Saturday, July 16, 2005

Shuffling Entemologist picking Through the insect trash

I am a wildlife nutcase, I love looking at anything that is alive, birds reptiles and insects even. Now as you can imagine this place being in the middle of the largest forest in the world is alive with some of the biggest insects that have ever been seen by man. Now my daily routine is to do mail for a while then read the papers and then go to lunch, then go to the control room check my equipment and then go for a stroll around the Turbines. Now if you don’t know these units have lights shining all night long and they are big powerful lights and these attract a multitude of moths, just giants and these in turn attract bats they must be big as the turds they drop are the size of Chihuahua dog crap, I know it is bat crap as you kick it, it falls into insect body parts like legs and wing cases, so there is a feast going on around the lights, the bats don’t eat everything as when I get there in the afternoon there are exhausted moths just collapsed on the ground waiting to be eaten by the small birds running around like tiny Road runners. but some of them are huge, the biggest I have ever seen well today during my shuffling around looking at these on the ground I found what can only be called the worlds biggest butterfly net, it is the cooling fan system that cools the gas from the compressors and it sucks air up from underneath and blows it across the cooling fins , just like a normal A/C system and in doing so the air pulls along every big butterfly and moth that comes within range, this is a terrible waste but unavoidable one on a plant like this, I did my bit and rescued a huge morpho butterfly 3 times before I took it far enough away to escape the magnetic attraction it felt for the fans, it looked ragged but it may survive for a good while to lay its eggs hopefully. So I noticed that I was being watched by some of the workers and it will be known in a short time that I am a shuffling lunatic, I told a couple of the guys I was catching the beetles to eat them, I said I was joking but who knows, with Chinese whispers they will have me eating stray children being the only gringo on site. So my hobby for now is taking pictures of the insects and when I get familiar with the area more I will start wandering to look at the birds in the local forest and maybe even catch a ride on the boats to see what birds are living locally on the water.

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