Thanks to all of you who had such kind things to say about the story I posted yesterday. This is another story from my time in PNG. Without giving away too much of future stories, you won't find the result of this story in the scientific literature.
Oh, and for those interested in seeing pictures of PNG's scenery, people and wildlife, go to http://picasaweb.google.com/...
Gono is mentally quite limited and everyone in Herowana knows it. Not that they mistreat him. They gave him a wife and a piece of land to farm, helped him save up money for his kids' school fees. With his boundless When the opportunity to make a little bit of extra money (by finding bird nests for me) came up, they told him about it first thing. Where everybody else in the village failed, Gono succeeded. In a little patch of scrubby trees right in the middle of his garden, Gono found a partially built pitohui nest. I had offered a reward to whoever could find an active pitohui nest, because I wanted to find out if the pitohuis, which are toxic, feed Choresine beetles, which have the same toxin, to their chicks, thus explaining where the birds get their toxins.
Gono wanted to be sure he would get the reward, so he brought his friends to see the nest, now nearly fully constructed. He decided to build a blind I could sit in and watch the birds coming to the nest. He built it very close so I would have a good view. He built it big so I would be comfortable. He covered it in a bright blue tarp so I would stay dry. The pitohuis, seeing a human and his giant blue lump a few meters from their nest, gave up on the nest and moved on. I spent several hours sitting in the big dome so Gono would not be offended and just in case the birds came back. They did not, but I gave him the reward anyway.
But on that visit I noticed that Gono's garden was actually a great spot to watch pitohuis. Patches of low fruiting trees intermingled with open fields where the birds can catch grasshoppers, with ridges sharp enough that the birds climbing them will stay close to the ground. And it was right on the river bank, which was where a beetle expert had told me he usually found Choresine Beetles. He had also told me that no one knew where the Choresine themselves got the toxin, and no one knew whether the beetle larvae were toxic, because no one had ever found them. I couldn't resist a spot where I could both mist net pitohuis and research the toxic beetles. So when I was looking for a new field site, I went there.
I couldn't walk five feet without the mud collapsing below me and the Herowanans trying not to laugh as they pulled me out, but that was true pretty much everywhere in PNG. Every time I ran into Gono or his family in the garden they would give me fresh papaya or cut a sugar cane for me. Gono, being the landowner, was inevitably one of the workmen I had to hire. I didn't feel it would be responsible to let him handle live birds, so he was assigned to look after the camp, fetch firewood and equally simple tasks. Mostly he sat by the fire, whistling to himself and prodding it with a stick. His two young sons who he kept with him at the camp did his work for him. One part of the job he clearly relished was whacking big piles of firewood apart with my fancy imported ax. When we came slogging back to camp through his pineapple plants and sago palm wallows, he always had a huge blaze going. The fresh pineapples and bananas more than made up for the holes he melted in the roof tarp.
After a few days we had as many pitohui blood samples as I needed, we had found a few beetles, and I decided to catch the next plane to Goroka. As we were packing up my cargo to bring back to the airstrip, Gono decided he would build a better path down to the river in case I wanted to take a bath. I tried to explain that I was leaving in a few hours and did not want a path, or a bath, but he went about cutting various small trees and jamming bits of them into the steep 15ft mud bank leading down to the boulders along the river's edge. Having finished packing my gear, I went to tell Gono it was time to go. He had just finished his path and would not hear of leaving until I had walked down to the water and at least washed my hands. So I took one tentative step onto a flat spot at the top of the trail. A sheet of roots, moss and sticks fell away below my feet. Looking between my boots I saw nothing but Gono, still holding the ax and grinning up at me. In slow motion I fell, tilting forward. Gono crouched down, ax blade sticking straight up over his right shoulder. Over the course of what seemed a minute, Gono drew closer and the ax blade slowly rotated so as to point off to the side rather than up. Just as it occurred to me to feel relieved about this, Gono's skull slammed into my sternum. A tremendous crack like a baseball bat. He, I and splinters of ax went rolling down the rocks to the edge of the river, my face close enough to feel the spray of whitewater. No air in my lungs. Gono still sprawled on top of me, clutching a bit of ax handle, started kissing my neck and hands hoping this would bring me back to life. I gasped until some inflation occurred, trying to focus my eyes on the boulder nearest my face.
And there, a few inches from my muddy nose, on the slimy yellow algae covered boulder, were two little red dots. They were the color of blood, but were moving slowly this way and that. A bit more focus and they were not dots but tiny line-segments. I freed one of my arms and straightened my glasses. Larvae. Bright red beetle larvae, grazing on the algae a few inches from an adult Choresine beetle. Matching in every respect predictions about what the larvae of this genus should look like. Weeks of detailed searches had revealed nothing that looked like a Choresine larvae. Yet here I was, struggling for breath, nearly smashed, axed and drowned, laying under a man who seemed to think that repeatedly smashing his ear into my shoulder was helping me, and I had found them. The first time a person ever knowingly saw a Choresine larva. I smiled, popped the two larvae in a vial, got up, washed my hands and told Gono that he had built an excellent path, and I would give him my tarp and my ax.