Cat among the pigeons

by David Muirhead

  Routine looms large in a rhino’s life, and the fact that they tend to be so predictable has always made them vulnerable to human hunters. To aid digestion, they need to drink every day and generally choose the same time of day, morning and evening, to visit the same waterhole. They usually take the same route too, along paths so well worn that they can become ditch-like in places. It’s the kind of setup that any professional assassin would kill for.

  In a generally hostile world, the one good friend rhinos have always been able to count on is a small bird with a colourful beak. Red- and yellow-billed oxpeckers make a living hopping about from stem to stern on their favourite rhino, eating ticks and other parasites and acting as lookouts for their myopic hosts. They spend a lot of time searching in and around the rhino’s ears, seeming to whisper little secrets. Given the rate at which rhinos are disappearing, they are secrets we’ll undoubtedly never share.

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  ALBATROSS

  The albatross was inducted into the realm of the magical and mystical by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. His classic poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, tells of a disaster that overtook a ship’s crew when one of them raised his bow and shot a black albatross.

  As the bird dies, the wind drops, the sea settles to a dead calm, and the ship then stagnates for many dry days and weeks. In a bid to fend off the inevitable, the superstitious sailors fasten the bird’s carcass around their guilty shipmate’s neck. That doesn’t help, though it’s difficult to understand why any of them could think it might. They all die of thirst, the rotten ship goes down, and only the killer survives, compelled by fate to endlessly repeat his sorry tale to strangers equally compelled to listen.

  Coleridge drew inspiration for the poem from the story of Simon Hatley, the sole survivor rescued from the wreck of the Speedwell, a ship that foundered in the southern ocean early in the 17th century. Hatley shot an albatross shortly before the sinking, and presumably blamed this for the subsequent disaster. By an odd twist of literary fate, at some point in his piratical career, Hatley had been a shipmate of William Dapier and Andrew Selkirk, respectively the models for Gulliver (of Gulliver’s Travels) and Robinson Crusoe.

  As seafarers in the southern ocean, all three men would have been familiar with the albatross and probably aware of the superstitions surrounding it. The great birds routinely followed sailing ships as they voyaged across the vast and featureless expanses of deep, cold sea. With a background chorus of wind in the rigging, it would have been easy for mariners to imagine that a big white bird circling in the twilight was really the soul of a drowned sailor. It’s little wonder that the netherworld got upset if you killed one.

  The real reason for the bird’s close attendance is more prosaic. People on ships, then as now, routinely chuck rubbish overboard, some of it edible. Ships came to exert an even greater fascination for albatrosses, and other seabirds, when large-scale whaling and commercial fishing began in the southern ocean. Over the years and decades, huge quantities of offal were routinely dumped into the sea, and even the mighty wandering albatross was frequently seen venturing close to the southern and eastern shores of South Africa to secure its share of the bounty.

  Those days of plenty are long gone, for the birds and for us, but from time to time the smaller albatrosses still hang hopefully above the stern of fishing boats. Many discover that turning up for free meals can prove expensive. Getting hooked on a baited long line is invariably fatal, and the chunkily built black-browed albatross, in particular, is still sometimes deliberately snared, and finds its way into the cooking pots of fishermen.

  Scavenging food from the surface of the sea is standard practice for an albatross, especially the wandering albatross which, with a wingspan in excess of 3.5 metres, is the biggest of them all. It is superbly designed to soar effortlessly through the air, but ill equipped to dive for its lunch. The bulk of its natural diet consists of squid, some captured alive when they rise at night, but most of them dead already and floating on the surface. These latter bonanzas are vomited up by overindulgent whales, or are the result of the mass mortalities associated with the squid’s breeding cycle.

  Some smaller species of albatross, better able to dive underwater for a metre or two, do specialise in fish. Within any given population, including the great albatrosses, there are really no hard-and-fast rules: if it’s eatable and somehow reachable, be it krill, a hooked fish, the guts of a seal, or a shark dismembered by a killer whale, an albatross will grab it.

