Throwim Way Leg Page 14

  Although we never located the species during our survey, it turned out, through a most bizarre twist of fate, that we held a partial solution to the mystery of Bulmer's Fruit-bat in our grasp all along. For over all the years during which we searched for the species in remote New Guinea, a specimen was gathering dust within two hundred metres of where I worked daily in Sydney!

  Almost a decade later, that piece in the puzzle was to fall into place.

  Partly due to lack of funding for collection management, since the 1950s about two thousand ‘problem specimens’ had built up in the mammal collection of the Australian Museum. These specimens lay uncurated and unstudied in various drawers and cabinets. In 1990 I obtained funding to examine, register and curate this material.

  Late one afternoon, the curatorial assistant who had been employed to carry out this difficult task knocked on my door. In her hand she held a box of unregistered bat skulls. As I casually picked one up, searching for some means to trace its identity, my breath caught and my heart began to beat wildly. The well-preserved skull had no foreteeth.

  Impossible as it seemed, I was holding in my hand a skull of the almost mythical Bulmer's Fruit-bat.

  The skull was accompanied by a tag which bore a single number ‘24/85’. This we recognised as being a preparation number, allocated to a specimen when it is sent to the taxidermist for mounting or cleaning. The assistant quickly checked the catalogue and brought me a skin from the collection with a number which matched the one on the skull. The skin was labelled as that of a common Bare-backed Fruit-bat (Dobsonia magna), which it superficially resembled. A brief glance at its fur, feet and wings, however, convinced me that the label was wrong. A band began to tighten around my forehead and I felt a queasiness in my stomach. At that moment, I realised, I was the only scientist on earth who knew what Bulmer's Fruit-bat looked like.

  Afterwards I examined the skin in a more systematic manner and began to see that it was quite different from that of the common Bare-backed Fruit-bat. Its fur was finer, its facial features more square and the claws were brown rather than ivory. There was also an extra claw on the wing. Furthermore, although it was the size of a Bare-backed Fruit-bat, this was still a juvenile. The adult must be much larger. If so, it would be the largest cave-dwelling bat on the planet.

  When my heartbeat slowed a little and my dazed brain began to think more clearly, I began to wonder whether this might all be a bizarre dream. After all, how could a specimen of the world's rarest bat have got into our museum collection unnoticed? Who could have collected it, and where?

  The answers, it turned out, lay in the label attached to the skin.

  The bat had been collected in 1984 by Steven Van Dyck of the Queensland Museum. He had accompanied me to Telefomin and Yapsiei on my first expedition there. Steve is an expert on the taxonomy of marsupial mice. He had decided to work at a place called Afektaman, which lies at an elevation of 1,400 metres in the Telefomin Valley—while I had gone to the Sol River—because he felt he had a better chance of encountering marsupial mice at that elevation.

  He must have been exceedingly busy on the day he collected Bulmer's Fruit-bat, for the entry in his field notebook gives only the barest details: the animal's sex, weight and forearm length. Alongside was scrawled the mysterious word, Woflayo.

  On our return, Steve and I had divided our specimens between the Queensland and Australian Museums. Among the material acquired by the Australian Museum was the bat. It had gone to the taxidermy department where the skin had been stuffed, but through an accident in curation or preparation the skull had become separated from the skin. The skin had been identified in the field as that of the common Barebacked Fruit-bat, and had been labelled as such in the collection. The skull had been placed in a box of problem specimens lacking data. Neither time nor money had ever allowed for the mistake to be rectified.

  By now I knew a little Telefol and suspected that Woflayo was the name of a person. And so, with some help from Ok Tedi Mining, Lester Seri and I were soon on our way to Afektaman, on the trail of Bulmer's Fruit-bat. Our ace card was Woflayo.

  Afektaman is a pretty little village overlooking the range which lies to the south of Telefomin. It is situated at the entrance to the Sepik Gorge, and is only about thirty kilometres in a straight line from Luplupwintem, which had been, until 1977, the sole roosting place of Bulmer's Fruit-bat.

