by Tim Flannery
Perhaps the situation had been compounded by the generous assistance provided to the people of Valearanisi by the Australian government in the wake of cyclone Namu. At first I thought that this might spark reciprocity, but they saw things very differently. The people of Valearanisi were, I’m now certain, expecting me to emulate my countrymen and dispense more of my apparently limitless wealth. When I disappointed them, anger and frustration boiled to the surface.
The entire social situation was made worse at the time of our visit by a bizarre millennial cult. Some young men had travelled to Honiara where they had seen a propaganda film, made by American Christian fundamentalists, depicting the Rapture—the end of the world. As portrayed in the movie, the Rapture will see the righteous miraculously levitate to heaven, leaving the damned to perish on a godforsaken planet. The young men who had seen the movie graphically described to me the coming fate: aircraft falling from the sky, terrible car accidents and other catastrophes. With great conviction the village head told me that the world would end in 2000—then just a decade away. I discussed their beliefs for hours, but all my efforts to persuade them that the Rapture was fantasy were dismissed. Moreover, I thought their greed strangely dissonant with this belief in the end of days.
We had appointed a day for the helicopter pilot to pick us up, but I was increasingly concerned that deteriorating weather would prevent its return. Nothing is certain in Melanesia, except the transience of life, and by then relations had frayed so badly that the evening before the chopper’s anticipated arrival was one of the most tense I’ve ever experienced. Winifred Violet Scott’s generous bequest was all but exhausted, yet I was still being bullied and cajoled, almost incessantly, for exorbitant payment for necessities like shelter for the night.
How to explain the frustration that saw me pick up my bush-knife in anger? Yes, I was worried that someone might steal our equipment, but it was blood—stupid youthful blood—that had me thinking of acting in ways that shame me even now. I thank the god of good fortune that I could contain my anger long enough to hear the dull thudding of the helicopter. Within the hour we were on our way to a completely different world. For months after, Tanya told me, villagers from Valearanisi would visit her office in the ministry of conservation seeking compensation payments for our visit.
As the sound of that thudding skyhook reverberated throughout the cyclone-devastated valley just before we left, I received a wondrous and entirely unanticipated gift. An old man, whom I had met when I had first arrived, hurried towards me, a plastic bag in his hand. I had explained my interest in bats to him, and he offered me the bag with a look of puzzled expectation. In it was a tiny winged creature with silver-tipped, blackish fur as beautiful as the fur of any chinchilla. It was an almost mythical animal—the flower-faced bat (Anthops ornatus) of the Solomon Islands.
The species had first been collected by Charles Woodford, in 1886, but the last time it had been seen was when my predecessor at the Australian Museum Ellis le Geyt Troughton received a specimen from Father Poncelet, a Belgian Catholic missionary based on Bougainville, in 1936. I peered into the bat’s strange face. Its eyes were completely hidden in its luxuriant silver pelt and a strange, bright orange, flower-like growth covered much of its face. Predominant in this growth were three tiny, perfectly spherical orange balls, lined up across the forehead and, below them, numerous overlapping flaps of almost luminous orange skin that formed a sort of radar dish around the nostrils.
What trick of nature, I wondered, had formed this living jewel perhaps ten million years in the making? The flower-faced bat’s ancestors had most likely flown to the Solomon Islands some time before North and South America were joined by the rising isthmus of Panama, before the island of New Guinea had formed into its present shape and long before anything like an upright ape trod the earth. Indeed, I later discovered, its nearest relatives are fifteen-million-year-old fossils from Australia.
What had inspired this very bat—which as far as we know is forest dwelling—to fly into the house of an old villager who just happened to know that there was a white man in the area who would appreciate this gift? He told me how he closed the shutters of his house and he and his children chased the creature about before catching it, and I handed over the very last of Winifred’s cash and accepted this most marvellous offering.
Honiara’s Mendana Hotel—with its cold beer and hot and cold running water—seemed a strange place to be. Just hours before I had stared into the depths of my own potential evil and then received what seemed like a gift from the gods on that worlds-away weather coast of Guadalcanal.
