by Tim Flannery
In 1988 I had appeared on a popular television program to speak about my research on tree kangaroos in New Guinea, and a few days later I received a letter from a solicitor in Sydney, requesting a meeting. He explained that one of his clients had left a bequest to fund wildlife conservation. It was a subject he knew little about, and he wondered if I might want some of the money?
The bequest, I learned, resulted from the determination of an ordinary Australian woman to make a difference to the conservation of our region’s most endangered species. Winifred Violet Scott was one of seven siblings, none of whom married. Each had lived a modest life, making prudent property purchases and investing wisely in stocks and bonds. They bequeathed their estates to their surviving brothers and sisters, until, finally, Winifred found herself the owner of seven North Shore houses and seven substantial share portfolios. In short, Miss Scott was worth a small fortune. But she did not change her frugal ways, and shortly before her death she met with her solicitor and explained that she wanted to leave all of her earthly possessions as a bequest to preserve endangered species.
The solicitor had at first tried to dissuade Miss Scott from this course, suggesting that instead she might like to consider a donation to cancer research or perhaps to underprivileged children. Miss Scott, however, was resolute in her wish, and the change to her Will was made accordingly.
When Miss Scott passed away, her solicitor discovered that the value of the bequest was even greater than he had imagined, amounting to a sum that he was at a loss to know how to disburse. He had considered donating the lot to the Stockman’s Hall of Fame in Queensland, but such a gift did not fall within the parameters of the Will. As the solicitor and I spoke, it became clear that a great faunal survey of the islands of the southwest Pacific region, for the purpose of identifying its endangered species, would be something Miss Scott would have been very proud of. So, in August 1989, the Scott expeditions were born, and for five years our survey teams ranged far and wide, from the Moluccas to Fiji, making biological discoveries neither I nor anyone else had ever dreamed possible.
So successful was our expeditionary work that we were soon in need of increased assistance from the museum’s taxidermy department. George Hangay had done his best to keep up with the stream of specimens requiring cleaning and stuffing, but it was a losing battle. Finding a professional taxidermist is not easy, but the backlog mounted up as the search went on. Finally, a solution dropped into George’s lap in the form of a young Chinese immigrant who arrived unheralded at the museum. Alex Wang spoke almost no English, yet managed to convey that he had recently arrived from Urumqi in China’s remote Xinjiang province, and was looking for work. He had no certificates or letters to testify to his past employment or skills. Instead he opened a long trench coat; pinned to the inside were the stuffed skins of dozens of small birds and mammals.
George decided that the best thing to do was to ask Alex if he’d like to volunteer at the museum for a week, so that the quality of his work could be assessed first-hand. All seemed satisfactory until Alex approached George at week’s end with his hand out for payment. Alex’s English was all but non-existent, and the word ‘volunteer’ had not been understood. But Alex’s work was exemplary, so George paid him out of his own pocket, and made arrangements to employ Alex permanently in the department. With Alex’s help the backlog of specimens was soon decreasing. We now had the capacity to write up our results, and a rush of scientific publications ensued.
There is only one town of any size in the Solomon Islands, the capital Honiara on the island of Guadalcanal. Woodford’s old capital of Tulagi was abandoned following the Japanese invasion in 1942. When I first arrived in 1987 the nation had been independent for just a decade. Flying into Henderson Field just outside the capital I could see the majestic, cloud-wreathed summits of Makarakomburu and Popomanaseu beckoning through the aircraft windows. Was that where I might find Woodford’s rats? Closer to the coast bands of dead trees revealed that the forests at lower elevation were being cleared with axe and fire. I was determined, one day, to scale the peaks that had defeated Woodford, but this was not the moment. I was too inexperienced and, despite the inauspicious forest destruction, my search for the great rats would begin closer to civilisation.
In the years that followed that first expedition, Honiara was all but destroyed by a civil war between migrants from the adjacent island of Malaita and the natives of Guadalcanal. When I did my work the war was no more than a distant rumble expressed in shouting matches and the occasional brawl. But as the years passed I watched the news, horrified, as the conflict escalated from one fought with bows and arrows, to one waged with rifles and armoured vehicles. One of the most bizarre scenes involved a formidable, locally made ‘tank’, which was used to flatten villages and lead assaults on enemy positions. It was crafted from a huge bulldozer that had been stolen from a goldmine and covered over with rough, welded-iron plates, every gap between them bristling with shotguns, arrows and rifles. As it ploughed through the jungle it had all the brutal, end of days craziness of a scene from a Mad Max movie.
