by John Carey
The slopes of Mt Karisimbi beckoned, and I knew that I must climb the peak. Doc came a short distance to examine the most unusual forest we had ever seen. Tree groundsels or giant senecios, weird and gnarled plants with an other-worldly look, were scattered over the open slopes to an altitude of 13,500 feet. In the temperate zones of the world, senecios are insignificant weeds, but here in the cold and humid mountains they are giants over twenty feet high, with thick stems and flowering heads a foot or more long. The large ovate leaves are clustered at the apex of the branches and they glisten as if polished. The only other tall plants in this curious forest were giant lobelias, consisting of a single stem, a cluster of narrow leaves, and pointing skyward like a candle a long flowering head covered with tiny purplish blossoms.
For the next two days we continued our search for gorillas. We found some fresh feeding sites, and Doc once thought he heard a gorilla in the distance. On the third day, far down along the Kanyamagufa Canyon, I heard a sound that electrified me – a rapid pok-pok-pok, the sound of a gorilla pounding its chest. I followed the edge of the canyon until I found a game trail that crossed it. Carefully I scouted along the slope where I expected the animal to be. But I had no luck. Only later did I learn that there is an almost ventriloqual quality in the sound of chest-beating that makes distance very difficult to judge.
When Doc and I returned to the canyon in the morning, we were greeted by the same noise. Evidently a gorilla had spotted us. I climbed into the crown of a tree to look over the shrubs that obscured our view, and Doc circled up the slope. Suddenly, as he told me later, the undergrowth swayed forty feet ahead, and Doc heard the soft grumbling sound of contented animals. Unaware of him, the gorillas approached to within thirty feet. Two black, shaggy heads peered for ten seconds from the vegetation. Uncertain of how to react, Doc raised his arms. The animals screamed and walked away. We both examined the swath of freshly trampled vegetation and the torn remnants of wild celery and nettles on which the gorillas had been feeding. While Doc took notes on the spoor, I followed the trail. The musty, somewhat sweet odor of gorilla hung in the air. Somewhere ahead and out of sight, a gorilla roared and roared again, uuua-uuua! an explosive, half-screaming sound that shattered the stillness of the forest and made the hairs on my neck rise. I took a few steps and stopped, listened, and moved again. The only sound was the buzzing of insects. Far below me white clouds crept up the slopes and fingered into the canyons. Then another roar, but farther away. I continued over a ridge, down, and up again. Finally I saw them, on the opposite slope about two hundred feet away, some sitting on the ground, others in trees.
An adult male, easily recognizable by his huge size and gray back, sat among the herbs and vines. He watched me intently and then roared. Beside him sat a juvenile, perhaps four years old. Three females, fat and placid, with sagging breasts and long nipples, squatted near the male, and up in the fork of a tree crouched a female with a small infant clinging to the hair on her shoulders. A few other animals moved around in the dense vegetation. Accustomed to the drab gorillas in zoos, with their pelage lusterless and scuffed by the cement floors of their cages, I was little prepared for the beauty of the beasts before me. Their hair was not merely black, but a shining blue-black, and their black faces shone as if polished.
We sat watching each other. The large male, more than the others, held my attention. He rose repeatedly on his short, bowed legs to his full height, about six feet, whipped his arms to beat a rapid tattoo on his bare chest, and sat down again. He was the most magnificent animal I had ever seen. His brow ridges overhung his eyes, and the crest on his crown resembled a hair miter; his mouth when he roared was cavernous, and the large canine teeth were covered with black tartar. He lay on the slope, propped on his huge shaggy arms, and the muscles of his broad shoulders and silver back rippled. He gave an impression of dignity and restrained power, of absolute certainty in his majestic appearance. I felt a desire to communicate with him, to let him know by some small gesture that I intended no harm, that I wished only to be near him. Never before had I had this feeling on meeting an animal. As we watched each other across the valley, I wondered if he recognized the kinship that bound us.
After a while the roars of the male became less frequent, and the other members of the group scattered slowly. Some climbed ponderously into shrubby trees and fed on the vines that draped from the branches; others reclined on the ground, either on the back or on the side, lazily reaching out every so often to pluck a leaf. They still kept their eyes on me, but I was amazed at their lack of excitement.
