This frog’s foam made a small dam. With time I noticed that the white froth gradually changed to a consistency more like jelly, and under it I found liquid. I do not know how this frog had made the froth to make a dam. Possibly it did something like a Javanese frog, in which species the froth making is associated with mating; as the female lays eggs, the male is on top of her and fertilizes them; they both dip their hind feet in mucus that is being excreted along with the eggs, and with their feet they then whip up the foam that surrounds the eggs as they are excreted. In the Suriname frogs, the foam formed a ball that was stuck to leaves or grasses, and later the foam inside of the ball liquefied, and the larvae were then enclosed in a miniature pool.
The frog in attendance seemed so obsessed with staying in its home that it allowed me to pick it up and take its picture while it was in my hand. It went right back to its original place and stayed there when I set it back down. On looking closer, I saw on this first day (April 2) frog’s spawn (eggs) within and under the jelly. On the morning after a torrential pounding, with gushing downpours during the night of April 17, the little artificial pool contained another batch of about two hundred more fresh eggs, in addition to a squirming mass of four-centimeter-long tadpoles, showing a surprising degree of home permanence.
The frog had made a sufficient “pond” for itself on a steep rock ledge where the sun beat down in the daytime, and where the rushing water in the nightly rains washed the ledges clean. Admittedly, many insects and some birds perform similar feats of home building using their feces, their spittle, with mud and sticks and rocks, but here in this inhospitable place the frog had made a home, where it had grown its tadpoles, with little more than the secretions from its cloaca. That’s elegance.
The Suriname frog had a dark warty back, contrasting with brilliant crimson patches separated by dark stripes that it exposed when it extended its hind legs. Maybe I should have “collected” it, because I now wish I knew its name. My photographs were examined by Dr. Rafael Ernst, who had worked on the amphibians of Suriname and is curator of herpetology at the Museum für Tierkunde in Dresden, Germany. He informed me that it could have been Leptodactylus rugosus, a species restricted to the high-altitude ranges of the Guiana Shield. “However, the bright red coloration is unusual,” and he suspected it was a new species.
On some nights, after our tedious work sitting at a camp table in the confines of the tent skinning and preparing birds for the Yale Peabody Museum collections, we took the opportunity to catch moths. James Prozek, one of our group, had brought along a “black light,” a common entomological tool for attracting insects at night. We wanted to capture the almost mythical “white witch,” Thysania agrippina, a moth distinguished for having the largest wingspread of any moth or butterfly in the world. We set up the light at the edge of the drop-off, facing the valley and a mountain beyond, with a white sheet behind it for moths to land on. Night-flying insects use the moon as a reference for “homing” orientation. Although they may not have homes as such, they still need to fly in consistently uniform directions to achieve distance in finding mates and food plants. The adaptation to use a bright natural light to orient to dooms them when they encounter an “artificial” light that is near, because they (like night-flying migrant birds) get caught by it, zigzagging or circling to and into it. White witches flying on an overcast night in the valley beyond our light would, we hoped, be misled by our beacon. And, to our delight, several of them came fluttering in. But my favorites at our light were the bycatch sphinx moths, the nocturnally flying analogues of hummingbirds. Some species are heavier than the witch, and among moths they may be unsurpassed in the beauty and diversity of color patterns in different species. I ended up making a collection of them to bring back home.
It was not until long after coming back home, when I tried to identify some of the species, that I came upon the work of an explorer in Suriname, Maria Sibylla Merian. Merian was a native of Frankfurt, Germany, who was sponsored in 1699 by the city of Amsterdam to travel to Suriname, then a Dutch colony, to study and draw insects. She apparently had a fascination with sphinx moths. Of the nearly two dozen species I collected at our light, I later learned that one, Cocytius antaeus, had been illustrated by her about 310 years earlier, along with its caterpillar and its food plant. In her book about the insects of Suriname, Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium, published in 1705, Merian illustrated not only the white witch but also twelve species of sphinx moths. Three of these species are familiar to me, especially one, the widespread species Manduca sexta, the subject of my PhD dissertation at UCLA. Merian at the time had no names for the insects; it was not until 1758 that Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae appeared and laid the groundwork for modern nomenclature. Linnaeus used her illustrations in some of his species descriptions.
