June 7, 2007--Screen-Door Naturalist: My Mosquito Coast
What is that magical hour called that proceeds official sunrise? When the light seeps above the horizon before the sun itself appears, licking the grasses wet with the night’s invisible dew and pulling early risers from their last moments of fitful sleep? I could look it up, but do not have the time right now as I have other things on my mind, other things summoning me as I am still on Mallorca and right now stirring is the beginning of the world of the day.
When on other travel, on bigger budgets and thus feeling the pressure to fulfill more ambitious agenda, this time of day promises to delivery what you are paying handsomely for. If you are so inclined, it is the time when big nature yawns its way to life.
As an ecotourist or, if it isn’t politically incorrect to say, while on safari (though my friend Leslie Woodhead, off a recent article in Departures magazine devoted to “authentic” travel would chide me here by saying, “What’s so authentic about that?” And he would be right.), it is at those times between sleep and consciousness that the gilded brochures and Websites, the marketing products of the packager who lure you to the Bush or Rain Forest with shimmering images of the allusive Costa Rican Quetzal or the adventurous allure of encountering the South African version of The Big Five, it is then, in the pastel half-light that they had said would be time each day to get up and out since these are the hours when the animals blessed with the warmest blood, like you and I, are best able also to rouse themselves and take advantage of the protein that awaits them from their slower-starting pray.
We, alas, will have to wait some time for our complex protein. But we know, while stalking, back at the camp, while we venture, other staff are already baking the hot buns and precooking the bacon since we are thus happily from a very different phylum of being than our game.
And so, at the first light of predawn you drag yourself from sleep; toss aside the mosquito net that comes at no extra charge with all the extra-deluxe huts; splash some icy water on your face (authenticity in The Bush does come at some costs beyond the obvious); snap on your Abercrombies; climb into your Land Rover; and, with just a few quick gulps of coffee to brace yourself for the adventure, place yourselves in the hands of your driver and tracker. Is it any wonder that all of this costs almost a $1,000 a day for two? (Meals, though, and sundowners are included.)
The Big Five await. Or at least, they say, today two of them—you are booked here for two more nights and so what’s the big rush? What would you do with all your extra time if you bagged all five on the first Drive? This is the Bush you’re paying for and happily, in the spirit of authenticity, the lodge doesn’t even include a shop.
It is the same predawn here. Or just a few moments past when the sun breaks free above the cliffs across our cala, Cala Marmacen. It is one of our simple pleasures to emerge from sleep and, facing east, look out from our bed across the water of the Sea, calmed in the rocky embrace of the enfolding sheer-faced cala, to see the accelerating flicker of the birds that are beginning their hunt or to struggle, still less than half-awake, to describe to shifting palette of light that too is beginning its journey.
As more consciousness takes hold, I begin my daily count of our local Big Five. Actually, I’m aggrandizing because there are at most three to spy—the cormorant, gull, the . . . . Nothing that big here or numerous—this is after all quite a small island. This is no Galapagos or Madagascar.
This turned out to be a slow morning—many gulls, but not the allusive cormorant. But as on safari, which I confess to have “done,” there is always tomorrow—at least three more. So perhaps it’s time to snap on my Club Monacos and head for La Consigna for the first of the cortados.
But just as I am kicking at the tangle of sheets, other life stirs right before me, not ten feet away--clinging high up on the screen of our bedroom door I spot, without the assistance of a tracker, two mosquitoes. These are not of the variety for which you need to take your malaria pills; but, bad enough, are the ones that are dawn, dusk, and nighttime predators, which means, if they manage to breech your screen-door defenses, that they seek you as their pray and, worse than the resulting itch, torment you through the night with their relentless high-pitched buzzing. Thus the need for what the British here call the mesh. We had these retrofitted in our windows and doors at great cost after last June’s nocturnal mosquito hunts, old style, not with binoculars and cameras but where we swiped and slapped to kill. A losing affair.
