“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,…
Category: Reptiles
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…
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: Poetic justice
If we lived in an ideal world, right about now I would have been putting on my headlamp to begin stalking katydids in the luxuriantly green savannas of Gorongosa National Park. But, alas, we don’t. For reasons beyond my control I had to postpone a trip to Mozambique, although I hope to be able to…
A portrait of a marine iguana
Sharlena Wood, a Canadian artist whose beautiful paintings have already been featured on this blog (here and here), did it again. Using a charcoal drawing technique she produced an outstanding portrait of a marine iguana by imaginatively reinterpreting one of my photos from the Galapagos Islands. This drawing is part of a series of portraits…
Mozambique Diary: On the benefits of being lazy
Since I needed for one of my book projects a few shots of the famous Gorongosa crocodiles, which rank among the largest in Africa, I asked for help from Bob Poole, a man with considerable crocodile experience. Bob is a legendary National Geographic cameraman who shot, among other NatGeo titles, “Africa’s Lost Eden” and “War…
The Smaller Majority 