A guest post by Edward O. Wilson At the end of a long rutted road in the park sits a conspicuous artifact in the midst of wilderness. Built in 1970, the Hippo House was the vantage point, the antigo miradouro, from which well-heeled tourists, cool drinks in hand, watched wildlife herds as they grazed over…
Category: Gorongosa
Mozambique Diary: A single breath that changed the planet
About 400 million years ago, in the Devonian, in what was likely a shallow, freshwater pond in some tropical part of the world, a fish made a sound that started a dramatic chain of events, one that culminated in you and me being born. The sound was that of air being sucked in, as the…
Mozambique Diary: Sibylla
These days, if God speaks directly to you, be it about the precise date for the end of the world or his opinion about somebody else’s sexual preferences, you are either a crazy nut or a Westboro Baptist crazier nut. Ancient Greeks, clearly more open minded about such things, referred to a woman with powers…
Mozambique Diary: Blind snakes of Gorongosa
Last night’s downpour flushed out a lot of things from under the ground, and one of them was a large blind snake, Megatyphlops schlegelii, which I found as it was swimming in a puddle in front of the Scientific Services’ trailer. Now, large is a relative term – the snake is only a little over…
Mozambique Diary: Devonian sashimi
A few years ago I wrote a book titled “Relics”, which was a way of expressing my fascination with both time travel and with all the irreplaceable forms of life that had existed long before our species sneakily appeared when Nature wasn’t paying attention. One of the organisms I really wanted to include in the…
Mozambique Diary: Victims of our deficiencies
I had a very short and uneventful tenure as a boy scout – I simply could not stand having my activities organized for me, and the idea of wearing a uniform fills me with dread to this day. But I did learn a valuable lesson at one of my camping trips: if a can of…
The Smaller Majority 