Today, protected by our new meshes, I spent the hour before full sunrise observing Mosca behavior with the patience and objective care of a true naturalist—I could not help but be inspired by the image of Dian Fossey studying her gorillas in the mist.
First there were two who flicked out of the bougainvillea to alight on the upper right quadrant of our screen. They did not move from that spot for at least five minutes. How, I wondered, are they going to arrange to have their breakfast when so idle. This was no mosquito café with a friendly waiter waiting to bring them their siempre, their usual. But, wait, before I could worry too much about their morning nutrition, suddenly from out of a remaining shadow there were three more and these did not alight. Rather they hovered and circled, in an every-widening arc around their—were they?—pilot compadres.
After a few futile forays, clearly to me in search of a breach in the mesh, perhaps tiring, running low on blood sugar, one of the three returned to where the original two were waiting and appeared to bump into them repeatedly as if to rouse them from their lethargy. Two of these three, I was certain exhausted, slumped drunkenly onto the screen where they appeared to hold on for dear life while the third, almost expiring, at last managed to dislodge the lazy two who then made a few indolent probes of there own around the margins of the mesh, the most likely place to find access to our bedroom and the feast of our blood.
I suspected, by this behavior, that the first two mosquitoes were not just their scouts but also were blessed with higher cognitive powers—just like the distribution of brains among homo sapiens—and used these at first to let others do the heavy lifting and, while waiting, learned from their fruitless exploration that the best place to expend their waning energy was at those places in our defense system that promised to be most vulnerable. And so they hovered and probed all along the margins where the screens abutted the door frame’s sides and bottom.
As a result, one did mange to break through because soon I became aware, near my right ear, of the familiar sound of mosquito dive-bombing. Perhaps from the sounds of this potentially successful attack, via pheromones or other insect modes of communication, six more leapt from the bushes and with their up-to-that-point husbanded vigor, in formation, they attacked the screen simultaneously and energetically on all fronts--at its center and margins. I tensed for what I assumed would soon be a full bore attack and in so doing my naturalist’s vision sharpened and I saw that as they more and more frantically probed and slammed into the mesh, some in their frenzy were noticing the approach of . . . the sun.
They and very soon I could feel the building heat; and that as well as all that it took to attempt to find a way through our impenetrable shield quickly began to sap their remaining strength and hunters’ zeal. First one, I think of the original two, and then its mate, and soon thereafter the others but one dropped off the screen and disappeared back into the plantings.
The one that remained, about whom I was most curious, hung on, quite literally, for another 15 minutes (I was keeping careful track of time, distance, sun angle, and such for my naturalist’s note book) and then, literally again, it dropped to the ground. With that, ever the dutiful scientist, I at last slipped out of bed and quietly, but not pausing to relieve myself as I always do after arising, tiptoed toward the door, not wanting to interfere with what was happening in The Wild. Thus I did not raise the screen but crouched low and looked through where it touched the door’s threshold. And saw, breathing its last and then expiring, that final, lone mosquito.
This reminded me of my one Big Safari in South Africa, how when in a fit of perverse, self-congratulatory debunking—what after all was I doing here spending all this money—as my fellow adventurers were recounting their close encounters with the Big Five—I remembered how I had come up mockingly with the Little Five—among others, the Tsetse Fly, the Termite, the (yes) Mosquito, and my favorite the Dung Beetle.
After enough wine with our wood-roasted Impala, thus loosened up this notion of mine led all to have a jolly-good time; and the next day, our final day, when out hoping to gather the last of the Big Five, the Cape Buffalo, someone actually spotted a Dung Beetle at work. The Land Rover nearly tipped over as all slid to the left side to get a close look. And it was fascinating—as interesting many later agreed as the previous night seeing a pair of hunting Cheetahs—to watch this beetle posed up on its tiny hind legs so it could use those in front to roll a dung ball twice its size to wherever it was headed where whomever was eagerly waiting for this luncheon treat.