CHAPTER 13
Poncelet’s Giant and the Last Great Forests
At its northern end, the archipelago that is the Solomon Islands terminates in the mighty island of Bougainville and its outlier Buka. With mountains nearly 2600 metres high (just taller than those on Guadalcanal) and with an area of eight and a half thousand square kilometres, Bougainville is a biological wonderland that is still yielding unknown species. But I have never worked there. The island was well serviced with airports and roads, and it just looked too easy. So I thought Bougainville could wait. How wrong I was!
The Panguna copper mine on Bougainville, which began operations in 1969, had presented the local people with a host of problems, including pollution, social disruption and disadvantage, none of which were being adequately addressed. In 1988 a Bougainvillean called Sam Kaona, who was frustrated at the lack of progress in addressing the problems, took to the jungle and formed a ragtag militia that was to become known as the Bougainville Revolutionary Army. It was not taken seriously at first, but by May 1989 Kaona had forced the Panguna mine, one of the largest and most profitable in the region, to shut down. Then followed a long and brutal civil war, now thankfully brought to a close. But to this day the mountains of southern Bougainville remain too dangerous to visit.
Although Bougainville was off-limits I was able to learn something of its fauna through an archaeological dig that had taken place on the adjacent island of Buka. During times of low sea level 20,000 years ago, Buka was joined to Bougainville, so they share a common fauna. An archaeologist at the Australian National University, Matthew Spriggs, had excavated a cave that preserved the remains of animals dating back to the last ice age. I had time to do a detailed study of only the rodents, but it revealed five species of large-to-gigantic rats, two of which had never been seen alive. Both appeared to be ground dwellers, like the emperor rat of Guadalcanal, and one was the largest rat ever recorded in the Solomons archipelago. Their remains occurred throughout the deposit, so perhaps relict populations survived. But how was I ever to follow this lead with a civil war raging on Bougainville?
Buka and Bougainville were not the only islands joined during the last ice age. Twenty thousand years ago low sea levels meant that most of the northwestern islands of the Solomons chain were united in one vast landmass known as Greater Bukida. It must have been one of the largest islands in the Pacific, encompassing every land from Buka to the Florida Islands just off Guadalcanal. Back then, animals roamed freely throughout this great landmass, meaning that, in the lowlands at least, the fauna of all the islands should be similar. Perhaps the scattered fragments of Greater Bukida offered a means of investigating Bougainville’s fauna.
One species recorded from the fossil deposit on Buka had been observed just once by a European. Known as Poncelet’s giant rat, it had been collected by the same Father Poncelet who had sent Ellis Troughton the flower-faced bat. Poncelet was based at Buin, in the south of Bougainville in the 1930s. During a visit to Sydney he had called in at the Australian Museum to enquire whether he might assist the scientists by collecting samples. His offer was gratefully accepted, for even at that time travel to the mountains of Bougainville was dangerous and rare. As noted in a 1935 newspaper report, a missionary (perhaps Poncelet himself) had set off in search of an unknown community which was rumoured to live in the mountains. He was armed with only a walking stick, and when h
e located the settlement the natives were so amazed that they:
actually rubbed his skin to make certain the colour was not painted on. Discussing his fate, the natives apparently concluded that a man of peace was not worth killing, to the relief of the priest, who said he was naturally terrified, as the natives, though not cannibals in the sense of killing to eat, have been known to kill and feast upon intruders.19
To the delight of Ellis Troughton, Poncelet dispatched a carefully documented collection from Bougainville soon after his visit. Its outstanding novelty was a pickled body and two skulls of a prodigious rodent hitherto unknown to science. The creature was the size of a cat, had a naked, prehensile tail and was covered in very coarse dark chestnut hairs that formed a kind of mohawk along the head and neck. Father Poncelet’s accompanying letter said that they were found ten miles from the mission station in dense forest, were known to the natives as nagara and were very rare. To honour the redoubtable Belgian, Troughton named the creature Unicomys ponceleti.
