h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hey, how are things? How are your animals all doing nowadays?

Anyways I thought you might like a look at this, I don't know if you like cats much, but this is a rather cute kind:

http://www.marwell.org.uk/feature-sandcat.htm

What a pity cats eat rodents ...

Things are fine, the animals are mostly fine. We've got a couple of eye-less hamsters though, and we're even more over-run with rodents than ever before... and mum has decided that she's going to start breeding jirds as well. Still, pet shops seem to like buying from mum, because she actually bothers to handle the rodents, which means that the pet shop staff don't get bitten. (Except by Russian Campbells hamsters - they are vicious.)

Aww, that is cute. I don't mind cats, but I wish they weren't so widespread here...

¦M¦

Well, hi again. You can see, I don't get here much ... my parents have lost their jobs, and now I have to help keep them going! I also have to earn more money, and spend less ... so I'm painting more, and spending less time on the 'net. In fact, nowadays I'm only on over weekends. I'll be going off in a short while, but I'll be on again tomorrow.

So, what's happening? Your latest journal entry dates from three weeks ago ...

Over here something really exciting has happened! I've now got a digital camera! It can even take MPG videos. Wow.

Oh dear...
Why did they lose them?

Well, nothing much has been happening. Well, it has, but I'm too paranoid to put it online...

Hey, cool! You having fun with it?

¦M¦

Well, they lost their jobs basically and essentially because of it being the Downfall of Civilisation. The place they used to work, the University of the North, like most of the other 'Big Institutions' here in South Africa, is rapidly going down the tubes. It's a nest of incompetence and corruption. It is also financially bankrupt, actually deeply in debt, owing lots of people money, and currently engaged in numerous lawsuits, of which they've already lost a number, and had some of their cars and computers and other property confiscated because they failed to pay damages the court ordered them to pay. So anyways the University is now looking frantically for corners they can cut ... and they decided that they're going to get rid of lots of their teaching personnel. They actually have a complete excess of non-teaching personnel, and a dearth of lecturers ... but the administrative and security people all belong to strong trade unions, so it's nigh impossible to get rid of them, even though they're ultra-incompetent. Anyways, so the University Authorities decided to close a number of departments. They closed the Department of History, and also the Department of Afrikaans, and some others as well, and laid off all the professors and lecturers of those departments. My parents both taught in the Department of Afrikaans. My dad's been there since 1980, and he's still a very strong, active and motivated person, and thought he could go on till 2014. But it's been getting increasingly unpleasant to work there. You might remember it culminated in my dad getting held in his office by two men with guns. The authorities hardly did a thing about that afterwards. And there have been many other also very unpleasant things. So, in a way, my parents are relieved to be away from such a place ... but still unhappy that they can't work any more. At their ages, and in this society, it's going to be just about impossible for them to find other jobs.

Well, that's what's going on here. We'll cope, we have been planning for this for a long time now.

So ... I hope what's been happening over there hasn't been too bad ...

Anyways, I am having fun with the camera! And also, I think it's going to help me a lot with my work.

Oh dear...
What are they planning to do?

Oh no, not at all bad. It's good. But I'm too paranoid to put it online.

Excellent!

¦M¦

Well, they do get a severance package, and they have retirement funds and investments. My dad is also going to be painting along with me, and we hope to be able to keep ourselves going by that. My father owes no money and in fact we have rather a lot of money saved and invested.

If all fails, my sister could perhaps still help us out. She and her husband are both quite highly paid and we might move in with them.

Anyways, I hope you're not as paranoid as I!

To get back to the topic ... the other day on the TV there was a program with a number of very cute animals. There were bushbabies ... do you know much about those? The adults are already very cute. On the program they showed some baby bushbabies as well! They look very funny. The parents carry them around in their mouths! Also on the program there were baby black-footed-cats (aka small spotted cats) which is one of the smaller wild cat species, weighing only about one and a half kg, or about three pounds, at adulthood. The baby kittens are ultra-cute! Other interesting animals were baby aardwolves. You know what an aardwolf is, do you?

Anyways, my digital camera is already paying for itself. A coupla days ago I got a comission for four pencil portraits, and took some photos on the spot from which I'm now working.

So how're things still going on your end?

Talking about cute animals, have you read my 'Tree Rat', 'Pygmy Squirrel' and 'Greater Galago' journal entries, maybe? Must say I'm appreciating nature more and more. How're you-all doing?

And to you and yours a Very Happy Christmas and a wonderful, prosperous New Year!

Ahh, that's OK then, I hope.

Well, I feel I have a very good reason to be paranoid about it, and indeed if I wasn't and something did happen I would land in serious trouble - partly with the law as well, I suspect.

No, I don't think I've seen a bushbaby... *tries to think* I don't /think/ I have. Tell me.

