Is it a bird? Is it a bat…
…No—it was a bug! A beetle, to be precise, the size of my hand, which whizzed above our heads with an awesome buzz before colliding audibly with one of the roof beams at Black Marlin Divers on Kadidiri, Togean Islands. One of the little dark geckoes that scuttle around on the walls actually tried to grab it. I wonder what would have happened if it had succeeded—I guess the beetle would have flown off with it hanging like a salmon in the claws of a sea eagle; and perhaps it would have eaten it as well.
The title question is far from unreasonable, because here the butterflies are the size of blackbirds and the bats are the size of butterflies back home. In Indonesia, the bugs are awesome. Just look what they swept out of the office in the same dive centre earlier that morning:
The coin next to this little fella is a 100 rupiah coin, the same diametre as an English 1 £. The fangs of this specimen would have fitted smugly around my little finger.
It doesn’t stop there. Back on mainland Sulawesi, we stopped briefly at a village next to a small tree which was entirely encased in a dense gauze of spiderwebs, festooned with dozens of spiders each the size of my hand—like the veil of the bride of Dracula. I can only presume that the spiders eat the birds around here.
Tags: SE Asia, Tag Index
Denni