Several zoological expeditions have visited Bougainville since Poncelet’s day, yet nothing more was heard of this extraordinary rodent. Was it, like the emperor rat of Guadalcanal, already extinct? Choiseul and Isabel are, with the exception of Bougainville, the largest fragments of Greater Bukida, and being politically part of the nation of the Solomon Islands they were not drawn into the civil war. They represented our best chance of seeing Poncelet’s giant rat and the rats that might still occur on Bougainville. The survey team included Harry Parnaby, an Australian expert on bats, Ian Aujare, a Solomon Islander with a keen interest in wildlife, and Tanya Leary. As Ian was from Isabel, he was able to open many doors for us with local communities.
As a result of disease, blackbirding and headhunting raids by the inhabitants of New Georgia Island, Choiseul and, more particularly, Isabel had been almost depopulated by the early twentieth century. Even at the time of our work their populations remained small, and both islands sheltered tracts of magnificent lowland jungle. We suspected that it was in such jungle, where the rainforest trees reach their greatest girth and height and where a great variety of fruits and nuts abound, that Poncelet’s rat and its kin might have found a haven.
After weeks of fruitless searching the team finally met a hunter who claimed that he knew of a great rat. It was not called nagara as on Bougainville, but vusala. But was vusala Poncelet’s giant rat? The only way to be certain was to examine one. The hunter searched in a large swamp forest near the village of Vudutaru, and there, in February 1990, he located a female accompanied by a single young almost half her size. They had been sleeping together in a huge messy nest made of sticks resembling an eagle’s nest, perched high in one of the largest trees in the forest.
When the specimens reached the museum I compared them with those collected by Father Poncelet sixty years earlier. One difference was immediately evident. The hairs of the Choiseul animals were black, rather than the rich chestnut of Father Poncelet’s rats. But did that mean they were a different species? Comparisons of teeth, bones, feet and other anatomy indicated that no other significant characteristics existed. The difference in colour, I concluded, must have resulted from the preservative used by Poncelet. We never could identify precisely what chemical had altered the colour of the hair, but at least we could say that, after an absence of nearly sixty years, the giant rat of the north Solomons had been rediscovered.
The information the expedition collected on Choiseul specimens is vital to the conservation of the species. First and foremost it demonstrated that this almost legendary rodent still survived. Secondly it indicated that its reproduction was slow: just a single young was reared at a time, and the young stayed with the mother until it was nearly mature. Even moderate hunting pressure could drive such a creature into extinction. But our work also revealed that the species requires pristine, unlogged forest—unless the unethical loggers who are devastating the region are stopped, the creature cannot survive. Tragically, Poncelet’s giant rat is not the only biological treasure under threat. As we were soon to learn, the monkey-faced bats, smaller giant rats and many lesser creatures of the Solomon Islands require unlogged forest for their survival.
The distribution of animals on the Solomon Islands makes no sense unless you take account of the ice age. Some islands that are now widely separated were then joined up, while other islands lying adjacent to each other remained separate because deep channels persisted even when the sea fell to its lowest point. One region has always remained isolated. Its largest islands are Kolombangara, New Georgia and Vangunu, and the waters, reefs and coral cays of the region are pristine, making it one of the most beautiful places in the southwest Pacific.
The only native land mammals reported from the region were bats, so I assigned Harry Parnaby, the bat expert on our team, to head up the survey of the area. One specimen he collected would launch a new research project. It was a small monkey-faced bat—the smallest yet known—with bright orange eyes, mottled wings and short golden fur. Clearly an unknown species, it was nonetheless evidently related to the monkey-face I’d found on Mount Makarakomburu. Harry would go on to name it Pteralopex taki, taki being the name that the villagers of New Georgia and Vangunu knew it by. It’s a great tradition, I think, to use the local language name for species new to science. It acknowledges the expertise of the local people in regard to their fauna, and such names do gain global acceptance. After all, that’s how we got the likes of koala and wombat.