  Albatrosses are not great wing flappers. Getting into the air is a laborious business, be it from land or the sea, and particularly so for the heavyweights. They need a run and a good headwind to get airborne. Once up, special tendons lock their narrow outstretched wings into place, so that no further muscle energy need be expended. The birds are then largely dependent on the speed of the wind to generate the lift they need to soar and glide.

  If the wind drops completely when an albatross is far out over the ocean, it has little option but to drop down onto the surface and wait for the next strong breeze. Bobbing about on the water, the bird is immediately vulnerable to sharks and other marine predators, including, one presumes, the occasional vengeful giant squid.

  Mercifully, they never suffer the same fate as the Ancient Mariner and his shipmates. An albatross has its own on-board desalination plant, as do penguins and many other marine birds. It can drink seawater and then expel the salt through its nasal passages.

  The need for strong and predictable winds helps explain why most species of albatross, including the greats, live in southern latitudes. The Roaring Forties and Furious Fifties were so named for good reason: what is invariably a loud and scary nightmare for lone round-the-world yachtsmen is music to the ears of an albatross. The constant circumpolar winds, and the giant waves they generate, provide perfect conditions for the albatross’s soaring and gliding aerial lifestyle. Albatrosses routinely zoom around the bottom of the world, up and over the big rolling waves south of Africa, Australia and South America. Throughout the trip they barely flap their wings, and their heartbeat stays constant, as if they were back on their nest.

  Albatrosses breed communally, mainly on isolated islands in the far south, with different species often happily coexisting on the same remote piece of hummocky real estate. Young birds don’t recklessly take the plunge with the opposite sex, but rather experiment with different dates in the flamboyant and complex dancing rituals for which the species is renowned. Several seasons may pass before a bird finds the perfect fit for its unique style of bill clacking, preening, neck stretching and calling to the sky. Finally satisfied that their opposite number isn’t a weirdo, the happy couple mate and then generally stay together for life.

  Life can be a long time for an albatross, upwards of 40 years, and in some recorded instances a great deal longer than that. During all that time they soar above the desolate southern ocean, covering a total distance which, if laid out in a straight line, would take them far beyond the Moon.

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  LION

  In the 1950s the company that made Raleigh bicycles launched a clever campaign to advertise their stoutly engineered product in Africa. Billboards placed all over towns, and even in the countryside, showed a beaming African youth energetically pedalling away from a charging lion. Despite the fact that by the 1950s there were already very few lions left outside of game reserves, the campaign was a great success.

  For an animal that spends two-thirds of its life snoozing, the lion has managed to exercise the human imagination like no other. The bicycle adverts undoubtedly struck a subliminal chord by reminding potential customers that lions once exercised our ancestors in ways we still shudder to recall. A lion can accelerate from 0 to nearly 60 kilometres per hour in the blink of an eye, so whether a bicycle would really help is a moot point.

  From the days of the Assyrians, Egyptians, Greeks and Romans, rulers and empire builders have always been eager to associate themselves with the lion’s repu
tation for physical strength, virility and fearlessness. Modelled in stone, and with their face sometimes replaced by the stern visage of a pharaoh or a king, granite lions in repose lined the ancient avenues of power. The tradition continued down the ages. The four huge lions, resplendent in muscular bronze, that guard the foot of Nelson’s Column in London’s Trafalgar Square, are among the many more recent examples. These lion replicas often look as though they’re about to doze off, but, just like the real thing, they still somehow manage to exude an aura of vigilance and menace.

  The reason that lions sleep so much is simply because they can. Most other creatures in the bush spend a good portion of their lives jumping out of their skin every time a twig cracks. They live with the constant worry that something is creeping up on them, and they’re often not mistaken. Virtually nothing will mess with a pride of lions, and they know it. They may occasionally and temporarily have to shift beds if a herd of elephants comes blundering through, but other than that, everything else in their domain is a menu item. This includes any young elephant that becomes separated from its herd.