‘George,’ called Doc. ‘George!’
At the sound all the gorillas rose and disappeared silently at a fast walk. Doc had become concerned for my safety after first hearing the many roars and finally the prolonged silence. We ate our lunch – crackers, cheese, and chocolate – before we checked the site where I had watched them. Their trail angled upward across a valley and up another ridge, where we found the group again two hours later. A female sat on a mound, her infant beside her. The male, ever alert, roared when he spotted us and stalked back and forth in the usual posture of gorillas – feet flat on the ground and the upper part of the body supported on the knuckles of the hands. When he approached the female on the mound, she moved rapidly to one side, and he claimed her place. As before, the group settled down and seemingly paid us scant attention. The male, who must have weighed over four hundred pounds, rested on the mound looking over the mountains and the plains, truly the master of his domain. A female holding an infant gently to her chest walked to his side.
‘It must have been just born,’ I whispered to Doc. ‘It’s still wet.’ And he nodded in agreement.
The female leaned heavily against the side of the male. Her hairy arm almost obscured her spidery offspring, whose hairless arms and legs waved about in unoriented fashion. The male leaned over and with one hand fondled the infant. For two hours, enthralled, we watched this family scene. But the way home was long, and reluctantly we left the animals, but not before we spotted another gorilla far uphill and barely visible. Was it another group or a single animal? With buoyant steps we moved down the slope. We only hoped that in our presence the gorillas would always be as tranquil as today. Perhaps, we feared, they had merely been loath to move because of the imminent or recent birth of the infant.
But something else took our minds off the apes. Just ahead and close to the trail that crossed the Kanyamagufa Canyon an elephant wheezed, and then another. We stopped and strained our eyes, trying to locate the gray forms gliding softly through the bamboo and the brush around us. It was my first close contact with elephants, and I was nervous. I clambered up a tree with much noise as the dry branches snapped under my weight. It was embarrassing, for after all my scrambling I was still no higher than the elephant’s back. Doc motioned me to come down, and we hurried in and out of the canyon, hoping that no one would bar our way.
On the following morning we returned to the ridge where we had seen the gorillas. The animals had descended into the valley and were now feeding leisurely. It struck us immediately that there were now more gorillas than yesterday. We counted, recounted, and agreed there were twenty-two: four adult or silver-backed males, one young or black-backed male, eight females, three juveniles, five infants, and one medium-sized gorilla of whose sex we were uncertain. Did two separate groups join, or had we seen only part of the group the day before? The big males roared and slapped their chests, but, as on the previous day, they seemed little concerned as they rested beneath the canopy of trees. As we watched, most of them lay down and went to sleep. One female sat with a large infant in her arms. Another small, woolly infant left its mother and bumbled over to the first female. Briefly she cuddled both youngsters to her chest. A male rose, casually ambled by a sitting female, suddenly grabbed her by the leg, yanked her two or three feet down the slope, then cantered off. It was a wonderful feeling to sit near these animals and to record their actions as no one had ever done before. We had th
e chance to observe significant and characteristic incidents, but we knew that to explain what we were seeing – and even to predict what might occur in a particular circumstance – would take many, many hours of observation.
After resting for some three hours, the animals spread over the hillside to feed. An infant ran along, put some leaves into its mouth, and spat them out. A juvenile, perhaps three or four years old, held to the end of a three-foot log with both hands. It bit off the rotten bark and appeared to lick a whitish fluid from the wood. Another juvenile came up and, having wiped the log with one finger, licked it. Soon all the gorillas were actively moving across the slope, feeding as they went. Their movements were restrained and rather phlegmatic; only the youngsters behaved in exuberant fashion. One infant dashed along, pounced on the back of another infant, and both disappeared rolling over and over into the undergrowth. After five hours with the gorillas we returned home.
A guard and I tried to find the group again the following day, but we had no luck. I realized how much I had to learn about the ways of the forest and about tracking animals over long distances. The park had no teachers, for the local bantus were all agriculturalists; they avoided the forest and the wild animals and evil spirits it contained. I knew that before I could study gorillas successfully I would have to teach myself to recognize the age of spoor, the number of animals involved, and the direction they had taken. The forest was vast, the animals few, and I could not depend on luck in finding gorillas as we had done so far.
