Sunday, 14 October 2012

To the great red isle


A young swallow flew over us yesterday, on the East Bank at Cley. As quickly as the year she was gone.

With the swallows gone it is time I too flew south, to Madagascar, where my skies instead will be full of Mascarene martins, of African palm swifts and, by night, of the hollow drilling song of the Madagascar nightjar.

Access to the internet in Madagascar is in inverse proportion to endemism and weirdness in the island's wildlife. It will be hard for me to post there. I will write though and will post when I can; and, strange primitive primates that you are, you will all be in my thoughts.



Any species capable of producing, at this earliest, juvenile stage of its development - almost instantly after emerging on the earth by any evolutionary standard - the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, cannot be all bad.

Lewis Thomas
The Medusa and the Snail


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