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. How, I wondered, did I appear in its ultrasound world? Perhaps its sonics permitted it to ‘see’ right through me to the meal of tinned mackerel and rice I’d just eaten. Or perhaps it saw my very life force—the blood flowing
through my veins and the electrical discharges that powered my brain, allowing it to anticipate my reactions and thoughts. Whatever it experienced did not hold it, for soon the majestic creature set off in pursuit of beetles and other insects. Finding its food is quite a job; the sixty-gram bat has to consume its weight in insects every night just to stay alive.
As full darkness closed in, bats seemed to flit everywhere. Tiny ones brushed my face as they chased mosquitoes and great fruit bats whooshed their wings overhead as they set out for distant fruit trees. The Solomon Islands really is a world of bats, for no other mammals apart from the rats had reached these distant outposts before the arrival of humans. The fauna has of course been enriched since then—first by a cuscus, most likely carried from the Bismarck Archipelago six thousand years ago, and then, in the past three thousand years, by pigs, dogs and commensal rats. Europeans have added cats and cattle, both of which have run wild. But, even so, the bats continue to dominate. The insectivores range in size from tiny, nondescript cave-dwellers, through to a gigantic relative of the diadem horseshoe-bat I’d just seen, which is one of the largest insect-eating bats. Then there are the fruit bats, ranging from the elfin, orange-, black- and pink-spotted Solomons blossom bat through to the largest and arguably the strangest bat of them all—the awesome, giant monkey-faced bat of Bougainville. Many of these bats are found nowhere else, and their ancestors must have been among the first mammal colonists to reach the islands.
As I pondered this marvellous, flittering diversity, a huge, completely black creature rose from the canopy a hundred metres away. It was a Guadalcanal monkey-faced bat—the first monkey-face I’d ever seen in the flesh.
Because most fruit bats, logically enough, eat fruit, they have simple teeth and weak jaws. The monkey-faces, however, are different. Their ancestors must have been among the first mammals to arrive in the Solomon Islands, discovering there a terrain with no land mammals except, perhaps, for the rats. The trees in their new home were full of nuts and tough fruit—from coconuts to Pacific almonds and candlenuts. On the mainland various marsupials and rodents have evolved to crack open such nuts. The fruit bats, in contrast, sip nectar from flowers or eat soft fruit. Their molars are rudimentary as, presumably, were those of the ancestral monkey-faces. But as they began to try to crack the tough fruit and nuts, those that succeeded without breaking their teeth were favoured in the race for survival.
As a result, today’s monkey-faced bats have complex molars covered in tough enamel, and enormously strong cheek muscles. There are five species in the Solomons and one in Fiji, the largest of which has such massive teeth and jaws that it can crack young coconuts. All species have short, powerful muzzles, small ears hidden in fur, and striking red or orange eyes that endow them with a rather lemur-like appearance. Hence their common name.
I feel a strong link with the monkey-faced bats, for one bears my name. It was described by Kris Helgen. He was my doctoral student and now heads the mammal department at the Smithsonian Institution. During his studies he resolved a problem that had plagued mammalogists since the days of Oldfield Thomas and Knud Andersen. Both men had described species of gigantic, black monkey-faced bats from the Solomon Islands—Oldfield Thomas’s from Guadalcanal and Andersen’s from Bougainville. Although the Bougainville population seemed to be very variable, no researcher had seen enough of these rare bats to publish a definitive classification. After examining every museum specimen in the world, Kris realised that the Bougainville animals consisted of two distinct species, whose distribution broadly overlapped. The largest kind—a black creature with the wingspan of a small eagle—had never received a scientific name. Its teeth and jaw muscles are enormously powerful, doubtless enabling it to crack the hardest nuts in the forest. In 2005 Kris named it Pteralopex flanneryi in recognition of my research in Melanesia.
No photograph of a living Flannery’s monkey-faced bat exists, and nothing definitive is known of its ecology. Even though it’s named after me, and I’ve worked in the Solomons, I’m yet to see one in the wild. If I want to do so I’ll need to hurry, for, like many of the Solomons’ most distinctive and ancient inhabitants, it needs primary forest and those forests are fast disappearing. Indeed all of the monkey-faced bats are listed by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature as either endangered or critically endangered.
The monkey-faces have evolved a neat trick that makes them particularly graceful fliers. Their wings meet in the middle of their backs, giving them a huge wingspan-to-lift ratio. This means that even though they can weigh a kilogram they’re able to fly slowly and precisely—even backwards if the need arises—an adaptation that may be vital as they search for food in the complex spaces under the forest canopy.
