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…
Category: Gorongosa
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…
Mozambique Diary: Not all flies fly
After a long hike in the scorching heat of the African savanna the cool, shady patch of tall miombo forest looked like heaven to us. I was in the southern part of Gorongosa, looking with a few friends for some elusive species of arthropods. But we were having little luck finding any and after several…
Mozambique Diary: Rescuing a Dragon
A guest post by Jen Guyton In my lap was a specter, one of the most elusive animals in sub-Saharan Africa. I’d been waiting years to see it, and now it was weighing abrasively on my thighs like a sack of bricks stuffed into a giant pinecone. It wiggled and unfurled its roly-poly body just…
Mozambique Diary: Amphisbaenians
Having drawn the short straw at the phenotypic lottery I have always felt a special kinship with creatures that most people dismiss as too small, too creepy, too unattractive. Because these are (I tell myself) the hallmarks of the truly interesting organisms, ones that have followed the less-trodden paths of unusual specialization, remarkable adaptations, evolutionary…
The Smaller Majority 