  On our arrival at Afektaman we immediately asked whether anyone called Woflayo lived there—and were led straight away, so easily, to a man of late middle-age who lived in a tiny collection of huts a kilometre or so from the village itself.

  Woflayo invited us into his house, and offered us a cup of tea. As we talked, it became clear that Woflayo's Pidgin was rather limited. He was a conservative Telefol who clung fiercely to his traditions. He did not deign to learn the new lingua franca.

  After we had explained the purpose of our visit, Woflayo commented that it was a good thing we had arrived that day, for later in the week he was leaving for Batalona. I was at first nonplussed as to where exactly Woflayo might be going. Batalona did not sound like any Telefol place name I had heard. After some more discussion it became apparent that Woflayo was off on a very long trip indeed. He was headed for Barcelona, where he would lead a Telefol dance troupe as part of the 1992 Olympic Games celebrations!

  Woflayo's careful observance of tradition had clearly paid off. Of all Telefol, he was renowned as the one who knew the ancient dances best, and was thus the natural choice as leader of the troupe. What, I often wonder, did the good citizens of Barcelona make of Woflayo, bedecked in penis gourd, cane waistband and feathered head-dress, chanting and swaying to his Telefol rhythms?

  After we drank our tea, Woflayo took us to a garden at the back of his hut. There, he showed us the stump of a small fig tree. It was in this tiup tree, he said, that he had shot the bat which he had sold to ‘Masta Steve’ in 1984.

  I was flattened.

  What an anticlimactic end to a journey which had begun with such excitement months ago and thousands of kilometres away!

  A bat which Woflayo had shot in his back yard and thought nothing of had brought strangers to his door from another continent... And in a few days, he would dance to a crowd of tens of thousands on a continent as foreign to him as the far side of the moon.

  Our work on this trip would not have been complete without one final check of Luplupwintem. This was now doubly important for we felt that Woflayo's bat may well have flown from there on the night of its demise. If young bats were in the area in 1984, there was just a chance that an undetected breeding colony might yet survive in the great cave.

  Lester and I had flown over Luplupwintem on a previous occasion when journeying from Telefomin to Tabubil, so we knew how rugged the region was. On that occasion we had flown down the Sepik Gorge early in the morning in a tiny Cessna.

  It was a hair-raising journey from the start, for the gorge twists and turns, and the aircraft often appears to be headed directly towards a vertical wall with no means of escape, when it suddenly twists to follow the gorge on its tortuous course.

  We turned south-west as we followed the Ilam River, a tributary of the Sepik. Then the plane climbed until we were flying just a hundred metres or so above the vast, flat limestone plateau known as Finimterr. That morning a thin mist veiled the plateau, but through it could be seen occasional patches of brown grassland as well as the green of alpine scrub.

  Below there somewhere was Luplupwintem.

  Absorbed in trying to read the topography and locate the cave, I was caught completely unawares. The little plane suddenly began a precipitous dive towards the curtain of mist. Before the full impact of my terror was upon me, we had dived completely through the mist. We were flying straight down beside an enormous rock-face. Vast caverns and splashes of water-stained cliff zoomed past us.

  Then the plane began to pull out of its dive.

  The pilot turned to me and said, ‘What do you make of the Hindenburg Wall?
’

  The Hindenburg Wall is often dubbed the eighth natural wonder of the world. It is a huge limestone cliff which runs for tens of kilometres across south-central New Guinea.

  I had seen, I was tempted to say, quite enough of this 1,500-metre vertical drop to last me a lifetime.

  The day after we said farewell to Woflayo, Lester Seri and I climbed aboard a helicopter at Tabubil airport and headed back to the Finimterr plateau.

  We landed in an area of grassland where the chopper could touch down, approximately three hours’ walk from the cave entrance. Then we set out on the long and difficult track over limestone pinnacles and sink-holes to the cave mouth itself.

  For hours we picked our way over small pinnacles and through dense, mossy, upper montane scrub. It was a closed, almost claustrophobic world which seemed to engulf us. Then, after we turned one last corner, the path opened into empty space.