When Merian spent two years in Suriname, she had compelling reasons to leave home and take her daughter along. One was apparently to escape her husband, another to join a religious sect at their home in that country, and a third to follow her passion of finding new caterpillars and studying and drawing them. She received financial support as well. I don’t know how she succeeded on all accounts, but she discovered many species of then-unknown animals, and she probably raised caterpillars on their respective food plants to the pupal stage and then on through the adult moth and butterfly stages. The food plants of any of the sphinx moths I captured were far beyond my scope. I could not know the species of plants, did not find a single sphinx moth caterpillar, and would not have been able to find out “to see what it would change to.” All such detailed knowledge of interrelationships is reserved to those who make their home in a place long enough to get to know it and care about it. Our stay was short, but it seemed long.
Finally, at the end of three weeks we had packed our gear and collections for the museum and were anxiously perched on our folded-up tents at the agreed-on time for our long-anticipated pickup. Our food was gone. Beer had been nonexistent. We joked about drinking cold beer in Paramaribo. It seemed as if we sat there forever—but finally we heard the rhythmic rumble of the chopper in the distance. I don’t recall who heard it first, but there it was, finally coming around the edge of a mountain—the sweetest sight we could possibly imagine. Everyone jumped up, to be ready the moment it reached our LZ that we had carefully cleared of brush and where our baggage was placed in a pile to be loaded in a minute or two.
This time the weather was fine and we were in great spirits, serenely humming along over the virgin forest and peering down, and I was again looking for a possible harpy eagle nest. But after an hour or so in the midst of this reverie we heard a sharp loud bang.
Before we left Paramaribo three weeks earlier, we had met a Suriname diplomat whose parting words to us were “Good luck—at least statistically you won’t all get killed.” Now I had a sudden doubt about that pronouncement.
Glenn was the first to step out after we landed in Paramaribo and the roar of the engine stopped. He closely inspected the windshield directly in front of his driver’s seat. He wiped a spot of dried blood there, and I pulled off a tiny feather that had been caught by a windshield wiper. I stuck this trifle into my notebook. I think it was a pigeon feather. But what I really took with me from this trip was a perhaps trite realization: There is no place like home.
Home Crashers
THE HOME I BUILT FOR MYSELF IN MAINE WAS ONLY A SIMPLE cabin, but already in the first spring the guests started moving in. I could hear the activity of deer mice at night, and a woodchuck dug its den under the floorboards. A pair of phoebes nested on a log under the roof on one side, and a colony of white-faced hornets built their nest on another. Red ants found the roof space under the metal sheeting quite appealing, because they and their larvae got warmed there by solar heating. Carpenter ants renovated a partially hollow log (and were later raided and demolished by the red ants). And a greater welcoming: a pair of flickers excavated their nest hole into the side of the cabin and fledged a clutch of seven young in l
ate summer. Less appealing and not at all welcome, though, the cluster flies moved in that fall by the thousands, ladybird beetles by the dozens, along with a few stray green lacewings. I saw a mourning cloak butterfly inspecting the outside of the cabin, and it may have found a cozy spot as well. In short, my home had become a biological hot spot. Toward many I had few objections; the cabin has space enough. My cabin was not like the highly desired real estate of the tight and tidy mud nests of cliff or barn swallows, which house sparrows, Passer domesticus, will routinely usurp and then renovate to their own specifications. Nor were my cohabitants as unpleasant as bedbugs, which hide in the cracks and come out at night to suck your blood.
Opportunistic home crashers can, as shown by many examples of the social insects and especially by ants, in the long term become permanently entrenched residents. Ants’ nests are soldier-defended fortresses filled with huge potential food resources, most notably the ants’ own eggs, larvae, and pupae. And yet a host of different kinds of insects, collectively called “myrmecophiles” or “ant lovers,” often move in. The ant “love” in this case refers mostly to eating in addition to homing, and myrmecophiles have their home crashing honed to a science. They dupe the ants by mimicking their host’s appearance, behavior, and scent so that they are treated as though they are one of them and are fed by the ants. Some, and they include true bugs as well as beetles and larval butterflies, are effectively wolves in sheep’s clothing, turning the ants’ otherwise vigilant home guarding on its head.