  Despite their obvious feline credentials, lions have a lifestyle more akin to that of dogs than other cats. A typical cat lives in fairly dense bush, hunts by itself and usually lives by itself; lions typically form large prides, prefer the wide open spaces and hunt as a group, rather like wolves and wild dogs. But unlike the canines and the smaller cats, lions evolved specifically to tackle the heavy end of the herbivore ensemble, including buffalo, zebra and wildebeest, and this requires not just individual brawn, but teamwork.

  Hunting is nevertheless invariably left to the females of the pride, despite the fact that they’re lighter and lack the immense strength of the males. This has given rise to the view in some quarters that male lions are a bunch of preening freeloaders. They spend their days pumping iron, when they’re not passed out on the couch, while the missus slaves away to put huge T-bone steaks on the table. Well, yes, and no. A male lion’s big bushy mane tends to make him a bit of a disaster when it comes to stalking prey through the grass. Even the doziest zebra is likely to notice a big furry boulder inching closer and closer, so it makes sense to let the svelte better halves get on with the job. When stealth doesn’t matter, male lions do weigh in, particularly when tackling buffalo; and nobody is better when it comes to swatting hyenas and other neighbourhood nuisances.

  A lion’s mane is not a pointless affectation: it makes him seem bigger and more intimidating than he is, if such a thing is possible from a bipedal perspective. It adds little extra weight and yet helps protect his neck and throat in battles with other lions. Life for a male lion is one long battle for dominance and survival and his lot, despite the endless snoozing, is generally not a happy one. It pays to have brothers as backup, but even then the typical tenure as head of a pride is only three or four years. Once driven out by a younger and stronger male, he’s on his own. The end of his life is invariably ignominious and usually not long in coming.

  Though famed for their sexual stamina, life is not a bed of roses for the females either. They stay with the same pride their entire lives and are usually closely related to each other. A great sex life can be little compensation for witnessing the slaughter of your infants whenever there’s a hostile takeover, a trauma that’s likely to happen at least once in a lioness’s lifetime. Having done all the hard and dangerous work, it’s no wonder that lionesses ditch the diet book and, in the absence of a humungous box of chocolates, tuck away up to 22 kilograms of raw meat at a single sitting.

  Setting your sights on the full buffet doesn’t mean you have to ignore the tray of cocktail treats when it’s passed around, of course, and lions will lap up termites as happily as we enjoy a chip dip. Over the aeons there must have been many occasions when one of our forebears was poking his sticky twig into a termite mound only to look over the top and suddenly find himself face to face with a crouching lioness. Whether she spat out the termites, and he wasted precious seconds looking around for a bicycle, probably proved irrelevant.

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  MARABOU STORK

  Most folk think that Marilyn Monroe had nothing in common with the ugliest bird in the world, and they are, of course, right. Except for those feathers. The marabou stork and Ms Monroe shared that cosy little secret. She occasionally wore them to adorn her shoes and, quite probably, her unmentionables, whereas the marabou wears them, or rather grows them, on its tail.

  Down feathers from the marabou are a sought-after item in the fashion industry, mainly used to create feather boas, and to add frills to clothing and hats. But this, alas, is as close as the stork gets to the dizzy peaks of haut couture, let alone the social soirées of the beautiful people.

  Imagine a cantankerous 90-year-old granddad, a man who had smoked two packs a day from the age of eight and knocked back a case of brandy once a week, and you will start to form a picture of what a marabou stork looks like when it hatches from the egg. From that point on, it’s straight downhill, at least in terms of appearance. Adult birds are bald, blotchy, hunched and have a floppy pink pouch hanging from their throat; throw a tatty black cloak, borrowed from a Victorian undertaker, over their shoulders, clip on a prodigious pterodactyl beak, and, voila, the ensemble is complete.