Who would have thought that some years later, in my bed on Mallorca, in that spirit, I would find myself on a Mosquito Safari? Talk about authenticity.
When on other travel, on bigger budgets and thus feeling the pressure to fulfill more ambitious agenda, this time of day promises to delivery what you are paying handsomely for. If you are so inclined, it is the time when big nature yawns its way to life.
As an ecotourist or, if it isn’t politically incorrect to say, while on safari (though my friend Leslie Woodhead, off a recent article in Departures magazine devoted to “authentic” travel would chide me here by saying, “What’s so authentic about that?” And he would be right.), it is at those times between sleep and consciousness that the gilded brochures and Websites, the marketing products of the packager who lure you to the Bush or Rain Forest with shimmering images of the allusive Costa Rican Quetzal or the adventurous allure of encountering the South African version of The Big Five, it is then, in the pastel half-light that they had said would be time each day to get up and out since these are the hours when the animals blessed with the warmest blood, like you and I, are best able also to rouse themselves and take advantage of the protein that awaits them from their slower-starting pray.
We, alas, will have to wait some time for our complex protein. But we know, while stalking, back at the camp, while we venture, other staff are already baking the hot buns and precooking the bacon since we are thus happily from a very different phylum of being than our game.
And so, at the first light of predawn you drag yourself from sleep; toss aside the mosquito net that comes at no extra charge with all the extra-deluxe huts; splash some icy water on your face (authenticity in The Bush does come at some costs beyond the obvious); snap on your Abercrombies; climb into your Land Rover; and, with just a few quick gulps of coffee to brace yourself for the adventure, place yourselves in the hands of your driver and tracker. Is it any wonder that all of this costs almost a $1,000 a day for two? (Meals, though, and sundowners are included.)
The Big Five await. Or at least, they say, today two of them—you are booked here for two more nights and so what’s the big rush? What would you do with all your extra time if you bagged all five on the first Drive? This is the Bush you’re paying for and happily, in the spirit of authenticity, the lodge doesn’t even include a shop.
It is the same predawn here. Or just a few moments past when the sun breaks free above the cliffs across our cala, Cala Marmacen. It is one of our simple pleasures to emerge from sleep and, facing east, look out from our bed across the water of the Sea, calmed in the rocky embrace of the enfolding sheer-faced cala, to see the accelerating flicker of the birds that are beginning their hunt or to struggle, still less than half-awake, to describe to shifting palette of light that too is beginning its journey.
As more consciousness takes hold, I begin my daily count of our local Big Five. Actually, I’m aggrandizing because there are at most three to spy—the cormorant, gull, the . . . . Nothing that big here or numerous—this is after all quite a small island. This is no Galapagos or Madagascar.
This turned out to be a slow morning—many gulls, but not the allusive cormorant. But as on safari, which I confess to have “done,” there is always tomorrow—at least three more. So perhaps it’s time to snap on my Club Monacos and head for La Consigna for the first of the cortados.
But just as I am kicking at the tangle of sheets, other life stirs right before me, not ten feet away--clinging high up on the screen of our bedroom door I spot, without the assistance of a tracker, two mosquitoes. These are not of the variety for which you need to take your malaria pills; but, bad enough, are the ones that are dawn, dusk, and nighttime predators, which means, if they manage to breech your screen-door defenses, that they seek you as their pray and, worse than the resulting itch, torment you through the night with their relentless high-pitched buzzing. Thus the need for what the British here call the mesh. We had these retrofitted in our windows and doors at great cost after last June’s nocturnal mosquito hunts, old style, not with binoculars and cameras but where we swiped and slapped to kill. A losing affair.
Today, protected by our new meshes, I spent the hour before full sunrise observing Mosca behavior with the patience and objective care of a true naturalist—I could not help but be inspired by the image of Dian Fossey studying her gorillas in the mist.
