“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…
Category: Mammals
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…
African Bats: Conservation in the Time of Ebola
A guest post by Jen Guyton The last fragile wing finally came free from the threads of my mist net. I sank into the sand on the riverbank, took a deep breath, and tugged off my yellow deerskin gloves. Eight cotton bags wiggled as they hung from the line that tethered my mist net to…
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: Shooting bats
My entire last month was a blur of hectic activity, related mostly to the opening of the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Laboratory in Gorongosa National Park. This kept me from updating the blog, but it was definitely worth it – the Lab is a fantastic facility that will serve as a research base to current and…
Mozambique Diary: Heroes, and what bugs them
One early morning, while on the Cheringoma Plateau, Jen “the Mammal Lady” Guyton came running into the camp. “We caught something really good in our traps!”, she announced breathlessly, sending the media team that was filming our expedition into a state of frenzied excitement. Everybody rushed to see the mystery animal, whose identity Jen refused…
The Smaller Majority 