At last yesterday, Friday November 10, at ten in the morning, Dismus and I trundled away from the seething mass of bureaucratic compromises that daily permeates existence here in the city of Arusha. In less than an hour, fossil oils fueling the old blue Land Rover, we had put a million years between ourselves and the dark-day rain puddles of the twenty first century African street. Yes! We were back in the sparkling silence of a little desert, the one that is called Angyata Osugat.
Angyata in the Maasai language means a treeless expanse - a type of steppe to the ecologically-minded; and Osugat their name for the seasonal watercourse (a korongo or wadi) that drains the area northeastwards toward Lake Amboseli, just inside Kenya territory. The Angyata of the Osugat is indeed a unique fragment of the earth's surface, lying as it does between three towering volcanic giants: Kilimanjaro to the east, Longido to the north and Meru to the south - one that I have come to call in these gladiatorial days "The Arena of the Larks".
Three million years ago this land underwent a period of rampant orogenesis, throwing up these three great volcanic cones and numerous lesser monoliths. They walled-off an area of maybe thirty square kilometres, hidden from the ocean trades that seasonally, following upon each equinox, deliver saturated air deep into the immense equatorial interior of Africa.
A population of one small bird, an open-country lark, evidently got sealed within a rain shadow which formed behind the rising wall. To me this bird has become the unsung hero of it's isolated desert kingdom, surrounded by acacia and broad-leaved woodlands that sprang-up beyond the wall, in so-called pluvial periods of earth's history.
Left behind by their spike-heeled relatives, who withdrew southwards in the shrinking savannahs away from an expanding equatorial forest, through time the larks became smaller in body, wing and tail yet sharper of bill and claw. Already highly terrestrial, they were condemned, by competition with other species, to dig ever more frequently in the desert hardpan soils to earn their survival. They becamemore sedentary, as each group was required to defend a sizeable patch of the parched prairie terrain, in order to find enough invertebrate food to successfully reproduce. Their population was certainly already small when John Beesley put them on the map; discovering these birds when he was conservator of the nearby Ngurdoto Crater conservation area (now Arusha National Park) in the dying days of the British Empire. Since those simple optimistic 'sixties their little band has shrunk still farther until now, from his retirement home in England their finder considers their number to be "only in the tens". Yesterday, in six hours scouting on the plain, I could find only four, by my reckoning this tiny number is close to ten per cent of the global population.
I have noticed that many people these days look at species such as Beesley's Lark and seem almost reassured to be witnessing what they perceive as an evolutionary failure! A complacent and condescending fatalism appears to nurture this judgment. Of what importance is a little brown bird, so hard to see as it scurries between harshly nibbled and ever more scattered tussocks of desert grass, loathed to fly more than a few centimetres above the ground? Admittedly a unique bundle of being. But one who just happens to be, and moreover happens to have been, a tad too specialized when history, or fate, took a turn for the worse. Initially by erecting too short a mountain wall and secondly by cramming the land within the wall with thousands upon thousand of alien sheep and goats. This latter horde being just one product of our own self-proclaimed evolutionary success. One in whose consequences we should, each and every one of us, be increasingly less able to claim the stance of dispassionate, objective observer.
I am physically saddened, when I watch these extraordinarily little birds out on their 'empty plain', to think that 'Chersomanes beesleyi' may well become extinct before they are even honoured, by the bureaucracy of the conservation industry, with the title of 'full species' - posthumously - and Critically Endangered at that! However, by the same mental processes, it was great consolation for me yesterday to be in the company of other flying beings. Especially one whose enduring presence on this wonderful planet I doubt our species will ever understand, let alone be able to relegate to a tiny place in our own history of opportunities mismanaged. As is increasingly the case, yesterday an insect restored my faith in life.
Once in a long while a shallow pool of brown silt-ladened water congregates in the middle of Lark Plains. Always on the day after a serious rain storm has broken upon this side of Meru. Such a storm took place on Wednesday night. So I made a point of visiting the sun-warmed pool yesterday during my wanderings in search of lark. And was delighted to find several mated couples of a large dragonfly, whose marmalade-coloured bodies and broad-based wings, sparkled in the sun as they skimmed back and fore at eye level. There were perhaps in all twelve pairs at the pond; skipping and gliding, dipping-down in tandem to egg-lay all along the shining muddy margin, kept entirely free of vegetation by the countless piebald ruminants that loose no opportunity to jostle here and drink the puddle dry.
The libellulid in question - Pantala flavescens is most definitely a"design classic". So much so that it's evolutionary success has earned it English names like Globe Skimmer in the USA and Britain, and Wandering Glider in South Africa. Arguably this is the most successful of all the species, in one of the oldest and therefore most successful of all the insect orders - the ancient Odonata.
This robust high flier rarely descends to earth from preferred cruising altitudes that have enabled it to catch the winds and secure for itself a pan-tropical distribution. No evolutionary bottleneck now for flavescens! It seems that it preempted man in his bid to navigate and colonise the entire world. Being an insect, in millenia of late it's been held in check somewhat, by the coolness of polar air currents. Yet the Pantala, as it is called in the Hispanic world, is an indefatigable dragonfly, one who skims aboard our ships out in mid-ocean; or arrives all of a sudden, in ones and twos, on pulsing tropical maritime breezes at the farthest corners of the occupied globe - in New Zealand, on Labrador or in northern Europe.
Several times each year, flight after flight, of countless Globe Skimmers, have surfed the warm up draughts ahead of towering tropical thunderheads as seasonally the great storm belt tracks the sun back and fore across the middle latitudes of Earth. As a species there's little doubt the Pantala has been doing this for a hundred times as long as Chersomanes beesleyi or Homo sapiens have eyed the heaven above. For both of whom, it's written, emerged not far from where I now write, and only a couple of million years ago.
To observant Chinese naturalists, who have watched these little dragons reach prodigious numbers in the humid heat of summer, they are known as the Typhoon Dragonfly. And for what it's worth, once every gaseous trace of our carbon-releasing frenzy has been finally fizzled-away, I bet those dragons will still be up there doing it. A gliding and a skimming. Yes! Now and forever - riders of the storm!