Because the taki inhabits a region that’s easy to reach and work in, it provided the opportunity for an ecological study. No such study had been undertaken on a species of monkey-faced bat, and in 1992 I’d employed an honours student at Sydney University, Diana Fisher, to carry out the research under our Scott grant. She did her fieldwork between February and May, and her study remains a unique insight into these most unusual of creatures. It’s tremendously time consuming to study bats in the vastness of a tropical forest, so Diana enlisted the help of local villagers. They cut tall bamboo poles and strung mist-nets on them in various parts of the forest, then watched all night for bats flying into the nets.
One of Diana’s first discoveries was that, despite their formidable teeth, the taki are gentle creatures. They almost never attempt to bite, even when being extracted from a mist-net, and they don’t seem to be particularly scared of people. This gentle disposition is shared with many island species. Lacking predators, they don’t anticipate harm from humans and so allow themselves to be handled without fuss.
The taki turned out to be reasonably abundant in the right habitat on two of the three large islands in the group, but were entirely absent on the third, Kolombangara, which had been devastated by logging in the 1970s. While Diana caught no taki there, she did meet people who recalled seeing them often prior to the logging operation. One man said that he saw the taki flying out from their roosts in panic as the last great trees crashed to earth. The bats disappeared into the distance, never to be seen again.
At first we found it difficult to understand why the taki should be so dependent on unlogged forest. After all, the fruits they eat abound in disturbed forests, including old gardens and village sites. The answer came when Diana fitted the bats with radio transmitters and began tracking them to their roosting sites. These were invariably enormous hollow trees growing in the fertile lowlands—the first targets of the loggers. Without roosts in which to rear their young and to keep safe by day the taki cannot persist.
Taki are quite social at their roost sites. Up to ten pack themselves like sardines into a single hollow a dozen metres or more up a great rainforest giant. They may do this because there are so few suitable roosting sites even in unlogged forest. During her work Diana saw another, larger species of bat sharing hollows with the taki. She never caught one, so could not identify it. To this day the creature’s identity remains a great biological mystery. And there is an even greater mystery to be solved in the region, for villagers told Diana that they knew of giant rats i
n their forest. Given her focus on bats she was unable to pursue this lead, but it’s almost certain that an unnamed species of giant rat lurks in the forests of Vangunu and New Georgia awaiting discovery by an adventurous biologist.
Towards the end of her stay Diana discovered something very surprising. Until 24 April, all of the taki she had examined had remained silent, even when being handled. She quite reasonably assumed that the species did not vocalise. But just after dusk on that night, a male she was holding in a canvas bag let out ‘one very loud, high-pitched note’. This cry was immediately answered by a second animal, which was being held in a separate bag. From that night on the taki called to each other frequently—but only for the first hour or so after dusk.20
Just what the taki are saying to each other remains unknown, but we do have a few clues: sometimes one male appeared to be trying to drown out the call of a rival, while at other times females appeared to be answering males in a kind of duet. Among other mammals, such behaviours are common during the breeding season. But Diana observed that at the time the bats were calling most of the female taki were pregnant or lactating. It’s possible that taki mate immediately after giving birth, but perhaps their vocal duels and duets have a different function. Whatever their meaning, the social lives of the taki were turning out to be more complex than we’d imagined.
It’s a wonderful thing to glimpse the secret life of any species, and for us it was a rare pleasure indeed. Because of a lack of funding and time, all too often our work amounted to documenting the mere existence of a fauna whose ecology and social life remained absolutely unknown. But it was sad, too, to learn about the vulnerability of these gentle creatures to logging. As Diana was at work studying the taki, logging had already commenced on northern New Georgia and Vangunu. Nobody has returned to see how the bats are faring in the face of the relentless forest destruction, and little is being done to assist them. The report on this amazing creature that we wrote for the government of the Solomon Islands sits unread, I suspect, on the desk of some bureaucrat in Honiara.
