Author: myip2014

Birds of the wetlands, with long curved bills, I have a fondness for ibis, even though I can’t work out which plural is preferable: ibises, Latin ibes, Greek ibides or just plain collective ibis.

We saw three new species (to me) in the Pantanal. The most handsome was clearly the Buff-necked Ibis, Theristicus caudatus:

They are comfortable with humans, and this one was hanging around in the garden of Baia das Pedras. At dawn, they perched on the palms:

They forage for insects and small vertebrates, often far from water.

The easiest to miss are the Plumbeous Ibis, Theristicus caerulescens, in their subtle blue-grey plumage. They are typically wetland birds, like most ibis, and feed on mollusks and insects. The youngster below still clearly expects handouts, but the mother is having none of it.

and walks off:

The Bare-faced Ibis, Phimosus infuscatus, do not make a big first impression,

until they gather in large flocks:

En masse, they remind me irresistibly of a convocation of 17th century plague doctors. A perfect match down to the black eyes with reddish rings around them.

If it weren’t for the fact that this species of ibis is not found in the Old World, you would think they had deliberately copied its costume (Actually, the mask’s long “beak” was filled with herbs in the vain hope of combating infection.) I suspect the mask might have instead been inspired by the distantly related but similar looking Northern Bald Ibis, Geronticus eremita, which went extinct in Europe in the mid 17th century. The plague mask is thought to have been invented by Charles de Lorme in Paris around 1619.

PS Ibises are tactile foragers, sensing their food with bony bill-tip organs called Herbst corpuscles, whose origins go back to the Cretaceous. Du Toit, Chinsamy, and Cunningham (2020) say this:

“The remote-touch bony bill-tip organ, used for remote tactile probe foraging; comprising groups of mechanoreceptors, known as Herbst corpuscles, embedded within densely clustered pits in the bone at the tip of the beak …..”

Memorize this, and all you need to impress is for someone to ask you the question to which this is the correct answer.

We had begun learning to identify the large dark low shapes of distant Giant Anteaters. This time in the long grass we saw two shorter shapes, following each other closely.

The guides, of course, knew exactly what it was: a single anteater, with a baby riding sidesaddle on its back, bisecting the usual single dark silhouette into two shorter ones.

It was so young that it had that floppy look of newborns, and we showed the photo to Danilo Kluyber, the wildlife vet for the Giant Armadillo and Giant Anteater Project (more about them in a later post.). He estimated it at no more than two weeks old. At birth, it will have weighed about 1.2Kg.

It was holding on tightly with tiny tiny hands, at the end of the back and the base of the tail. Look closely in the center of this photo to see its hand:

We walked very slowly and very quietly, stopping if she showed any signs of alarm, and we got a really magnificent look:

And in close-up you can see that this irresistibly cute small animal is a perfect replica of its mother.

It will ride around with her for a full year. When it needs to nurse, she lies down and the baby just crawls around to feed, without having to get off. She will stay with her mother for up to two years., and she may live till the age of 14 years in the wild, perhaps 26 in captivity.

So there you have it, one of the great moments of my life.

PS: Wikipedia says this about the Giant Anteater’s conservation status, as assessed by IUCN in 2013: “The species is listed as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, due to the number of regional extirpations, and under Appendix II by CITES, tightly restricting international trade in specimens of the animal and its parts and derivatives. Between 2000 and 2010, the total population declined by 30%. In 1994, some 340 giant anteaters died due to wildfires at Emas National Park in Brazil.The animal is particularly vulnerable to fires due to its slow movement and flammable coat.”

Wildfires are part of the normal cycle in the Pantanal, but since this 2013 assessment there have been fiercer and more extensive fires than usual, which cannot have helped. This story makes the scale of the problem clear.

https://www.reuters.com/business/cop/planet-heats-brazils-anteaters-face-rising-extinction-risk-2022-11-07/

I’ve just returned from the South Pantanal in Brazil, my second visit. My first visit was ten years ago, to the North Pantanal, long before I had a blog. Both trips were quite magical, and I’ll show you some of what I saw.

I’m starting with the animal I most wanted to see on this trip, because it is the one I didn’t see last time.. the Giant Anteater, Myrmecophaga tridactyla. For me it has almost mythical status. As a child, I read and re-read Gerald Durrell’s 1954 book Three Singles to Adventure, in which he chases a giant anteater across the pampas, trying to lasso it. So now I am happy.

These animals are huge, up to 8 feet long and 100lbs. They are 1/3 head, 1/3 body, and 1/3 tail.

As you can see, this is not exactly wilderness. The Pantanal has for 200 years had vast cattle ranches, but some, including Baia das Pedras, are now devoting much of their effort to conservation. The idea is to make a mixed model viable, cows and wildlife too. And since cows and deer don’t eat ants (or anteaters) , and anteaters don’t eat cows and can usually find their way through the local fences, it works. (Jaguars are more complicated, for another day.) We saw this one from very far off, and to reach it we walked through still-flooded fields in knee deep water in our hiking boots. It was worth every squelching step.

Here is a close up of the remarkable head, which houses a 2-foot long tongue, but no teeth.

