Bat Tales interlude: Aliens On Our Planet

Heh. Since I'm going to be sitting around unemployed, I ought to be sitting on my bum and writing more rather than sitting on my bum and surfing. Here's the article I wrote to go with Jodi's and Laura's in Haring Ibon magazine (means 'raja burung' in Tagalog, is the local name for the Philippine eagle, and is the magazine of the Haribon Foundation).

Aliens On Our Planet

The ‘space bug’ was caught during our second to last week on Mount Isarog. Its glasslike wing-cases and head shield formed a disk, with the body a bright orange dome in the middle, so that it resembled a flying saucer. There were other fantastic finds – the ‘scooter bug’, a leafhopper with handlebar-shaped horns; an iridescent green and copper beetle; and an ‘alien’ spider that looked as if a black-and-yellow blowfish had been glued to its behind.

For an urbanite, a trek into the jungle is like an astronaut’s journey to the far side of the moon – so close, yet one never sees it. Too often we act as if our cities are spaceships, closed off from external change. It was staggering to realize that all the cities I had lived in (in Malaysia) once were very much like the forest around us: dense with life, growing, eating and being eaten, nothing inorganic but the rocks.

Some of the forest inhabitants quickly became familiar, in particular bats. (And those ants with the red heads and 4mm jaws.) From ‘ball of fluff with wings’, my recognition of insect bats improved to the point where I could tell the difference between Rhinolophus arcuatus and Hipposideros ater after a couple of days. However, we discovered that one can’t tell the difference between a dung beetle and a bat without looking:

“Which bag has the bat in it?”

“It must be the heavier one.”

“Okay – oh! It’s the beetle.”

Handling the fruit bats proved an interesting diversion, because they had to be hung from a high place in order to take off when released – often on the clothesline next to a T-shirt or pair of socks. Large-eyed and furry, their faces are cute even by non-zoologist standards, although “all the cuteness goes away when they bite you.”

The more common bats were marked with hair bleach to identify them when recaptured, although one Sunday the field assistants borrowed some bleach and gave themselves new hairdos. Hitherto I had only seen bats from a distance, over trees and lamp-posts, or in zoos. Watching them scramble, flutter, and then fly off into the night when we released them was thoroughly satisfying.

What surprised me about the forest was the degree of human encroachment in it. At the ‘official’ border of a nearby barangay, the sign proclaiming “Welcome to Mount Isarog National Park!” is thrown into ironic relief by the electric lines running overhead and dozens of houses in the background. Our final campsite on the Tabuan River was actually on one of many abaca plantations in the area. The endless stretches of identical trees made navigation difficult. “I never want to see another banana tree again,” I groaned after Jodi, Laura, and I got lost on our first night of trapping there. Exploring by day, we saw freshly felled and girdled trees.

Yet it’s hard for me to assign sole blame to the farmers doing the cutting and cultivation, opportunists like everyone else. As someone said of the abaca farmer who let us use his house and rent his water buffalo, “He’s cutting down the forest—but he’s a nice guy!” What about the people who buy and use the abaca, sugarcane, and rice? What about the people who should be ensuring that the park boundaries are enforced? They probably live in cites, as do I, as do most of us. It’s easier to accept loss experienced only in the abstract as a figure of so many hectares of land, without seeing it with one’s own eyes; but the weeks on the mountain brought the knowledge of that loss closer to my heart, harder to bear.

---

Completely unrelated -- here's a pic of a Philippine eagle. They're HUGE. Laura and I saw one at the raptor centre at the UP-Los Banos campus. When asked how many they had, the curator said, "We have three. There is another pair that is not on display. This one's name is Laila. One of the keepers is courting her for artificial insemination."