The presence of a Guadalcanal monkey-faced bat on the Poha River augured well, I felt, for my search for giant rats. When I set out that night accompanied by two local lads, my legs were already aching from the day’s exertions, and I was desperately tired. To make matters worse, the track we followed was rough, forcing us to scramble over boulders and down slippery slopes. And all the time I had to keep my spotlight on the canopy and my shotgun on my shoulder. We had barely gone fifty metres when I noticed a reed beside the track moving in an unusual way. As I watched, a red, kitten-sized creature climbed up it. It was a rat the likes of which I’d never seen, and once it had emerged from the surrounding vegetation it sniffed myopically in our direction. Hoping that we might be able to capture it alive, I kept the spotlight steadily on it, while signalling to one of my companions to move in behind. I was both astounded and dismayed when he casually reached forwards as if to grab the creature in his hand. In an instant it vanished, leaping from the reed into the dense foliage beside the track. Looking confused, he explained that he thought it was a baby cuscus (which is also red)—a creature so slow and inoffensive that it can easily and safely be caught by hand.
In all my time in the Solomons, this would prove to be the first and last time I ever saw the mysterious reddish murid. Was it Woodford’s little pig, a creature known from just a single specimen collected over a century before? I’ve thought deeply about it over the years, trying to recreate in my memory the details of that night. Yet even today I cannot be certain whether I’d encountered the little pig or some other species that remains unknown to science. If I were forced to bet, I’d incline to the view that it was an unknown species, for its agility in climbing that stalk sits ill with the short tail and chubby build of the little pig specimen I’d seen in the Natural History Museum.
But the experience made one thing crystal clear to me—the importance to a field biologist of obtaining a specimen. Without the physical evidence of what you’ve seen, you can never be sure of what kind of creature you’ve been observing, nor can your discovery be verified. This means, apart from anything else, that endangered species can never be assisted without a specimen. The little pig is presumed to be extinct today, but if I had been able to establish that a relict population survived in the Poha Valley, then measures to preserve it might have been put in place.
For several hours after that exhilarating moment we saw nothing but possums, roosting birds and bats. All were interesting creatures to observe, but none was what I had come for, and I was about to head home to bed when, high overhead, on a liana connecting two huge forest trees, I thought I caught a glimpse of silver. Craning my neck, I could vaguely make out a rat-like shape against the dark sky. A shotgun—even one filled with the lightest shot—is a blunt instrument for collecting mammal specimens, and I hate using one. But when I was studying arboreal rats in the 1980s it was the only means of gaining a positive identification.
The silvery gleam had almost disappeared into the foliage by the time I pulled the trigger. Because I was shooting directly above my head, the kickback from the gun almost dislocated my shoulder. But then a magnificent, silvery male rat the size of a young cat dropped to the ground at my feet. It was Uromys rex—the king rat—and it was stone dead. I felt a moment of reg
ret, but when I looked into its mouth to confirm my identification, I didn’t feel so bad. It was a geriatric male whose molar teeth were so worn that little but roots remained. Without teeth, even if I had never seen it, its life was most likely counted in weeks rather than months or years.
The sacrifice of that one geriatric rat would provide the key to understanding much about all of the rats of the Solomon Islands. Its tissues permitted a DNA analysis which confirmed that the king rat was related to the giant naked-tailed rats of Australia and New Guinea, even though it had separated from them aeons earlier. So, several million years ago, a naked-tailed rat must have made an astonishing journey from New Guinea to Guadalcanal. The distance involved is enormous and, a bit like Mendaña, that first voyaging rat had made landfall on an island in the middle of the archipelago. We were to learn far more than history from the sacrifice, for by studying its morphology and stomach contents we learned about its lifestyle and diet. Like so many of the ancient endemic species of the Solomons, it’s dependent upon primary forest for both food and shelter. But above all the specimen was important because it constituted proof positive that the king survived and that measures to conserve it would not be undertaken in vain.
But what of the emperor? Did that largest of all the Solomons rats still survive in some remote corner of the islands? Further work in the Poha River area, as well as in other lowland regions of Guadalcanal, had turned up nothing definitive. But old hunters who knew the creature at first hand said that, although they had not seen it for decades, it probably survived in the mountains. Clearly I needed to attempt what Charles Woodford was never able to do—ascend Mount Popamanesu or Mount Makarakomburu. It was to be a far more prolonged and difficult undertaking than I ever imagined.