They have three huge claws on the front foot, for ripping apart termite mounds. They are very hard to see in the long grass, but you can glimpse them here if you look carefully, at bottom right. .

You have probably also noticed that when you look at one of these creatures it is remarkably hard to tell what you are looking AT. Their odd shape, coupled with the stripes, creates a very confusing image. They emerge into the grasslands from concealment in small above-water hummocks of trees and bromeliads :

and forage for ants.

They conduct commando raids: fast in, and fast out, before the soldier ants counter-attack. If they do, they use their front feet to swipe them off:

The best is yet to come, but with great restraint I will wait for my next blog, and so must you.

PS They are related to the Three-toed Sloth, something else I have never seen..

A smart but fairly ordinary bush shrike, the Northern Puffback’s name gives away its claim to fame. Its scientific name is Dryoscopus gambensis, meaning ‘tree-watcher’, and this one lives up to its name:

It forages stealthily for insects, mostly in the canopy, but sometimes coming down to the top of tall bushes. Birds of the World describes it as “retiring, secretive and easily overlooked”.

But when it is courting, watch how the male transforms himself:

He does this by puffing out his white back and rump feathers to cover the darker back and base of his wings, till he looks like a fluffy pompom. In the next photo the bird at top right is the female. She looks entirely different, but she too has a bright orangey-red eye:

.

Northern Puffbacks range across the tropical woodlands of central Africa north of the equator, and are not currently threatened, but habitat loss is a worry, and in some countries they are apparently killed for traditional medicine.

Sunbirds are small birds with long curved bills that feed on nectar and flowers. The male Beautiful Sunbird, Cinnyris pulchellus, is about 10cm (4in) long with another 5cm (2in) of tail and weighs up to 10g; here he is in his iridescent breeding plumage:

When he turns, you can see his chest colors (sorry about the blurry photo):

His non-breeding (eclipse) plumage is much more subdued; this one is drinking from a container in the grounds of our lodge.

In The Gambia March is the end of the breeding season, so the one above has shed his glad rags.

They build a nest out of almost any available vegetation or soft substance, including snakeskins, cobwebs, and lichens. Some nests, including this one, have a charming roofed porch over the entrance:

This nest seems to be made mostly of grass and bark, with downy feathers escaping from the entrance. They lay only 1-2 eggs. It was suspended from a tree about 3m above the ground.

I end with a photo of a male Pygmy Sunbird, Hedydipna platura, in his breeding plumage. He is smaller than the Beautiful Sunbird, weighing in at a mere 7gm. But his long tail streamers and purple rump compensate for his diminutive stature.

[I’m back in Maine, briefly, then off to the Pantanal in Brazil for a bit. One or two more Gambian posts will reach you while I’m gone.]

For me these are the most magical of all damselflies. Jet black, with iridescent bodies, the females have contrasting pure white wingtips. They flit around close to my ponds and streams.

At the moment they’re mating. It is a complicated process. The male on the left uses his abdomen to clasp the poor female by the back of her neck.

If the female is not keen, she may struggle:

maybe forcefully

but if she likes him, she lifts her abdomen up receptively:

and they mate.

His sperm is actually produced at tip of his long thin abdomen, and he transfers the sperm to his penis on his second abdominal segment. So that is where the female must place her genitals, to receive his sperm. She is up to the challenge.

Mercifully even the Kama Sutra does not demand such contortions of us humans.

PS The male can also use his penis to scoop out any sperm left by earlier males!

I know this is a nature blog, but the birds and animals live in a country where humans have lived for thousands of years too, and I thought that some of you might be interested to see glimpses of Gambian life and culture. We were asked not to photograph people without their permission, so I do not have any street scenes, just a few odds and ends.

This is Omar Kuyateh, who played for us during dinner on two evenings. His instrument is called a kora and it has 21 strings. It is considered a “plucked harp-lute”. Kora players come from traditional jali familes, jali being the Mandinka name for a griot, who passes on oral traditions. Mr Kutayeh made it himself, out of a gourd and a calfskin. Here is one of his songs.

One day, we went to Tanji fish market. En route, the sole of my boot detached itself from the uppers, and my only other shoes were Tevas. So AJ our guide took me to the market, where Muhammed first glued the sole back on, then meticulously sewed it on neatly all the way round with strong black thread and a lethal-looking needle.

He charged me two dollars. It took about 15 minutes, and is as good as new.

At the fish market, there are no jetties or docks; the boats pull in and people wade out to offload the fish:

The boats are painted and named, and they have prows with wooden totems (right rear), and flags (the boat on the left supports the Spanish soccer team Barca!). When they are moored, the gulls and turnstones arrive:

And on shore, boats are pulled up for maintenance:

The fish market wastes nothing. These meticulously filed fish are being dried, and many had been collected dead from the foreshore.

The garbage along the seashore was horrendous, and I do not know if this is local to the fish market, or widespread. The Common Sandpipers below do not seem to care about the garbage festooning the sand behind them.