It probably took millions of years of evolution for the myrmecophiles to perfect their strategies. However, in the cases where the guests take nothing, or may instead contribute, the process of acceptance could be quick, and indeed it might almost literally be “instant.” I’m referring to some birds living in/on our homes, and also to cases of birds nesting peaceably within the lattices of the large stick homes of raptorial birds. Flickers that make their nest hole in a cabin are a rarity, but in North America, robins, house sparrows, house finches, cliff swallows, and European starlings often nest on our homes, and eastern phoebes and chimney swifts now nest almost exclusively with us. In Indonesia, swiftlets, Aerodramus fuciphagus, nest in colonies and make the edible (to us) nests for “bird nest soup” entirely out of spittle, used as a glue and a building material, to nest on the ceilings of rare caves. But in the 1990s they started nesting in the upper floors of the new modern “Western” homes. Kisaran, a town in Sumatra of seventy thousand people, now has three hundred swiftlet “hotels.” The swifts’ moving from cliffs into our homes led to “farming” swift nests for income, and swiftlet “hotels” were attached to apartment buildings to invite their occupancy. In part the switch is due to scarcity or lack of original nest sites. Chimney swifts, Chaetura pelagica, in North America now use chimneys almost exclusively to nest in, as a stand-in for hollow trees. But elimination of nest sites does not explain all of home crashing by birds. The cliffs where eastern phoebes once nested are still here, although phoebes now prefer to nest on or in human dwellings. In Europe, the swift, Apus apus, used to nest on still-available cliffs as well, but now they nest almost exclusively in small openings of buildings, which they apparently prefer. For the most part, we encourage these guests to stay with us. And many are willing guests. I made a list of those birds which in Europe and North America habitually to sometimes associate with human structures and/or the nest boxes we provide, and I noted thirty species that are welcome guests. In direct opposite, we reserve loathing for other home crashers, like bedbugs, for example.
Bedbugs belong to the insect order Hemiptera. They are “true bugs,” as opposed to the colloquial name for almost any insect. If you know any bedbugs, they probably belong to the species Cimex lectularius. It is a mammal-nest dweller that was once a scourge and was then defeated through chemical warfare, but in the past fifty years it has been making a comeback, due to evolving resistance to pesticides, and now lives comfortably in upscale hotels and slum tenements alike. Another species, Rhodnius prolixus, perhaps more commonly known as the “kissing bug” because it feeds on peoples’ faces, may be one of the most despised insects on Earth. (It was, however, the favorite animal of renowned British physiologist Sir Vincent Wigglesworth, who gained his fame from using the kissing bug as the ideal experimental animal. With it, he laid the foundations of our knowledge of endocrinology, for which the Crown allowed him to add “Sir” to his already distinguished name.)
Lou Sorkin, a forensic entomologist at the American Museum of Natural History, calls bedbugs “the most loathed insect in the United States today.” I suspect part of our loathing comes from our lack of defenses against these unwanted houseguests that have perfected their tactics through millions of years of trial and error, all the while staying with us with little chance of leaving. We can at least swat at a mosquito after it lands on us, and we can hear it coming. But what can you do against a bug that crawls silently at you at night out of a crevice, sneaks up on you while you are asleep, and then begins its work by injecting an analgesic so you won’t wake up until it is too late? Each blood meal can yield not just a welt, but hundreds of eggs, hundreds of new bugs, and so your home can in short order become bug infested. There are only limited options for a remedy. The most common is to leave home, which is what some birds do when their nests become infested, even if it means leaving their babies behind.
