by Simon Barnes
Long-jump gold medal
I was embarrassed the first time I saw a bushbaby. How can you be serious about an animal with such a vomit-inducing name? I am a serious student of natural history; I couldn’t deal with this debilitating attack of cuteness. We picked it out in the trees of the Luangwa Valley in Zambia: two red-hot coals reflecting back from a beam of light; their sudden disappearance as the owner of the eyes leapt into oblivion. I was quite glad I didn’t see it better. I don’t go to the bush for cuteness.
Some years later, I got a rather better view. Yes, back in the valley again. In full view this time: the face staring back. The eyes were much too big. They looked as if they had been designed with cold-hearted purpose – like ET – for raising the cuteness response. The name is going way too far. It actually comes from one of the calls, which is disturbingly like the mewling of a human baby. But when they move, they are nothing like babies.
I was on a night drive. We caught the twin coals in the beam of light once again; and then the leap. But this time, the animal leapt towards the vehicle. And he performed. Resting bushbabies make cute pictures, to the point of nausea, but the truth is that these creatures have their being in movement. They are leapers. And they leap like a man: springing from the legs to land on their feet, after which they grasp the branches with their hands. In the air, knees bent, arms outstretched, they look like long-jumpers: like little Bob Beamons setting record after record. They are more agile than we are and capable of proportionately much longer leaps, but they look like one of us, and for the best of all reasons. They are relations.
They too are primates. There are currently reckoned to be 20 or so species of bushbabies among the 300-odd primates, and probably a good few more still to be separately described. They are hard to find, hard to study and hard to identify: they live in the dark and they all look pretty much the same. This one, so far as I could make out, was the brown greater galago, or Otolemur crassicaudatus.
And he put on a virtuoso display of leaping. They can jump 20 feet, 6 m, which is not bad for an animal that’s only a foot long, 30 cm, without his tail. This one was more modest in his ambitions, since there were trees all around, but the leaps were still prodigious for his size. It is impossible to watch a display like this without cheering at every leap; call that the Salmon Reflex. After that, this generous and obliging creature leapt straight over the vehicle – and it was a Toyota Land Cruiser – to give a display of equal brilliance on the far side before vanishing into the tree-crowded night, which is his world.
Wonderful things, bushbabies, with a complex social life that is still being investigated. Various mysteries are being discovered, including the fact that a mother can raise twins sired by different fathers. They all live on fruit and insects, this species being inclined to stress the insects. They catch them with their hands, like slip fielders, for they are authentic grasping primates. They can see in what we foolishly call darkness: with their vision and their clever hands and their quite phenomenal leaps, they make a very respectable living, and do so very largely unseen by the noisy primate that chops down forests.
Architects of human culture
Mostly, we think of inverts either with indifference or with fear and loathing. We tend to meet inverts in normal life only when something has gone wrong. Inverts tell us that our attempt to civilise the world is incomplete. Inverts tell us of the irrefragable failure of humankind: spiders in the bath, cockroaches in the kitchen, flies on the ceiling, daddy longlegs in the bedroom, the terrible itch of mosquito bites. Perhaps the most hated inverts of them all are the wasps at the picnic. Here they come, smart as paint in their striped livery, rascals on the spree, bingeing on jam, squash, Pimms and beer, homing in on picnics and barbecues and pub gardens across the land.
Is there anything good about wasps? Are they sent only to plague us, to spoil our attempts at a good time, to upset us on those few cherished fine days when the family is all together? Is their entire evolutionary purpose to frighten children, harass holidaymakers and sting al fresco lovers on the bum? Before we start to dive over the drop-off into the world of animals without backbones, let us pause just for a second to consider the fact that this book wouldn’t be possible without wasps. Nor would Wisden, I Ching, Finnegans Wake, the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins or The Origin of Species. Nor any of David Beckham’s autobiographies. Human culture might have taken a very different form without wasps.