  Not that the birds would give a bat’s entrails what we think. Once upon a long time ago, some of us were lunch as far as they’re concerned. Archaeological digs on the island of Flores have unearthed some evidence that ancestors of the modern marabou, over 2 metres tall and just as ugly, preyed on the miniature proto-human inhabitants. They may even have contributed to the eventual extinction of this little race of Flores hobbits, as they are endearingly if somewhat colloquially known to science.

  The modern marabou hasn’t shrunk much, still reaching a height of about 1.5 metres, but modern humans have grown bigger, or at least fatter, largely thanks to our penchant for wolfing down just about every other organism on the planet. We are no longer on the menu, but in sub-Saharan Africa, where marabous now live, they still like to keep a beady eye on us, or more particularly on our vast and ever-expanding rubbish dumps. Scavenging has always been a way of life, but the storks have not previously experienced a bonanza on this scale; the result has been a measurable increase in their numbers, at least in their East African stronghold.

  Never in a good mood at the best of times, marabous living in close proximity to human settlements are known to get quite testy if the supply of edible crap dries up. The local inhabitants can expect a lot of belligerent bill clattering and muttered reminders about Flores if they toss out nothing but broken appliances, old mattresses, cracked crockery and other inedible rubbish.

  Back in the pristine wild lands, marabous live a more conventional life. They often join vultures, the other baldies of the savanna, sticking their heads into the gory cavities of dead elephants and other deceased creatures. If a large animal dies of natural causes and is still intact when it keels over, marabous have to wait for the vultures to unzip the carcass, but when that’s done, they lord it over all, pushing the smaller birds aside and taking what they want.

  But it’s not all about making do with dead stuff. These storks also hunt live creatures of manageable size, and particularly so while raising a brood of chicks. Any caring parent wants what’s best for its young, and marabous are no exception. Adults may be able to swallow week-old carrion and other rotting leftovers loaded with just about every conceivable strain of ghastly bacteria, but the chicks need health food. Small rodents and reptiles, fish, frogs and the young of other birds are all items routinely added to the menu. Around the lakes of East Africa’s Rift Valley, marabous occasionally cause consternation among camera-clicking tourists by preying on young flamingos, an event akin to an ogre slaughtering a dainty princess in the capricious human imagination.

  Like other storks, marabous are community breeders, building large nests of sticks lined with grass, and featuring other modest creature comforts, on the top branches of flat-topped
acacias and similar suitable trees. The nests are safe from the ground but vulnerable to the wide-open African sky, which is amply loaded with raptors. Having vigilant neighbours helps, but both parents need to share the 30-day incubation process, and then generally take turns to be in attendance for three to four months until the chicks have fledged.

  Marabous know where babies come from, or more likely, don’t give it any thought. It’s safe to assume, though, that they don’t subscribe to the belief that the bundles of joy are delivered in pristine napkins by their sissy white stork cousins.

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  GOLDEN ORBWEB SPIDER

  Little Miss Muffet, of nursery rhyme fame, could certainly be forgiven for ditching the curds and whey and making a run for it if what came and sat down beside her was a large and colourful Nephila fenestrata. These invertebrates look like extras from a horror movie, maybe The Spiders That Cocooned New York.

  Miss Muffet was, incidentally, a real person, the daughter of Thomas Muffet, a 15th-century British naturalist whose keen interest in spiders was obviously a source of domestic friction. I have a particular empathy for the young lady because a similar thing once happened to me, though thankfully no curds and whey were involved.

  At the time I was sitting in the back row of a game drive vehicle in Ndumo, a game park in northern KwaZulu-Natal, minding my own binoculars. As we passed under the first of a series of intimidating gigantic webs spanning the dirt track, the ranger blithely assured everyone that golden orb-web spiders were sensible creatures, and allowed ample space for large animals and vehicles to pass underneath their structures. We didn’t need to duck, he said.