  At last we had arrived at the rim of Luplupwintem.

  Luplupwintem is the most spectacular cave I have ever seen. Its entrance is as unexpected as it is grand. We found ourselves standing on the very lip of a vast, roughly circular shaft, perhaps four hundred metres across, its walls plunging vertically for hundreds of metres. Looking across the chasm to its southern face, I saw that we stood at the lowest point of the entrance. All round, the cliff-like sides of the doline soared hundreds of metres overhead, as well as below. It was by now early afternoon, and a shaft of sunlight pierced down into the gloomy depths. I could see that the doline opened into a cathedral-sized cavern, across the mouth of which flowed a fine, almost mist-like waterfall. The height of the south wall appeared to be the best part of a kilometre, if not more.

  As we rested, exhausted, at the edge of this grandeur, we heard a strange, twittering noise coming from far below, inside the cave. It sounded like the calls of parakeets, but no self-respecting parrot would roost in that gloomy place. Instead, we saw a large fruit-bat sally out from the cavern below and fly through the shaft of light.

  This was exciting indeed. But had we rediscovered Bulmer's Fruit-bat, or had a colony of common Bare-backed Fruit-bats settled in the cave in their place? We waited anxiously for dark in order to find out.

  About half an hour before dusk the bats began to circle ever higher in the doline, then to fly out over our heads as they left the roost to forage. They were very large fruit-bats, and by the time the last had left the cave we had counted 137 of them.

  By observing their flight path we developed a strategy for netting one. But it was not going to be an easy job, for the area offered little scope for mist-net setting.

  Unfortunately, there was nowhere to camp at Luplupwintem, and we had left the bulk of our equipment at the grassland patch where the chopper had dropped us. By 9 p.m. we had to begin our long walk back, arriving at camp about midnight.

  For each of the next three days we walked back to Luplupwintem, and each evening tried a new technique to capture a bat. Our efforts met without the least success. The bats would fly too high, or to one side, and the small hours of the morning saw us returning to camp exhausted, wet and lacerated.

  With only a single day remaining before the helicopter arrived to pick us up, it was time for desperate measures. Considering the flight path taken by the majority of bats, and the topography of the entrance, Lester and I concluded that we would have to set a mist-net high above the canopy, in a position where it virtually overhung the great precipice itself, if we were to stand a chance of catching one of the bats.

  This was a perilous operation, and it was critical that the net tension be right, otherwise it would not work.

  Executing this dangerous manoeuvre took an entire afternoon. We finished just as the bats began to stir below. Exhausted, we waited for them to begin to stream out from their roost. This is what I later wrote:

  The previous three hours had been pure terror. In order to set the net we had to climb two large moss-covered trees that overhung the rim of this enormous cave, which plunges down vertically for several hundred metres. It was a fifteen-metre climb to the canopy, and we first had to cut a clearing for the net with bush-knives. Then we each had to manipulate a seven-metre pole, with mist-net attached, into place, and fasten it to the trees. All the while the light was fading, and the vines I had used to ascend the tree were becoming smooth with wear.

  We finished—and darkness descended.

  Clouds of mosquitoes surrounded us as we sat there, crawling into our ears, nose and eyes. We were unable to slap them for fear of disturbing the bats. Then at last we heard the distinctive ‘pok pok pok’ wingbeat as they left the roost. The noise of one bat after another colliding with the net high above our heads sounded encouraging, until we realised they were bouncing off again. The net had been set too tight, and we would have to climb high into the canopy of trees above the cave to loosen it. And it had to be done quickly. In ten minutes the skies would be empty of bats.

  The thought of climbing the tree again filled me with dismay; then I realised from the sounds overhead that Lester was already halfway up his tree.

  The climb seemed easier in the darkness, for I could not see the yawning chasm below, nor could I see the tree sway as I reached the thinner branches of the crown. Almost immediately upon loosening the net, a bat struck and became firmly entangled. I held onto the tree with a crooked elbow, stuck the torch in the fork of a branch, and began to haul in the net. The bat was understandably furious, attempting to bite everything around it. It was much larger than I had expected. When I reached the animal I realised I'd have to cut the net and carry down the section containing the violently struggling bat.