We only meet wasps on those end-of-the-season occasions, times when an intensely social and desperately hard-working insect gets a free pass to go out and have fun. We only meet wasps when they have finished with their duties of raising grubs into adults and securing the future of the colony. This period of all-consuming activity ends up with big numbers of workers with nothing left to do but have a bit of fun before the autumnal chill kills them. There are eight or nine species of social wasps in this country, including the much feared but comparatively gentle hornets. Hornets have a fearsome sting but are more reluctant to use it than other wasps. They are a decent, even rather alarming size, with brown rather than black stripes against the yellow: handsome little animals. There are also around 240 species of solitary wasps in Britain; none of them has a taste for picnicking.
Social wasps begin their lives when the warm weather comes. The queens, sole survivors from the madness of the previous summer, wake from hibernation full of last season’s sperm. Their job is to make new colonies: or to speak genetically, to continue the old colony. Each one will make a nest, lay eggs, forage and feed the first generation of workers. Once that generation is up and buzzing, the colony can expand its ideas. The new workers take over the job of enlarging the nest and feeding the grubs, which means that the queen can concentrate on laying eggs. The grubs are fed on other insects, but you won’t see a wasp carrying prey back to the nest. A worker catches an adult insect, stings it to death, rips off the legs and the wings, and then chews up the rest, to be fed as goo to the growing grubs back in the nest. The same process, minus the wing removal, takes place when they catch caterpillars and other larval forms. Eventually there are enough workers to raise a generation of males and queens. These wasps won’t help around the nest: sex is all that concerns them.
Thus a series of generations, about one every fortnight, works to ensure the colony’s continuation for the following season. Once that’s done, it’s the end of term. Nest’s out for summer, nest’s out for ever. And so these insects, which live a richly complex life, essential predators on all kinds of plaguing and pestilential insects of others species, go out on their annual foray to get themselves a bad name.
But we should bless wasps every time we see one. Without wasps, the spread of knowledge across the history of humankind would have been desperately hampered. Because wasps invented paper. A wasp’s nest is as exquisite a thing as you will see anywhere in the natural world. It is a glorious piece of architecture created from wood pulp and spit, chewed up and manufactured into – paper. The Chinese cracked the technique a couple of thousand years ago and the rest is – in every sense – history.
I ask you, then, to raise your glass rather than your newspaper to the wasps you see as you take tea or drinks in the garden in the summer. These late-season hooligans live a highly evolved social life, are essential predators in a complex ecosystem, they create a thing of genuine beauty, and without them, what would Shakespeare have written on? “I’ll be waspish, best beware my sting,” says Kate in The Taming of the Shrew. We’ve got it all wrong about inverts: we do wrong to distance ourselves from them, we do wrong to hate them, we do wrong to look away from them. Fellow animals. What’s so special about a backbone anyway?
The lion, the glitch and the glove compartment
I have the instincts of a beast. We all do. And I’m deeply thankful, because without them I’d be a few old bones on the banks of the Luangwa River. Yes: this is my Lion Story; don’t expect me to be brief. Let’s say we are sitting round the campfire at Mchenja, a camp on the banks of
that river, a few hundred yards from where it all happened. You can hear the stridulating of crickets, the tinkling of the reed-frogs, the occasional bleep from Peters’s epauletted fruitbat, the prooping calls of the African scops owl, the clink of a bottle on glass as I pour you a drink while you hold yourself in resignation for this set piece. I used it without any exaggeration whatsoever in my first novel, Rogue Lion Safaris. But then it doesn’t need any exaggeration, though the drink helps.
A good few years ago, I spent a couple of months at Mchenja, when my old friend Bob Stjernstedt was “running” the place. One day, there being no clients in the camp, we drove off for a spot of birding. The previous evening I had claimed over dinner that I could pick out the stallion from a breeding group of zebra within ten seconds. I believed that my horsemanly reading of equine body language gave me all the information necessary. So every time we saw zebras, Bob stopped the vehicle and I picked out my stallion candidate. We then peered pruriently at the undercarriage through binoculars until we had a firm diagnosis. Male. Definite male. Yes, definite male. I was right way above chance expectation, which was deeply pleasing.
