THE first thing that strikes you about the African savannah is the dust, says Colin Beale. Those of us who haven’t been there probably picture a vast, sweeping plain of golden grassland, dotted with trees and filled with teeming multitudes of wild animals.

Well, the wildlife is there, all right, admits Colin. But if he had to sum up what savannah is like? “Dust is your first impression. It can be pretty bleak in the dry season. Dust, and wind, and monochrome greys and tans.”

He first went to Africa as a teenager fresh from school in Oxfordshire. He was on a six-month programme to work with the Kenya National Museum studying wildlife.

Even at the airport in Nairobi, he was overwhelmed by the sights and sounds of Africa. “There were the noises of invertebrates everywhere. All these insects, calling, calling, calling.” And then there was the heat, and the humidity. “It was like getting into a bath.”

When he woke up the following morning, there were exotic birds hopping around on the lawn. But it was that first fieldtrip into the savannah that brought home to him the reality of where he was.

It was 1995. “We were driving out of Nairobi, and we saw the first giraffe just outside the city boundaries, then the first zebra by the side of the road.”

You’d need to get deeper into the savannah to see such animals now, almost 20 years on. “But back then you could watch them from the bus.”

He remembers turning up at a Masai village in the bush. It had been two hours down a dirt track, then across two corrugated steel bridges. The village was a cluster of mud huts with thatched roofs, surrounded by a defensive ring of thorn scrub. “There were people hanging around, kids, dogs, the all-pervasive smell of goat.”

But what really struck him were the views. The village was on the edge of the Great Rift Valley, where human life began. “It was a stunning location. Beautiful.”

Colin – Dr Colin Beale of the University of York, to give him his full title – has always been fascinated by wildlife. His mother knew when he was three that he was destined to become a biologist, he says.

“She has a story of me sitting watching a snail crawling around a wheelbarrow when I was three. I wouldn’t leave until it had done the whole circuit.”

After growing up in Oxfordshire, he got himself that first placement in Kenya, before doing a degree at Imperial College, London, then a PhD at Glasgow University. He joined the Macauley Land Use Research Institute in Aberdeen, then Aberdeen University. And then, just over three years ago, he and his young family – wife Victoria and children Emma, now eight, and Alexander, five – found themselves in Tanzania.

Colin had obtained funding for a three-year fellowship to enable him to study the movement of savannah bird species westwards in response to climate and environmental change.

Neil Baker, of the Tanzania Bird Atlas project, had noticed that some species of savannah birds seemed to be moving their distributions gradually westward.

Working together, and using records of bird sightings by volunteers and bird watchers going back to the 1960s, he and Colin analysed a huge bank of data to confirm that yes, there really had been a shift westwards by many bird species.

They also looked at data on climate change and land degradation, and realised that what was happening was that birds were moving away from heavily grazed savannah in central areas and towards western savannah areas where the dry season was becoming longer.

But they also noticed that the network of ‘protected areas’ in Tanzania – hunting reserves and national parks set up to preserve and manage the country’s big game mammals – was playing a big part in the birds’ survival.

The reserves provided vital stepping stones that enabled the bird species to move westward, away from the degraded land to new territories where the dry season was getting longer.

The research, published recently in the journal Ecology Letters, could have important implications – not only for our understanding of how bird species deal with climate change, but also for the way Africa’s national reserves are managed in future.

During his three years in Tanzania, Colin did something else as well, however. He took many photographs.

All the photographs on these pages were taken by him. They capture life on the savannah in breathtaking, vivid detail.

A Cape buffalo stares out two grey crowned cranes in the Ngorongoro crater; a herd of elephants stir up the dust in Tarangire national park; a dramatic sunset falls over the Ndutu woodlands in Ngorongoro; a pair of lions bask luxuriously in the sun.

Then there are the birds, Colin’s first love: a pair of brightly coloured yellow-collared lovebirds on the dry, central Tanzanian plateau; a woodland kingfisher perched in a tree; a male red and yellow barbet in Lake Manyara national park.

Colin returned to the UK with his family last September to take up a post as lecturer in ecology in the Department of Biology at the University of York.

His research in Tanzania could have important implications for the future management of African game reserves and national parks.

His photographs bring the heat and the dust and the exotic beauty of the savannah and its wildlife right to your front door.