The Smaller Majority

Travels in the Meddle Earth

“Go!” is the last word I hear, and then it’s only the swish of air, panic in my heart, and the river getting closer with every nanosecond. Right at the moment I am ready to have my skull crushed, something pulls me up, and I am flying towards the top of the canyon again. Ah,…

Mozambique Diary: Coconut crabs of Vamizi

In July 1937 Amelia Earhart’s plane vanished somewhere over the southern Pacific in the general vicinity of New Guinea. Neither the plane nor her and her co-pilot’s bodies were found during the massive search operation that followed. But two years after her disappearance scattered skeletal remains, later identified as those of a tall woman of…

Lungless and happy about it

Of all the organs in my body, the one that I would be most reluctant to part with (perhaps with the exception of my eyes) are the lungs. It seems that we need them more than anything else. True, we need all the other bits, but lungs seem particularly useful. Without them the brain stops working in…

Ghost hunting

I have been working in Africa for quite a while and during this time I have seen my share of iconic animals that epitomize the awesome continent’s fauna. There are still, of course, many that I yet need to meet in person – aardvark, “hairy” Trichobatrachus frog, Acridoxena katydid, to name a few – but luck…

Mozambique Diary: Snug as a bug

“There is a strange ecto on this vesper”, said Jen, a sentence that only recently would have been difficult for me to comprehend. But now, after a few years of rubbing shoulders with mammalogists in Gorongosa I osmotically absorbed enough jargon to understand that she had noticed an interesting parasitic insect on a bat of…

Mozambique Diary: Photoshop or not?

One of the more entertaining consequences of posting images of obscure, rarely seen animals on this blog or on my Facebook page is that I am sometimes accused of faking them, especially if a Google search by those who doubted the veracity of my photos did not produce similar pictures taken by other photographers. This…