  Cutting done, I began my descent in darkness, for in the struggle to pull in the net my torch had fallen. Suddenly I began to feel my centre of gravity shift, and I realised I was supporting myself by the mist-net pole, which I had tied loosely to the tree. I grabbed wildly for further support and caught a liana vine. I climbed down the last few metres shaking, the furious fruit-bat struggling to be free.

  Lester was waiting with a calico bag. Carefully he placed the bat inside, then took up his torch and peered in. We looked in amazement at the indignant face of this bat. Its incisors were missing. In our grasp was an animal once thought to have become extinct at the end of the last ice age, some 12,000 years ago. We hugged each other with joy—after eight years of field work together in rugged western Papua New Guinea we had rediscovered Bulmer's Fruit-bat!

  Lester and I now think that Bulmer's Fruit-bat may have survived all through the 1970s and 1980s at Luplupwintem. Given what we now know of the rate of population increase at the roost, it seems likely that perhaps as few as ten to twenty bats escaped the massacre in 1977. The tiny population which remained had probably gone un-noticed in the vastness of the main cavern for over a decade, until numbers had built up sufficiently that they could again be detected at the cave entrance by their noise.

  Over the past few years we have learned much about this intriguing bat. It really is the world's largest cave-dwelling bat, it breeds once a year, and females do not breed until their third year of life. Its numbers are growing slowly (there were about 160 individuals in 1993), more slowly indeed than its reproductive rate would suggest they should. We suspect that it is still being hunted somewhere, probably at one or more of its feeding sites.

  Most hearteningly, the local Wopkaimin owners of Luplupwintem have agreed to ban hunting at the cave. They were never happy with the transgression of the taboo which protected the cave and its bats, but were uncertain of its relevance in the face of the modern world they found themselves engulfed in.

  The Wopkaimin are slowly regaining their own sense of balance. By 1993, six young men had agreed to undergo traditional initiation. They looked magnificent in their red clay body paint and extraordinary, taro-shaped head-dresses.

  The return of the cave to a traditional form of protection gives Bulmer's Fruit-bat its best chance yet to recover. If this is successful, perhaps the day will again come when t
he ground will shake to the wingbeats of tens of thousands of Bulmer's Fruit-bats.

  NINETEEN

  Expedition to the Stars

  The western world was well into the space age, and the first moon landing only four years away when, in 1965, the first European explorers ascended to the summits of the Star Mountains.

  Jammed up against the border with Irian Jaya, the Star Mountains are Papua New Guinea's most mysterious range. Their peaks were named from afar by the Dutch explorers who first saw them in 1910. Perhaps they chose the names of stars and constellations because the jumbled peaks seemed as profuse and remote as the heavens themselves.

  By the time I began work at Telefomin, the Star Mountains were still biologically unexplored. They beckoned irresistibly. When the opportunity arose in the late 1980s to undertake some biological survey work there (courtesy of the Environment Section of Ok Tedi Mining), Lester Seri and I jumped at the chance.

  The mining town of Tabubil lies at approximately 600 metres elevation on the southern slopes of the central range. It is, like most mining towns in New Guinea, a conglomeration of fibro cottages, offices and new roads, all constructed in a fresh gash in the forest. The town is noisy, and one feels more distant than ever from the real bush.

  What makes Tabubil different from other mining communities is its remoteness and the appalling weather conditions in the area. It is always exciting to fly into Tabubil. The area receives rain on 300 days each year, and cloud can hang over the foothills for weeks at a time. Inward-bound flights are frequently diverted to Kiunga (from where there is road access to Tabubil), and those that are not often have to make several attempts at finding an opening in the clouds so that they can locate the airstrip. On the ground the atmosphere is warm, humid and sticky. You can feel the fungus growing on your skin from the moment you step out of the plane.