very much appreciate it if you could fill in both check-sheets, but we also understand that the Sightings Sheet will require more time and effort to fill in. We therefore recommend that you prioritise the Species Check-list, and only complete the Sightings Sheet if you have sufficient time.
Please only record mammal species if you are absolutely certain of having correctly identified the species sighted.
Once you have sent us your data, we might send a follow up letter if we have any questions regarding your sightings, so please remember to provide us with your address. After passing through our vetting procedure, your sightings will be loaded onto the individual species maps on the website. We ask that you fill in a new form for each year and for each different grid square where you saw a mammal species. There is a space for notes on the checklist where you can also list the GPS location of your sightings if by chance you are able to record this.
We realise that it may be difficult for you to identify all mammal species and so we ask you to please restrict yourselves to recording details of only those species that you are confident of having identified reliably. We recommend Jonathan Kingdon’s ‘The Kingdon Field Guide of African Mammals’ (1997 Academic Press) as a useful identification tool, especially for the lesser-known mammals. You can also find useful identification details and pictures of each species on our Tanzania Mammals page. If you have any questions about what mammals you might be seeing please do not hesitate to contact us at .