First there were two who flicked out of the bougainvillea to alight on the upper right quadrant of our screen. They did not move from that spot for at least five minutes. How, I wondered, are they going to arrange to have their breakfast when so idle. This was no mosquito café with a friendly waiter waiting to bring them their siempre, their usual. But, wait, before I could worry too much about their morning nutrition, suddenly from out of a remaining shadow there were three more and these did not alight. Rather they hovered and circled, in an every-widening arc around their—were they?—pilot compadres.
After a few futile forays, clearly to me in search of a breach in the mesh, perhaps tiring, running low on blood sugar, one of the three returned to where the original two were waiting and appeared to bump into them repeatedly as if to rouse them from their lethargy. Two of these three, I was certain exhausted, slumped drunkenly onto the screen where they appeared to hold on for dear life while the third, almost expiring, at last managed to dislodge the lazy two who then made a few indolent probes of there own around the margins of the mesh, the most likely place to find access to our bedroom and the feast of our blood.
I suspected, by this behavior, that the first two mosquitoes were not just their scouts but also were blessed with higher cognitive powers—just like the distribution of brains among homo sapiens—and used these at first to let others do the heavy lifting and, while waiting, learned from their fruitless exploration that the best place to expend their waning energy was at those places in our defense system that promised to be most vulnerable. And so they hovered and probed all along the margins where the screens abutted the door frame’s sides and bottom.
As a result, one did mange to break through because soon I became aware, near my right ear, of the familiar sound of mosquito dive-bombing. Perhaps from the sounds of this potentially successful attack, via pheromones or other insect modes of communication, six more leapt from the bushes and with their up-to-that-point husbanded vigor, in formation, they attacked the screen simultaneously and energetically on all fronts--at its center and margins. I tensed for what I assumed would soon be a full bore attack and in so doing my naturalist’s vision sharpened and I saw that as they more and more frantically probed and slammed into the mesh, some in their frenzy were noticing the approach of . . . the sun.
They and very soon I could feel the building heat; and that as well as all that it took to attempt to find a way through our impenetrable shield quickly began to sap their remaining strength and hunters’ zeal. First one, I think of the original two, and then its mate, and soon thereafter the others but one dropped off the screen and disappeared back into the plantings.
The one that remained, about whom I was most curious, hung on, quite literally, for another 15 minutes (I was keeping careful track of time, distance, sun angle, and such for my naturalist’s note book) and then, literally again, it dropped to the ground. With that, ever the dutiful scientist, I at last slipped out of bed and quietly, but not pausing to relieve myself as I always do after arising, tiptoed toward the door, not wanting to interfere with what was happening in The Wild. Thus I did not raise the screen but crouched low and looked through where it touched the door’s threshold. And saw, breathing its last and then expiring, that final, lone mosquito.
This reminded me of my one Big Safari in South Africa, how when in a fit of perverse, self-congratulatory debunking—what after all was I doing here spending all this money—as my fellow adventurers were recounting their close encounters with the Big Five—I remembered how I had come up mockingly with the Little Five—among others, the Tsetse Fly, the Termite, the (yes) Mosquito, and my favorite the Dung Beetle.
After enough wine with our wood-roasted Impala, thus loosened up this notion of mine led all to have a jolly-good time; and the next day, our final day, when out hoping to gather the last of the Big Five, the Cape Buffalo, someone actually spotted a Dung Beetle at work. The Land Rover nearly tipped over as all slid to the left side to get a close look. And it was fascinating—as interesting many later agreed as the previous night seeing a pair of hunting Cheetahs—to watch this beetle posed up on its tiny hind legs so it could use those in front to roll a dung ball twice its size to wherever it was headed where whomever was eagerly waiting for this luncheon treat.
Who would have thought that some years later, in my bed on Mallorca, in that spirit, I would find myself on a Mosquito Safari? Talk about authenticity.
posted by Steven Zwerling at
9:18 AM
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