Hello and welcome to my second blog post. This week I have been mostly living on the tiny island of Ile aux Aigrettes in the south east of Mauritius. That's six days of sun, fun, long hard days of trekking through undergrowth, and clean clean living. When I say clean living, of course I mean bucket showers with rain water, 90% humidity and being covered in island dirt. Despite the adjustment to life on a field station, this week was amazing. A great learning experience, with brilliant people.
Here are some fun things that I've learnt this week:
1. Pink pigeons can be homosexual.
They have been brought back from the brink of extinction. Some homosexual pairs exist even in the small population of Ile aux Aigrettes - they build a nest together (equal share of the work) and sometimes attempt to copulate. Endangered eh? Go figure.
2. Fruit bats don't like their greens.
I've spent a nice amount of time this week patting, and generally doing impressions of fruit bats. I adore these wide eyed beasts, and have been feeding the captive bats in the evenings whilst the warden was away.
Their order for food preference - from most preferred to least preferred, goes Papaya > Pear > Banana> Apple > Carrot > Pumpkin > Cabbage. If you put the cabbage at the top of the bowl, they won't eat their dinner.
3. Something eats cockroaches.
The Telfair Skink of Mauritius eats cockroaches. We can all be saved.
4. Tortoises trample everything and can weight 300kg.
The saplings of Mauritius have adapted to be "bendy" and distasteful to tortoises to save them from trampling and/or being eaten at a young age. The leaves change shape, colour and flavour as the tree becomes big enough to defend itself from a trampling. If you stand on the saplings, the stem bends to the floor and then pops back up again afterwards.
For the more studious amongst you, rest assured I learnt a lot of very valuable field skills this week too - the ringers grip, morphometrics of song birds and sea birds, how to locate a tortoise in dense under growth and so on.
All in all an excellent week. Now time for some R&R, a relaxing Sunday before lectures start on Monday morning. Huzzah!
For some pictures of my life here so far - go to the Gallery page