Yes, I did read your journal entries. I've forgotten most of their contents now though... sorry I haven't posted before now, but I don't seem to have a lot of time online... I've seven exams in January. *sigh*
Anyway, the menagerie appears to be fine, as far as I can work out. We've added a young corn snake to the list, and it's a wonderful orange colour. And good grief, it can't half swallow things twice the size of its head fast! I can't imagine what watching a large snake swallowing something twice the size of its head would be like, but it would be pretty impressive!

Yes, and a Happy New Year to you as well!
(I'd say Christmas as well, but that was last week now...)

¦M¦

Hmmm, I see ... paranoia-just-in-case. I'm personally paranoid-just-in-case about numerous things. I wonder if not more people should perhaps have such an attitude. If not pushed to extremes, that is. Anyways I do hope you do not land in trouble with the law.

A bushbaby and a Galago is/are one and the same thing. A tiny kind of non-monkey non-ape primate. Very very cute. They have long fluffy tails, huge eyes, pointy wet snouts and big radar-antenna-ears that they can fold up like maps when they're not using them. You'll not have seen one unless you've set foot in Africa, and probably not even then. I haven't ever known of any zoos having any and I don't think they can do well in captivity. You may have seen pictures, though I guess even those may be hard to come by outside of Africa. I know of many kinds of animals of which there are no photos available on the internet. I'm not going to try bushbabies tonight, my internet is behaving horribly these days and all that I can do anything with is the text-only version of h2g2.

Good luck with the exams!

Corn snake, eh? An American species? It seems not to be British. I now own a book called the 'Collins Complete Guide to British Wildlife'. It's got supposedly everything from algae, mosses and fungi, to fish and other marine life, to terrestrial wildlife, to farm animals. The only species it doesn't appear to cover is Homo sapiens. But anyways this guide to me is both shocking and illuminating. Illuminating because at last I now have a fairly good idea what's going on in Britain outside of the cities and towns. Shocking because the book has less than a third as many entries as my own guide just to the Butterflies and Moths of Southern Africa. And the butterfly guide isn't even nearly complete!

Just to give you perspective ...

Britain has six species of native reptile. South Africa has about six hundred known species, and they're discovering new species almost by the week.

That's the only statistic I know off the top of my head though but I can do similar comparisons for amphibians, mammals, birds and so on. But six hundred species of reptile I think says something. Just in our garden we have had or still have AT LEAST these species already:

1. Rock agama
2. Striped Skink
3. Flap-necked Chameleon
4. Dwarf gecko
5. House gecko
6. Some kind of girdled lizard
7. Brown house snake
8. Some kind of thread snake
9. Green bush snake
10. Numerous other kinds of snake I couldn't identify at the time
11. Leopard tortoise

So in an area of about 35m x 35m we can boast about double the reptile species that occur in the entirety of the British Isles!

And if I widen the region to include a few other gardens and some small hills and other patches of land around these parts I could also include green flat lizards, giant girdled lizards, Kalahari tortoises, tree agamas, bush monitor lizards, water monitor lizards, terrapins, and another bunch of snakes. That is if we *exclude* the local reptile parks where there are of course large numbers of reptiles, many indigenous and some exotic. Not so far from here we even have crocodiles.

Well anyways I hope you enjoy the corn snake! Come to think of it I think I've seen some in our reptile park.

And a Happy New Year to you! Just a few hours to go.

Well, I very much doubt I will get into trouble, because even if I were to talk about it on here it would still all be perfectly legal. However, if something were to happen I could be held repsonsible or whatever. Dunno.

http://web.wanadoo.be/waingunga/galago.html ? If this picture's right, then I'm sure we've pictures of them in books somewhere. They're very cute!