We reached a point on the river a good way north, and we found, I think, a red-billed teal, an unusual bird for the valley, so that was all very satisfactory. We had a picnic, a bottle of Mosi beer each. I remarked that the front bumper of the Toyota Land Cruiser made an admirable shelf for a beer bottle; no danger whatsoever of it tipping over while I was scanning the shoreline for waders. We then tidied up the bottles and Bob started the Land Cruiser. Or rather he didn’t. But no big deal. “Pass me the wallet of tools in the glove compartment, Simon.” It kept happening: one of the leads would slip off the battery terminal and we would be temporarily becalmed. Bob had it right in no time: we started up and cruised back, stopping to stare intensely at small brown birds and at the undercarriage of zebras. We were within a few hundred yards of camp when the vehicle went lame on us. Puncture. Another routine emergency. I climbed into the back and passed Bob the Tanganyika jack, a high-lift jack beloved of old Africa hands. “And I’ll need that wallet of tools again.”
“You never gave them back to me.”
“I bloody did.”
“You bloody didn’t.”
A longish pause. “It’s all your bloody fault.”
“My bloody fault!”
“You told me the bumper made a good shelf.”
“I meant for beer. Don’t tell me: you left the bloody tools on it.”
“Yes. Well, we can’t have driven far with them. They’ll be on the riverbank where we saw the teal.”
“Anything vital in there?”
“Wheel wrench.”
“Have you got a shifting spanner? Maybe you could bodge the nuts loose with that.”
“Certainly.”
“That’s all right then.”
“It’s in the wallet with the other tools… Well, we’d better walk, I suppose.”
“Back to the riverbank? It’ll take three days.”
“No, no, to camp. I’ve got lots of spare tools at camp.”
So, unarmed as we were, we set off on foot through the bush. Precisely as you’re always told not to. Stay with the vehicle: except that on this backtrack, we’d have been there for ever; it was more or less our own private road. So off we went. Just about the first thing we saw was a lioness. She was lying flat out like a cat on a hearthrug and never so much as lifted her head. I loved her. So we altered course, making a dogleg to avoid her, and aimed straight at the river; once there we turned right and followed it towards camp. I could just make out the shape of the huts as we crossed the Chamboo, a tributary of the Luangwa, dry at this time of year. It was as I was climbing the far bank that it happened.
A nuclear explosion. Rather drastically localised. A Combretum bush detonated before my eyes and became lion. Huge, black-maned, deeply shocked and utterly furious. I was, I suppose, about a cricket pitch away from him. Twenty yards max, though it seems a lot closer in my memories and occasionally in my dreams.
But here’s the thing. I didn’t cut and run. I wasn’t even frightened, not then. Because it was here that my beastly instincts took over. I did absolutely nothing. I locked. Just staring at this angry lion, me looking at him looking at me.
So here’s how I bring the story to a close round the camp-fire: “And I looked into his eyes and it was like looking into a fruit machine, fight or flight, fight or flight, fight or flight, and in the end it came down jackpot. Flight. The lion spun on his hips, revealing balls like footballs, and he ran twenty yards to an eminence a little further away from us and from there he lashed his tail and snarled his fury at us. There was one of those lifelong ten-second pauses. And then Bob said: ‘Definite male.’ ”
Let’s go back to that long frozen moment. My stillness was exactly the right response. If you, dear reader, ever walk into an irritated lion, then I hope you do exactly the same thing. I rather think you will. I suspect that this response is hard-wired in us humans. It doesn’t make intuitive sense: you’d suspect that every instinct in our bodies would tell us to run, to climb a tree, to move, to get away. But this was no country to outrun a lion, which is capable of a charge of 35 mph. And had I run, I would have triggered his chase response, and I’d have been caught in a few yards. Caught and devoured. But he wasn’t hunting: had he been doing so I wouldn’t have had a prayer, no matter what my reaction had been. In fact, he was sleeping off a prolonged bout of sex: that was the only deduction to be made from the set-up we walked into. (And when lions go in for sex they don’t mess about; the great ethologist George Schaller counted one lion through 157 copulations in 55 hours.) He was angry, not hungry. So standing still and staring him down was the perfect response, and I wish I’d thought of it myself. It gave him the utterly fraudulent message that I was not easy prey. I outbluffed a lion, but only because he wasn’t terribly bothered in the first place.
