After the food bank on Saturday I took my groceries
home to put away and then headed out to the supermarket, expecting to have to
wait in another long line-up because of the new social distancing rules. Last
week I had to wait half an hour and the week before that the line went around
the block. I was very surprised when I got to No Frills that for the first time
in a month I was able to walk right into the store. I mused morbidly that maybe
most of the customers had died over the last seven days.
I
bought six bags of grapes, two double packs of pork souvlaki, and some
mouthwash.
When
I left the store I noticed that there was a small line-up of about five people
waiting to get in.
For
lunch I had a piece of toast with peanut butter and cheese and washed it down
with the cucumber-mint-lime beverage, which basically just tasted like cold
mint tea.
I
worked on my journal.
For
dinner I had a fried egg with a loaf of naan and a beer while watching one and
a half episodes of David Attenborough’s Zoo Quest from the 1950s. The first
part was the final instalment of “Quest to Madagascar”. Madagascar is the land
of the lemurs, of which there are a large variety ranging in size from the tiny
mouse lemurs to the ape-sized indris. The mouse lemurs are the smallest of all
primates. The indris is a size of a young chimpanzee and it is the only
tailless lemur. Many speculate that when Marco Polo reported having seen a dog
headed man it was of the indris that he was speaking. The name “indris” comes
from a French explorer who recorded the title after his guide pointed at it and
said, “Indris." But apparently "indris" just means "Look at
that" while the real name for the creature is “babakoto".
Before
David went to Madagascar the indris had never been photographed alive. David
went to the only thick tropical rainforest left in Madagascar, on the east
coast. While looking for the indris he found other things, such as a nest of
shiny pill millipedes. When hiding they roll themselves into seamless balls.
After several days of looking David still had not found an indris. He decided
that since Madagascar is full of many rare birds he would at least take some
equipment into the forest and record their songs. But while he was doing that
there suddenly came from out of the trees and eerie howling noise that varied
in pitch to an almost musical quality that could not have come from any bird.
He was certain it was the call of the indris. Several more days passed and
although David sometimes could hear them, he still had caught no glimpse of the
indris. He decided to focus on other animals. He was interested in finding a
frilled gecko, which has the ability to blend in so well with the bark of trees
that it seems invisible. David searched and finally found one. They flatten
themselves so much against the tree that they seem to melt into the bark. The
secret to any effective camouflage is to not cast a shadow and so these geckoes
have flaps of skin along the sides of their bodies. After catching the gecko
David’s thoughts returned to the indris. It dawned on him that he had a
recording of the call of the indris and so he brought his equipment back into
the jungle to play back that call at very loud volume. After a while he began
to hear from up in the trees responses to the recording. He looked for the
sources of the howling and finally saw an indris. They were at least a metre
tall and they had come out from hiding to get a closer look at the source of
the indris calls they were hearing. David noted that they looked very much like
the dog headed men that Marco Polo spoke of.
The
next day David went back to the same place at the same time, without his
equipment and found them to be sitting in the same trees as before. There was a
family of four. The two youngest were an affectionate pair and there was a
father and mother but the mother tended to stay out of sight. It turned out
that she did so because she was nursing a baby indris. They were so regular in
their habits that they went to the same trees at the exact same times every
day.
The
last of the Zoo Quest documentaries that I downloaded is “Quest to West
Africa" but since that one is an hour long I only watched half of it this
time. This was a larger expedition than the previous ones and David did not
seem to be the one in charge. They went to catch a rare bird called the
white-necked picathartes. The leader of this expedition was Jack Lester of the
London Zoo because he had actually caught sight of the bird once. They went to
Freetown on the coast of Sierra Leone and then headed into the bush to the
place where Jack had seen the bird. Their first duty was to pay their respects
to the chief of the village because if he gave his approval the best hunters in
the district would be available to help them on their quest. The chief was a
Muslim and he came to greet them with a few dozen of his over sixty wives. They
showed the chief a picture of the picathartes but the chief said he hadn’t seen
one. He invited them to watch a dance by one of his people who had control over
snakes. The magician danced with cobras and even put the head of one in his
mouth. He also allowed the venomous snake to bite him several times with no ill
effect. Not far from the hut where they were staying they found and captured a
gaboon viper, which is just as poisonous as a cobra.
They
had put the word out that they were willing to pay for animals and so natives
began coming to them in large numbers with boxes and cages holding live
animals. Some they bought and some they didn’t but one they did take was a very
frightened baby chimpanzee. Jack had great difficulty feeding the chimp because
it fought and bit for a couple of days. After four days however it would run to
Jack for milk. They named her Jane and they were able to let her loose to play
in the trees nearby wherever they travelled.
They
found termites that keep mushroom farms underneath their mounds. David broke
open one of the mounds to expose the large, bloated and cumbersome queen whose
function is to do nothing but lay eggs. Because David had exposed her to the
sunlight, hundreds of termites worked desperately to push and pull her back
into the darkness while others closed up the exposed mound.
He
watched a kilometres long river of driver ants that consume everything in their
path, including insects and small reptiles. They don't like the sun and so they
build walls on each side of their path to provide shade. A millipede approaches
and walks straight into the path of the ants and then right along it for a
while before emerging unharmed. The millipede is protected by the formic acid
that it discharges.
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