Half a century ago, Belgian Zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans first codified cryptozoology in his book On the Track of Unknown Animals.
The Centre for Fortean Zoology (CFZ) are still on the track, and have been since 1992. But as if chasing unknown animals wasn't enough, we are involved in education, conservation, and good old-fashioned natural history! We already have three journals, the largest cryptozoological publishing house in the world, CFZtv, and the largest cryptozoological conference in the English-speaking world, but in January 2009 someone suggested that we started a daily online magazine! The CFZ bloggo is a collaborative effort by a coalition of members, friends, and supporters of the CFZ, and covers all the subjects with which we deal, with a smattering of music, high strangeness and surreal humour to make up the mix.
Unlike some of our competitors we are not going to try and blackmail you into donating by saying that we won't continue if you don't. That would just be vulgar, but our lives, and those of the animals which we look after, would be a damn sight easier if we receive more donations to our fighting fund. Donate via Paypal today...
Max Blake is 20 today. In the two and a half years since we met him at the first Bugfest, he has become an integral part of both the CFZ and Corinna's and my lives.
As you know, Oll has been working on the archiving project since early February 2009 and he is now working on a general mish-mash of a section known as `General Forteana`. This 25th collection once again really is a collection of completely uncategoriseable stuff, including the Holy Grail taking a bus ride, a pervert Michael Jackson impersonator, and a freakshow horror museum in Philadelphia. It doesn't get much better than this. Good stuff.
HERE
Regular readers of my bumblings will know several things about me, most notably that I was brought up in Hong Kong where I first got my love for the natural world. They also might know that I have been working with my childhood friend Richard Muirhead on a book about the mystery animals of Hong Kong in a desultory sort of way for many years now, and as part of my ongoing research for this project, which will eventually reach fruition (honest) I subscribe to an internet newsgroup called Old Hong Kong, which occasionally does what it says on the tin and sends me photographs of Hong Kong in the years between the wars, and the post-war years before it became the unbridled mouthpiece of lassaiz faire (and non-lassaiz faire) capitalism, and was still a bastion of colonial architecture, and – possibly even more important – colonial values.Even as child I was aware that dragonflies emerged into adulthood after a protracted adolescence as aquatic nymphs. Indeed, I kept the nymphs of several species in my various makeshift aquaria on my bedroom windowsill and once or twice even managed to rear them to adulthood. I had always imagined that these obscene and completely daunting swarms of dragonflies terrorising the neighbourhood for more than a day had all emerged from their nymphal state at the same time. But how could they? There were very few ponds and streams on that part of Hong Kong island, and I was very familiar with the inhabitants of most of them. Sure, there were usually one or two dragonfly larvae to be seen but nothing even approaching the amount of biomass it would have taken to produce these immense swarms, which were like something from the imagination of Clark Ashton Smith.
I decided this afternoon, once the subject had come back into my head after a gap of (terrifyingly) nearly half a century, to look up the causes of dragonfly swarms. Google prodded me towards a blog called http://dragonflywoman.wordpress.com/.
She informed me that there are two known types of swarming behaviour:
Neither of these descriptions actually tick all the boxes. Although the characteristics of the swarms I encountered as a child were far more likely ‘static swarms’, and indeed they were usually congregated with their epicentre around a grassy area (either the playing field at Peak School or the grassy playground that apparently still exists at Mount Austin). These were in enormous numbers, and despite the fact that I (alone amongst my terrified compadres) found these swarms fascinating and did my best to observe and interact with the wallages of insects, I have no memory ever of seeing any of them hunting or eating their prey. I remember this with a fair degree of certainty because on other occasions I used to watch Anaciaeschna jaspidea, the common evening hawker, or the glorious Anax immaculifrons hunting and eating its prey and I was very aware of the hunting strategies of the Odonata.
I am only too aware of the fact that dragonfly woman is writing nearly half a century after my experiences, and that times have changed for invertebrates (as they have changed for all of us) in the intervening years. For example, I remember in 1971 catching, marking and releasing nearly 400 specimens of the two cabbage whites Pieris brassicae and P. rapae simply in one day within the confines of my garden here in North Devon and the garden of Well Cottage next door. These days one is lucky to see three or four in a day. So to the photograph sent to me in a parcel of soft pornography proving that my memory is not defective, what actually were these dragonfly swarms on Victory Peak, Hong Kong island, during the years when my contemporaries back in Blighty were experiencing the Swinging Sixties?
In Canada in 1979 I witnessed the beginning of the migration of monarch butterflies Danaus plexippus and the sheer biomass of hundreds of thousands of insects was an awesome sight that has stayed with me ever since. However, I wondered then as I wonder now, exactly where this huge number of butterflies had come from. I had been in my little suburb of Toronto all summer, and had seen the unmistakable caterpillars on milkweed plants quite commonly. But the caterpillars weren’t there in their millions. I wondered then whether certain areas, and indeed certain trees, were for some reason obvious to the orange and black patterned insects, but obscure to the amateur naturalist intent on grokking this entomological experience in its fullness – designated muster points from whence the horde of butterflies could, once whatever biological trigger was necessary, fly thousands of miles down to Mexico.
I wonder whether, rather than a large swarm of migrating insects having arrived in Hong Kong just before a typhoon, the opposite could have taken place. Perhaps individual specimens of Pantala flavescens from all over the former British colony, the former Portuguese colony of Macau and quite probably large chunks of Guangdong Province, had gathered together on Victoria Peak, using it as a sort of departure lounge before – with the typhoon as its impetus – beginning an enormous migration which could take them half way across Asia.
Some months ago we received a mysterious parcel containing onions that look like the eponymous plants from a John Wyndham novel. I went out in the garden yesterday, and to my great pleasure they are growing well....
Yesterday I noted that Haunted Skies Volume 1 by ex-police officer John Hanson and his long-suffering partner Dawn Holloway is now available in the USA.
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