There are two important matters arising from this campfire story. The first is that we humans first walked the savannahs of Africa a million years ago and part of us still knows it: enough for me to come up with a wholly appropriate response without reference to conscious thought or study of ethology. My body did it without reference to my mind. There is a continuity between humans of the 21st century and the first humans to walk upright. At an unconscious level, we humans are used to being prey, even if the idea shocks our conscious 21st-century minds.
It is an instructive thing, being prey. You realise all at once that so far as lions are concerned, we are no different from the impalas and pukus and buffalos. We like to think that there is something wrong when a lion or a tiger becomes “a man-eater”: that the animal has been wounded and can’t hunt its rightful prey, or that some bizarre incident has given the animal a depraved taste for human protein. But obviously for a lion, eating a human is much the same as eating a zebra. In 1898–99, two lions preyed heavily on the humans who were trying to build the Kenya–Uganda railways. The project was run by Lt-Col John Henry Patterson, who in 1907 published an account of this called The Man-Eaters of Tsavo, in which he claimed the lions killed 135 people before he shot them. I once read an account of this most unfortunate railway delay in a newspaper under the headline: “The Wrong Kind of Lions.”
“To kill Man is always shameful. The Law says so,” says Mowgli in The Jungle Books, but when you look a lion in the eyes – when you are made to look a lion in the eyes because your body says you must – you become aware of some different truths. That killing and eating humans has never been anything special or different or out of the way for a lion. That human uniqueness is not as clear an issue as we have been taught. To meet an alpha predator on terms of intimacy is to understand a truth that great libraries of philosophy avoid. That is why the order of Carnivora has a unique fascination for humankind.
Brother sponge
It’s hard to feel a sense of equality with a bath sponge. Not much good looking for eye contact: eyes are one of the many things that spong
es don’t have. All the same, they are animals just as we are: kin to the tiger and the termite, and not to the oak tree, the pumpkin and the mushroom. They can even move, sometimes as much as 4 mm or 0.16 inches in a single day. If they don’t look much like animals to us, that only reflects our narrowness of vision. They are animals in that they can’t make their own food, unlike photosynthesising plants, which means that they must take in plant or animal food from outside. They are animals in that they give out carbon dioxide and take in oxygen, unlike plants, which take in carbon dioxide for photosynthesis (the basic mechanism of their lives) and give out oxygen as a waste product (which is one of the reasons why things like rainforests are quite useful for us animals, even if we don’t live in them). There are also crucial differences at the cellular level – plant cells have walls; animal cells don’t.
There are maybe as many as 10,000 species of sponges, and most of them are not like bath sponges at all: they build structures of calcium carbonate and silica spicules, and they wouldn’t be much fun in the bath even for those with the most vigorous tastes in ablution. There are only a couple of genera of sponges with entirely fibrous skeletons, including the Mediterranean bath sponge that has proved so useful to humans across the centuries. The Romans used them; they have been used as padding for helmets, portable drinking vessels and water filters, for cleaning tools, applying paint, even for contraception. People used sponges attached to sticks for wiping their bums, hence the expression “the wrong end of the stick”; in such circumstances you’d prefer to seize the stick by the unsponged end. We like this species of sponge so much that we had brought it to the brink of extinction by the middle of the last century: that is the human way. These once-common animals are now rare and imperilled.