The Smaller Majority

Mozambique Diary: Pardalota

Ever since I can remember I have been having a recurring nightmare: I am in some incredible location – usually somewhere in the tropics, there are amazing insects everywhere, often those that I have been dying to find, but I need to leave immediately and have none of my collecting gear – not a single…

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: A welcoming conehead

Last night I arrived in Mozambique’s capital Maputo. It was almost midnight when I finally got to my hotel, tired to the point of barely being able to keep my eyes open after more than 20 hours on the plane. But the scent of tropical, humid air was too much for me to resist, and…

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…