Luck, however, was still with us, for on the way home, at a place where the Kanyamagufa Canyon veers sharply toward the upper slopes of Mt Mikeno, we came across a fresh trail. Early the following morning, when Doc and I had barely proceeded three hundred feet along this trail, the brush crackled ahead. A black arm reached from the undergrowth, pulled a strand of vine from a branch, and disappeared from view. We stepped behind the bole of a tree and peered at the feeding gorillas about one hundred feet away. Without warning, a female with infant walked toward our tree, a large male behind her. I nudged Doc and quietly climbed up on a branch without being seen by the animals. The female stopped some thirty feet from us and sat quietly with her large infant beside her. Once the infant glanced up at me, then stared intently for fifteen seconds without giving the alarm. But when the female inadvertently looked in my direction, her relaxed gaze hardened as she saw me. She grabbed her young with one arm, pulling it to her, and with the same motion rushed away, emitting a high-pitched scream. The male answered with a roar and looked around, and Doc, having failed to interpret the purpose of my nudge, was surprised to see me in the branches above him. The members of the group assembled around the male after a moment of tense alertness. The animals were still within about one hundred feet of us, and we wondered what would happen. To our relief, one face after another turned toward us in a quiet, quizzical stare as curiosity replaced alarm. They craned their necks, and two juveniles climbed into the surrounding trees to obtain a better view. One juvenile with a mischievous look on its face beat its chest, then quickly ducked into the vegetation, only to peer furtively through the screen of weeds as if to judge the effect of its commotion. Slowly the animals dispersed and went about their daily routine. I particularly remember one female who left the deep shade and settled herself at the base of a tree in a shaft of sunlight. She stretched her short legs in front of her and dangled her arms loosely at her sides. Her face was old and kind and creased by many wrinkles. She seemed utterly at peace and relaxed as she basked in the morning sun.
Source: George Schaller, The Year of the Gorilla, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1964.
Toads
George Orwell (1903–50) was not a trained naturalist, but he had the gift, essential to scientists, of noticing what other people did not. This piece was written for Tribune in April 1946.
Before the swallow, before the daffodil, and not much later than the snowdrop, the common toad salutes the coming of spring after his own fashion, which is to emerge from a hole in the ground, where he has lain buried since the previous autumn, and crawl as rapidly as possible towards the nearest suitable patch of water. Something – some kind of shudder in the earth, or perhaps merely a rise of a few degrees in the temperature – has told him that it is time to wake up: though a few toads appear to sleep the clock round and miss out a year from time to time – at any rate, I have more than once dug them up, alive and apparently well, in the middle of summer.
At this period, after his long fast, the toad has a very spiritual look, like a strict Anglo-Catholic towards the end of Lent. His movements are languid but purposeful, his body is shrunken, and by contrast his eyes look abnormally large. This allows one to notice, what one might not at another time, that a toad has about the most beautiful eye of any living creature. It is like gold, or more exactly it is like the golden-coloured semi-precious stone which one sometimes sees in signet-rings, and which I think is called a chrysoberyl.
For a few days after getting into the water the toad concentrates on building up his strength by eating small insects. Presently he has swollen to his normal size again, and then he goes through a phase of intense sexiness. All he knows, at least if he is a male toad, is that he wants to get his arms round something, and if you offer him a stick, or even your finger, he will cling to it with surprising strength and take a long time to discover that it is not a female toad. Frequently one comes upon shapeless masses of ten or twenty toads rolling over and over in the water, one clinging to another without distinction of sex. By degrees, however, they sort themselves out into couples, with the male duly sitting on the female’s back. You can now distinguish males from females, because the male is smaller, darker and sits on top, with his arms tightly clasped round the female’s neck. After a day or two the spawn is laid in long strings which wind themselves in and out of the reeds and soon become invisible. A few more weeks, and the water is alive with masses of tiny tadpoles which rapidly grow larger, sprout hind-legs, then forelegs, then shed their tails: and finally, about the middle of the summer, the new generation of toads, smaller than one’s thumb-nail but perfect in every particular, crawl out of the water to begin the game anew.