I've absolutely no idea where corn snakes are from, actually. Certainly not Britain though, as you've found. And is it any wonder we've hardly any reptiles? They are cold-blooded, and it's not very warm here. Since records began, the temperature has never officially reached 30 degrees C as far as I know. I don't know if that's only one particular place, but it does give you an indication of the climate! I think a heat-wave here is when it goes over 26 C. About two weeks ago the weather was so cold down here in the very south even that at midday we could still see our breath!
And there aren't very many of those reptiles around, either, I think. The only ones I've ever seen in the wild are four grass snakes and two slow-worms... I've heard accounts of adders, but I've never seen one. But then, they do all tend to be very shy. I don't know if it says in that book, but there are no snakes at all native to Ireland.
And of course, the reptiles are going to die out because their habitats - woods, heaths and moors - are being built on, and I don't think they'll be able to adapt to urban life like mammals and birds have. Amphibians seem to be managing so far - we get quite a few frogs in our garden, even the occasional toad, and we haven't got a pond. One of our friends has a pond, and although it isn't very big, she gets some wonderful newts in it! Newts here are protected by law, so you can't take them into captivity because they are endangered. Mum's boss (mum works as a lab technician in a school), the head of science, is also interested in the wildlife around, and he actually caught a pair of some newts - we never quite worked what sort they were - and persuaded mum to keep the eggs they produced and let them go. We did, and it's quite amazing watching baby newts growing! And hunting! They're almost completely transparent as babies! And they eat mosquito larvae, which we thought was wonderful. Of course, doing that was illegal, but... well, the newts survived, possibly better than they might have done in the wild, and we let them go in our friend's pond. We'd been careful to make sure they learnt to hunt with and without cover, so they should be alright.
But yeah, there aren't very many species here against the immense variety you've got over there! The largest buttefly we have has a wingspan of up to 114mm and is the Monarch (or Milkweed) as far as I know. I don't think I've ever seen one. The largest butterfly I've seen is a Swallowtail, with the second largest wingspan of up to 90mm. Our largest wild mammal is the fox - only one species - unless you count the horses, but they are no longer completely native (new strains of other horses were introduced a long time ago to improve the horses' traits, so that when they were caught as foals and trained they'd be better), nor are they completely wild. I don't know what our largest bird is, but I expect it will either be a stork or heron or be a hawk of some description. However, there are very few of those... the most common sightings are of them hovering near main roads and motorways watching for flattened prey!
I don't know what our tallest tree is. I've no idea even how many have been imported!

But yeah, there are very few species of anything here, and even fewer the further north you go.

¦M¦

Hi! Sorry for not being around much, I have internet troubles. I don't think it's going to clear up soon ... but I do keep hoping.

You should get yourself a field guide to British wildlife! It's nice to know what's going on. I eventually want to have field guides for every place in the world. I'm currently collecting field guides for entire bird families ... all the birds in that particular family in the entire world. I already have books for the Hornbills, the Crows and Jays, Woodpeckers, New World Warblers, Tits, Nuthatches and Treecreepers, and Wildfowl. I hope to have opportunities, some day, of really exploring the world and seeing as much as there is to see.

Well, anyways ... Britain does still have a lot of wildlife, considering how densely populated the islands are. Personally I don't think any reptiles will become extinct ... unless you reach the point where every single square millimetre of the place is occupied by humans, and I don't think that will happen because conditions will become unbearable long before then. I think there will always be substantial wild areas left ... and reptiles actually do not need as much space and food as mammals and birds do. In fact they often benefit from human activity. For instance garbage dumps offer small reptiles lots of niches in which to live, as do rubble left over from buildings or metal cans and other objects left to lie in fields.

Amphibians are more likely to suffer from human activity, because they are very easily poisoned by unnatural chemicals. But anyways, if there are frogs and newts around, it's a sign that the local ecology is healthy. And when frogs and newts die out, it ought to be a sign to humans that there are poisons in the environment and that they might be next!

The book I have lists animals and plants that occur naturally as well as ones that have been introduced. According to it the biggest mammal in Britain (excluding cows and horses) is the Red Deer, which is indeed native, still living wild in Scotland. Apart from the Red Deer there are four other kinds of deer ... Fallow Deer, Sika Deer (introduced from Asia), Roe Deer, and Muntjac (also introduced from Asia).

Foxes might be the largest *predators* in Britain ... though I'm wondering, isn't a badger a bit heavier?

The largest tree in Britain ... according to my Guinness Book of Records of 1983 ... is a Douglas Fir that back then was about 58 m tall, it may now be a bit taller. But it's not a tree native to Britain, it's introduced from America. There was back then also a Grand Fir of about 58m, but this I'm not sure if it's indigenous to Britain. The biggest tree that I know is indigenous seems to be the Common Beech, which attains 41 m.

South Africa does not have many very tall indigenous trees ... the natural climate here is, mostly, semi-desert and there are only a few tiny patches of forest. But we have *big* trees ... trees here tend to grow not so tall, but rather, to spread out very wide and to become very thick. That's because they're growing in savannah where there are only a few trees dotted here and there over a wide area. We have many 'flat crowned' species of trees that are up to five times as wide as they are tall! And we have the Baobab Trees that are among the thickest in the world ... we have one here with a trunk that is almost sixteen metres in width. Its crown is 37 m wide. But it is only 17 m tall!

But we have a few tall indigenous trees. The Outeniqua Yellowwood can attain 60 m but most of the tall ones have been chopped down; the tallest one remaining is about 39 m. But it does not just grow tall, it also develops a very wide and deep and dense crown, and an immense trunk, 2 to 3 m thick over its entire length. I've seen an absolutely huge one standing alone on a high mountain plateau in a very inaccessible area a way from here. It is so big it forms a small patch of forest all on its own, amidst the grassland, with underneath it a typical forest understory.