Amongst the mangrove swamps there are oysters, and these are gathered and cooked for sale (they are not eaten raw). The women collect them from tiny skiffs, many if which are true dugout canoes:

The white heaps on the left are oyster shells. Then, in the evening, from my floating lodge :

I saw them paddling back with canoes full of firewood. They are allowed to collect fallen branches in the national park:

Our guides have good jobs, and they’re usually men. We had one woman, Mariana, in Bonto forest.

She told me that she was 26, that her father had died, and she was the sole support of her mother and three younger siblings. She was a terrific guide.

This is not an easy life, and you become very aware of how extraordinarily privileged you are to fly thousands of miles just to see birds.

One afternoon in The Gambia we ran into a large troop of Guinea Baboons, Papio papio . This is the smallest species of baboon, weighing a maximum of about 26Kg or 57lbs, and is classified as Near Threatened because it is found in only a relatively small area of West Africa (including The Gambia,  Senegal, Guinea, southern Mauritania and western Mali), and its habitat is under threat. Their fur is crimped, making them look fuzzy, and posing a challenge to photographers.

There were lots of young ones in this group, and they were a delight to watch. This looked like a real newborn, being investigated by an adult female. The adult on the right is a male. They are larger and have a sort of mane around the head and shoulders:

The males are more laid back than the males of other baboon species, being more willing to share females, and forming friendships with other males, The little ones hung onto their mothers’ bellies, allowing them to suckle as they hitched a ride.

The adults kept a careful eye on the smallest babies, making sure they didn’t get left behind as the troupe moved past us:

Sometimes they rode on their mother’s backs, like tiny jockeys:

They are remarkably independent from the get-go. This one, who the guide said was only 2 or 3 days old, suddenly stood up, ran along his mother’s spine, and jumped off over her head:

Like all baby animals, a lot of time is spent in play. Also, notice the big male on the right of the group of adults, and his “mane”:

This whole group of maybe 50 baboons moved through the forest, flowing around us, parting only minimally to get past us while we stayed still.

On a different day, we were on the river passing a semi-abandoned park with broad steps cascading down to the water, and another big baboon group was in residence. They sunbathed, and groomed each other:

just hung out:

and bonded.

PS Their intricate social system is not as well studied as that of other baboon species, but this Wikipedia entry gives you some idea:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guinea_baboon

I write more often about animals (insects, reptiles, birds, mammals) than plants, but I glory in it all. Look at a corner of my wetlands back here in Maine.

These rusty spikes in the foreground were familiar to the dinosaurs 180 million years ago, and have barely changed since.

They are Cinnamon Ferns, Osmundastrum cinnamomeum, and are considered a living fossil. Their name comes only from their color: don’t put them in your apple pie. Unlike our more modern plants, they do not produce seeds. They reproduce by spores, like fungi do.

The ferns are six feet tall, and they send up specialized dark green fertile fronds,

The fronds are covered in tiny globules called sporangia, within which the spores are gestating.

As they ripen, they turn a cinnamon orange, like the flanking spikes below:

working from the bottom up:

until eventually the whole spike blazes with color:

In extreme close-up, you can see that the tiny globules open up like a clamshell and release their spores:

Each sporangium is by my calculation about 1/60″ inch (0.4mm) across. A spore is about 50 micrometers in size ( a micrometer is 1/1000 of a millimeter). One sporangium can produce up to 500 spores, and a single stem can produce 52 million.

I picked a few ripe fertile fronds and brought them inside. The next morning there was a dusting of green spores on the sheet of paper. The first photo includes an American nickel for scale.

The second one is a close-up of an opened sporangium surrounded by some of its spores:

I have not even tried to photograph the spores themselves in close-up, unless someone would like to lend me an electron microscope?

If you’d like to know more, explore this site:

https://www.amerfernsoc.org/about-ferns

And, to end, a wonderful image of spores by Rogelio Moreno:

The African Goliath Heron, Ardea goliath, is one of the world’s largest flying birds. It weighs up to 5Kg (11 lbs), is 1.5m (5′) tall, and has a wingspan of 230cm, or 7′ 7″.

This one stood in the Gambian mangroves as we drifted along, looking at something overhead:

They hunt passively, waiting for an unwary fish to swim by, and then they pounce with that lethal beak.

They only eat 2 or 3 fish a day, but big ones, over a pound each, so they gobble about 25% of their body weight a day. And they can live for 22 years.

The full glory of this huge bird shows best in flight, I think:

How on earth do they do it? Rayner (1988) is a fascinating article on the aerodynamics of bird flight. Herons have large wings in comparison to their load (weight divided by wing area), which puts them in the same group as thermal soaring birds like hawks, storks, and eagles. They have similarly shaped wings too, broad with squarish tips, and separate primary feathers.

The surprise is that the Goliath Heron can fly at all. It is distinguished by having a very slow wing beat of 1.8 beats per second, and this puts it at the outer limits of all birds and near the theoretical limit of possible flight (apologies for the poor quality of the graphic, I couldn’t find a better one; the vertical axis is wing-beat rate, and the horizontal axis is mass):

PS That very slow wing beat is why I was able to get sharp flight photos even from a moving boat. Here’s another one, just taking off on a different flight, though quite possibly the same heron:

As you can see, gaining height takes time! The jumbo jet of the avian world.