Among the Islands: Adventures in the Pacific by Flannery Tim

Among the Islands: Adventures in the Pacific by Flannery Tim

Author:Flannery, Tim [Flannery, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Travel, Science, Adventure, History
ISBN: 9781443413589
Amazon: 1443413585
Goodreads: 15820993
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2011-01-01T08:00:00+00:00


CHAPTER 9

Probing towards the Summit

Prior to my arrival in Honiara I’d written to David Roe, an archaeologist working in the Solomon Islands who’d excavated a cave north of the capital on the Poha River. Among the bones he’d unearthed there were some jaws of the emperor rat. They looked fairly fresh, and I felt it was possible that the species still inhabited the area. So when David offered to introduce me to some people in a village near the caves, I jumped at the chance.

The village, which turned out to be almost on the outskirts of Honiara, was a rendezvous for prostitutes and their clients who arrived by taxi at all hours of the night. It was also close enough to town for the young men to get drunk and then go home and cause trouble. I hardly slept at all on my first night there for the screamed abuse of drunks, some of which was directed at me, and the comings and goings of the prostitutes and their clients. But, worst of all, the village was a long way from the forest.

My brief stay did, however, have one great benefit, for I met some older men who knew at first hand of Woodford’s rats. One even claimed to have captured a kandora mbo, as he knew the emperor, around the time of World War II. The name means ‘ground-living possum’ and he described finding them in burrows, so confirming my suspicions that the species was terrestrial. He advised me to walk into the foothills where the forest was better, and search for the creatures there. I didn’t need much encouragement, and I set out late that morning in the company of some local landowners. Loaded down with equipment we walked through lowland grasses and decimated re-growth. It was suffocatingly hot and I was delighted when we came to a steep valley that had retained much of its original cover of trees. Even better, here the Poha River formed a magnificent waterhole, its crystal-clear waters flowing over a sandy bottom before cascading through a rocky defile. The water was alive with freshwater prawns and tiny coloured fish. It was a perfect place to camp.

That evening, after a refreshing swim, I prepared a meal of rice and mackerel—typical fare for fieldworkers in the Solomons. As the sun set, the distant siren-like sound of the six-o’clock cicadas rose and fell with the last of the light, and slowly the creatures of the night roused themselves. Most of the mammals of Melanesia are nocturnal, so for a mammalogist this is the most exciting moment of the day. I was not prepared, however, for the experience of having a huge diadem horseshoe-bat—its wingspan the length of my forearm—land on the branch of a dead sapling just a metre in front of me as I sat in camp. Its intricate nose-leaf twitched as it sent out its ultrasonic, pulsed cry with which it reads the world. As the sound patterns bounced back to the restless creature it twisted its body this way and that, rotating its ears like radar dishes.



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