The dilapidated remnants of Chironde, an old hunting camp near the town of Inhamitanga in Mozambique, don’t make for a particularly enticing location for visitors and most of the year the camp sits empty, looked after by a lone guard whose most exciting part of the day used to be cooking a pot of rice…
Category: Behavior
Mozambique Diary: Demons in the dust
When the fuel line under a car breaks and starts spewing a highly flammable liquid, the chances of something good coming out of such a situation are usually slim. And so I was not looking forward to having to crawl under my Landcruiser to try to fix the leak after the car had stalled again….
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…
Mozambique Diary: Snug as a bug
“There is a strange ecto on this vesper”, said the mammalogist, 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…
Treehoppers
“I need to have my vision checked” was the first thought that popped into my head when my eyes met a treehopper of the genus Bocydium sitting on a thin branch in the Braulio Carillo National Park in Costa Rica, where I was researching several newly discovered katydid species. I had seen many mind-boggling organisms…
Almost mammals
I was rummaging one day through the leaf litter on the forest floor in northern Cambodia, looking for insects, when a small, perfectly round ball rolled from a leaf above, bounced off my head, and landed on the ground in front of me. I picked it up to have a closer look, not sure if…
The Smaller Majority 