I mention the spawning of the toads because it is one of the phenomena of spring which most deeply appeal to me, and because the toad, unlike the skylark and the primrose, has never had much of a boost from the poets.
Source: The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Volume 4: In Front of Your Nose, 1945–50, edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1970.
Russian Butterflies
The novelist Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) was a passionate lepidopterist. Several thousand specimens caught and preserved by him are now in the American Museum of Natural History and the Cornell University Museum of Entomology. These memories of his boyhood in pre-revolutionary Russia are from his autobiography Speak, Memory.
Near the intersection of two carriage roads (one, well-kept, running north-south in between our ‘old’ and ‘new’ parks, and the other, muddy and rutty, leading, if you turned west, to Batovo) at a spot where aspens crowded on both sides of a dip, I would be sure to find in the third week of June great blue-black nymphalids striped with pure white, gliding and wheeling low above the rich clay which matched the tint of their undersides when they settled and closed their wings. Those were the dung-loving males of what the old Aurelians used to call the Poplar Admirable, or, more exactly, they belonged to its Bucovinan subspecies. As a boy of nine, not knowing that race, I noticed how much our North Russian specimens differed from the Central European form figured in Hofmann, and rashly wrote to Kuznetsow, one of the greatest Russian, or indeed world, lepidopterists of all time, naming my new subspecies ‘Limenitis populi rossica.’ A long month later he returned my description and aquarelle of ‘rossica Nabokov’ with only two words scribbled on the back of my letter: ‘bucovinensis Hormuzaki.’ How I hated Hormuzaki! And how hurt I was when in one of Kuznetsov’s late
r papers I found a gruff reference to ‘schoolboys who keep naming minute varieties of the Poplar Nymph!’ Undaunted, however, by the populi flop, I ‘discovered’ the following year a ‘new’ moth. That summer I had been collecting assiduously on moonless nights, in a glade of the park, by spreading a bedsheet over the grass and its annoyed glow-worms, and casting upon it the light of an acytelene lamp (which, six years later, was to shine on Tamara [Nabokov’s first love]). Into that arena of radiance, moths would come drifting out of the solid blackness around me, and it was in that manner, upon that magic sheet, that I took a beautiful Plusia (now Phytometra) which, as I saw at once, differed from its closest ally by its mauve-and-maroon (instead of golden-brown) forewings, and narrower bractea mark and was not recognizably figured in any of my books. I sent its description and picture to Richard South, for publication in The Entomologist. He did not know it either, but with the utmost kindness checked it in the British Museum collection – and found it had been described long ago as Plusia excelsa by Kretschmar. I received the sad news, which was most sympathetically worded (‘… should be congratulated for obtaining … very rare Volgan thing … admirable figure …’) with the utmost stoicism; but many years later, by a pretty fluke (I know I should not point out these plums to people), I got even with the first discoverer of my moth by giving his own name to a blind man in a novel.
Let me also evoke the hawkmoths, the jets of my boyhood! Colors would die a long death on June evenings. The lilac shrubs in full bloom before which I stood, net in hand, displayed clusters of a fluffy gray in the dusk – the ghost of purple. A moist young moon hung above the mist of a neighboring meadow. In many a garden have I stood thus in later years – in Athens, Antibes, Atlanta – but never have I waited with such a keen desire as before those darkening lilacs. And suddenly it would come, the low buzz passing from flower to flower, the vibrational halo around the streamlined body of an olive and pink Hummingbird moth poised in the air above the corolla into which it had dipped its long tongue. Its handsome black larva (resembling a diminutive cobra when it puffed out its ocellated front segments) could be found on dank willow herb two months later. Thus every hour and season had its delights. And, finally, on cold, or even frosty, autumn nights, one could sugar for moths by painting tree trunks with a mixture of molasses, beer, and rum. Through the gusty blackness, one’s lantern would illumine the stickily glistening furrows of the bark and two or three large moths upon it imbibing the sweets, their nervous wings half open butterfly fashion, the lower ones exhibiting their incredible crimson silk from beneath the lichen-gray primaries. ‘Catocala adultera!’ I would triumphantly shriek in the direction of the lighted windows of the house as I stumbled home to show my captures to my father …