Tuesday 19th February
I woke up this morning just before dawn and my alarm clock.
The room was still dark enough that the green lights playing up and down the
side of the internet router on the shelf in front of me cast a faint greenish
hue for a few metres around them. I was just determining to get a couple more
minutes kip when I thought I saw a light flicker on and off in the middle of
the ceiling. Thinking I might have imagined it, I watched and waited until it
came again, a small but distinct pulse of warm light that came and went, quite
literally, in a flash. It was too reddish and in the wrong place to be my light
bulb, but this was a possibility that I scarcely considered. What I thought
right away was "Firefly"! I watched several more flashes, and came to
the conclusion that they were spaced at fairly regular intervals. I turned my
phone to stopwatch mode, and pressed start on the next flash. The subsequent
flash came at 47s. The one after that came at 1 minute 34s, and the next one at
2 minutes 21s. As I waited expectantly for the 3 minute 8s flash, which came
exactly on time, it occurred to me that these intervals were rather precise for
an insect. Nothing against inverts, mind, but I'd never heard of one you could
set your clock by. So I turned on the light to have a look at it, hoping it
wouldn't fly off. It didn't. Smoke alarms usually don't.
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Amurum The small reserve in which APLORI is situated,
comprised of a mix of gallery forest, open savannah and rocky outcrops.
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So, I've not seen any fireflies here, though the MSc
students assure me that they occur here during the wet season. I have, however,
seen lots of beautiful butterflies, some very scary-looking ichneumon type
things that make a noise like an electric razor when they fly close to your
head and are alledgedly harmeless (unless you're one of the unfortunate
beasties it parasitizes) some even scarier wasps clustered around their nest
that I thought at first was a fruit (SO glad I didn't touch it, see photo for
details), and other cool stuff like praying mantis, damselflies, camel spiders,
termites… ants, ants and more ants, cockroaches, mosquitos and ants. Not quite
the haven for invertebrate diversity that a tropical rainforest is, but there's
considerably more going on than in northern Europe. The continuous hum of
buzzing, churring, and chirping during the night is a deeply comforting and
restful sound.
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Wasp Nest I
think these look particularly evil – they make normal wasps look quite cheerful.
Manu and I found this on a point count. The conversation went something like
this: Me: [Peering into bush] "What's this? It looks like some kind of
weird fruit!" Manu: "It's a wasp nest." Me: Inarticulate noise,
accompanied by a hasty step backwards. Manu: "Yeah!"
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Sunday 24th February
Today is to be a day of writing, in an attempt to make up
for the first half of the weekend, when we were mostly devoid of power.
Apparently this happens quite often in Nigeria, and even in APLORI where we are
doubly buffered from such events by a stack of mammoth solar-powered 200Ah
batteries (the inverter broke) and a petrol-powered generator (the petrol ran
out), we are not immune. Of course this can be frustrating, but there is also
something liberating about being in a situation where you can't access your
computer. Forced to read and help Emma try and resight some of her
colour-ringed Whinchats. What a hard life!
This week's teaching activities will consist of practice
transects surveys and geolocator fitting demonstrations (courtesy of Emma, ably
assisted by various Whinchats), reviewing various different approaches to conservation,
bringing on a few longer-term assignments (including the students' MSc project
proposals and some mini-projects using bird and habitat data they collected in
the reserve, and demonstration and discussion of sampling methodologies
(particularly sampling of insects and habitat). I'm hoping we can arrange for a
moth-trapping session to liven up the latter teaching element. There is so
little light-pollution here that, on a still and cloudy night, even a simple
light-bulb hung above a sheet would attract numerous weird and wonderful
species. The challenging bit would be identifying them, as there is no handy
field guide to West African moths. I've got in touch with someone at the
Natural History Museum in London to see how they would recommend we go about
identifying our catch. If we can start to build up a photo database of the
species found here, it could act as the nucleus for a useful identification
resource for the reserve and surrounding area.
This entry has become distressingly skewed towards
invertebrates, so I'll try to redress the balance with a few more birdy pics!
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Lesser Blue-eared Starling The starlings in Africa are considerably more glamorous than
those we have back home, all of them much bigger, and typically sporting glossy
blue, green or purple plumage and brightly coloured eyes. Ironically, they are
a lot harder to identify, as there are 4 or 5 species around APLORI, all of
which are equally striking!
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Red-cheeked Cordon Bleu These little finches look like they've
been painted by an imaginative child, or are taking part in a ritualised syle
of Asian theatre. They are one of the commonest birds around the guest house,
but I still love to watch them, and am hoping to see one in the hand before I
leave!
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Mocking
Cliff Chat Centrepiece of the APLORI logo (which you can see at the bottom of
the photo, on the door of the truck), and one of the most attractive birds we
see regularly around the guesthouse.
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