The tallest indigenous South African tree is at the moment not a Yellowwood but a Sneezewood, of 45 m. But it is not nearly as thick and wide.

We happen to have an Outeniqua Yellowwood, and also a Sneezewood, in our garden! The yellowwood is still only about 5 m and the sneezewood is now heading for 3 m.

Your largest bird seems to be the Mute Swan. Swans regularly exceed 12 kg, and there was one that weighed over 22 kg. By comparison a grey heron only weighs up to 2 kg. The biggest bird of prey is the Golden Eagle which might attain 6 kg.

Our biggest birds are of course the biggest of all, Ostriches. We also have the biggest flying bird species, the Kori Bustard, which on average weighs 15 to 18 kg. We also have the biggest oceanic bird, the Wandering Albatross. We don't have the biggest bird of prey though ... that would be the Harpy Eagle of South America that can weigh up to 13 kg.

In the past there used to be very much bigger birds. In Madagascar there used to be an ostrich-like bird that weighed up to 500 kg. There were similarly big flightless birds in Australia. And there was a flying bird in South America, that had a wingspan of almost eight metres, and was estimated to have weighed 120 kg!!!

Anyways, you *do* have something there in Britain that we don't have here in South Africa at all ... newts! Newts and salamanders are mostly restricted to the Northern Hemisphere ... I have no idea why. You have three species: the Smooth Newt, the Palmate Newt and the Great Crested Newt.

That's OK, I know you do. I hope it'll get better soon as well!

Well, we've got several books which specialise in butterflies and birds and insects, and a few general ones that won't have everything in...

Well, I hope you're right about reptiles, and you do know rather more about them than I.
And there are lots poisons in the environment already, what with all the pesticides and fertilisers farmers are using now... And plus, people over here are not going to care about amphibians dying out, because they aren't cute and furry. They'll care about seals and badgers, but not toads... currently, people are vaguely worrying about the population of sparrows, which has taken a sudden down-turn. After the same people increased the population of sparrow-hawks several years ago.

Of course, I forgot about deer! How thick. I didn't know Muntjacs had been introduced though - but it would make sense, a local farmer who is determined to help preserve the woodlands he owns complains about the Muntjacs eating the trees. He doesn't mind other deer so much. He also complains about the rabbits eating his crops...

Yes, I would guess that badgers are rather heavier than foxes.

Sorry, I'll be back to finish replying another time...

¦M¦

Jeezz ... this page is getting huge! Takes forever to load. So I'm not going to be writing a very long message today!

Sorry for having taken two weeks to answer ... I usually just go online on Sunday mornings (it's the only time when the 'net is fairly accessible to me) and last week we had a power failure just as I was writing over here.

Anyways ...

If I was that guy, I wouldn't worry so much about the muntjacs. They're quite cute! I'd rather find a way to protect the trees from them. Here in South Africa when there are important trees in game reserves they protect them from the wild animals. Of course they want not only the trees, but also the animals! What they do is they erect little chicken-wire fences around the trees, quite close to the trunks. This means that the antelopes can eat the leaves that stick out through the wire, but only to that point ... the leaves that are on the inside of the wire are spared, and the trunk also. So porcupines for instance cannot 'ringbark' the trees.

For some big trees like baobabs and marulas, that are often damaged by elephants, they place lots of big, sharp-edged stones around the base of the tree. Elephants don't like stepping on such stones.

They cannot do that for all the trees, of course. They only do it for trees considered especially important, and for new trees that they plant specially for certain purposes.

If I had a 'forest' of my own, every year I would select a few hundred new young trees and erect little wire fences around them ... and when they're fairly big, say five to ten metres, take away the fences and put them around newer young trees. That ought to give the plants plenty protection while they're young, and enable both the animals and the plants to flourish.

Anyways, how's it been with your exams?

Yeah, I've noticed this too.

That's OK.

Well, you have to remember that he is a working farmer on a working farm: he doesn't have time to do all that...

Elephants do have nerves in their feet then?

The exams? Terribly, and I still haven't finished them!

¦M¦

Yes, as far as I know, elephants do have nerves in their feet! Why wouldn't they?

Ooohhh ... I do hope your exam results are better than you expect.

Yes, as far as I know, elephants do have nerves in their feet! Why wouldn't they?

Ooohhh ... I do hope your exam results are better than you expect.

I guess there's no reason why they wouldn't really.

I rather hope so too!

¦M¦

Anyways, about what you said earlier about people being more concerned about soft furry & cuddly animals rather than wet slimy ones ... I personally just love frogs and newts! I'm going to try and raise people's awareness about amphibians. I think I'm going to add a 'Frog Page' or two to my Dreamwater website ... it's high time I updated that old thing.

Go for it and good luck! See if you can do it for snakes and spiders and insects as well!

¦M¦