Bedbugs and also fleas can be especially harmful in social situations where they have many hosts reliably available, such as in a dense bird colony. The team of Charles R. and Mary B. Brown from the University of Tulsa have made a detailed study to find out just what it means for colony-nesting cliff swallows to be invaded by bedbugs, specifically one species out of eighty-nine of the family Cimicidae, namely, Oeciacus vicarius, known as “swallow bugs.” They found that in southwestern Nebraska, several hundred individual swallow bugs can inhabit a single swallow nest. The victimized nestlings respond to their frequent bloodletting by dying or exhibiting a great reduction in growth rate. When the researchers fumigated heavily infested colonies, they found that the surviving offspring at these fumigated nests were markedly increased in size relative to those in unfumigated nests. The adult swallows are apparently aware of the danger these unwanted hosts pose in their nests, because either they avoid reoccupying previously heavily infested nests, or they abandon those that are heavily infested. As I learned from a correspondent, other bedbugs of the same family also inhabit the nests of swifts, though apparently not in great numbers.
This correspondent, Klaus Reinhardt from Sheffield, England, was a stranger to me. He identified himself as an expert on bedbugs. He wrote to me because “while reading your book [The Snoring Bird] suddenly the name of one species of bedbug, which I had always thought a little strange, got meaning.” The name of the bedbug he referred to was Paracimex gerdheinrichi. Nothing more was known about it except that it came from Indonesia. It is now in the collections at Berlin and was described and named in 1940 by the parasitologist Wolfdietrich Eichler. The locality label states: “Celebes, Latimodjong Gebirge, Oeroe, 800 m, Aug. 1930 (G. Heinrich) in nest of Collocalia spodipygia.” Collocalia is a swift.
I knew then that it was named after my late father, Gerd H. Heinrich, who as a young man of thirty-five years left Europe, on March 16, 1930, accompanied by his wife and her sister, and another woman, to spend two years in the wilds of Celebes (now Sulawesi), at the behest of the renowned ornithologists Erwin Stresemann of the Berlin Museum and Leonard Sanford of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, to bring back birds, especially a presumed extinct bird, a rail named Aramidopsis plateni. So, why did he send a bedbug to Berlin? And why was it named after him? As with much in biology, it probably has something to do with home.
Bedbugs don’t travel around on the bodies of their hosts; instead they hide in their homes. My father must have collected bird nests, specifically to then try to catch the pests. His usual method, which I recall from watching him when I was a child, was to put
the animal and/or its home, such as a mouse nest, into a white bag, seal it tight, and then later check to see what crawled out onto the cloth, where it could be picked off. Bedbugs were the least of the catch from most nests. In addition to the swallow bugs and swift bugs, birds’ homes are also favorite residences of fleas, mites, and the maggots of some species of flies.
The seriousness of unwelcome insect guests may be hard for those of us who have chemical defenses that we can order up at will to grasp. Those who can’t may pay dearly. Once, in Tanzania, I came to an abandoned Maasai boma—a circle of mud/cow-dung-plastered huts with dirt floors in a circle surrounded by a perimeter of heaped and woven thornbush to keep out the lions from the central area that holds the cattle at night. It was, I thought, a romantic setting, one where I would have liked to live. So why, I wondered, had all the people left? The question was, I think, answered the moment when, clad in shorts, I entered one of the huts. In the darkness I almost immediately experienced a creepy-crawly sensation on my legs. When I stepped back out into the light, I saw thousands of fleas ascending my bare legs. I stripped naked and fled. That option, which worked for me, does not work for a baby bird confined to its nest, especially if those guests may be almost invisible.
A neighbor, Bob Heiser, had a phoebe nesting on a beam in his garage with five young that were almost fully feathered out, but one day he found all five chicks on the ground. One of them was dead. He returned the live ones to the nest, but the next day they were again on the ground, but by then only one was still alive. He put the live one back into the nest and sat at a safe distance to watch, expecting to see the baby jump out. But instead what he saw was the adult phoebe return to the nest, pick up the live chick, and drop it out of the nest. A week later the phoebe was incubating again, but in a new nest on a light fixture, closely adjacent to the old. Normally phoebes reuse their old nest for the second clutch. What happened here?
The Homing Instinct Page 16