THOSE OF YOU INTERESTED IN SOUTH AMERICAN HERPS WILL BE FASCINATED BY THIS

Dear colleagues,

We have just completed a new page with recordings and pictures of frogs from the new Sound Guide of the frogs and toads of southern Brazil and Uruguay (scientific editors: Axel Kwet and Rafael Marquez). A 2 CD-audio including recordings of 109 species of frogs and toads from Southern Brazil and Uruguay including chorus and soundscapes. With a 56 page book in English, Portuguese and Spanish with pictures and distribution maps of the recorded species.

If you want to check it out, follow the link in the front page of:

http://www.fonozoo.com/

Any report of glitches, comments, and/or suggestions for improvement are welcome.

Warm regards from Axel Kwet and Rafael Marquez

Dr. Rafael Marquez
Fonoteca Zoológica
Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales (CSIC)
José Gutierrez Abascal 2
28006 Madrid
Spain

MORE ON ANDRE ISSI

If one good thing has come out of the ongoing saga of the Peruvian giant snake, it is that we have made friends with Andre Issi and if it had not been for all this stuff about Mike and Greg Warner's expedition to Peru, then none of this would ever have happened.

One of Andre's pictures was taken out of context by a Northern Irish newspaper which implied that it was the 40m snake claimed by ther Warners. It was of course no such thing and the forces of righteousness, led by Dr Dan, said as much. Unfortunately we all jumped to the conclusion that Andre was the bloke claiming that the snake in the pictures, which, as you can see, is dead (or nearly so) and floating in the water, was the one claimed to be 40m. As Andre writes:

"I was traveling alone by kayak from Brasília to Santa Catarina (state of Brazil) in a long journey along 6000 km crossing Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay and Argentina.

It was so hard and I almost die three times. About a city Guaira (frontier between Brasil and Paraguay) I saw this anaconda floating in the river. I take a lot of pictures and filmed. It has about six meters and his head is under the water arrested in the trees. I had never seen anaconda before and I became very nervous, at the last moment thinking it was alive.

My kayak has 5,20 m and the anaconda has about six meters. Only it. I´ll send you another photo beside the anaconda that i take like a joke because it seems like reference to see the real tale of the snake."

As one can see from the pictures, Andre is clearly an OK dude, who is more than averagely intrepid and is possessed of a silly sense of humour; attributes that would make him an ideal member of the CFZ. Dan writes:

"Convey my apologies to Mr Issi (...) I'll buy him all the beer he fancies; he appears to have achieved a rare feat indeed: he photographed a wild anaconda in its natural habitat without the aid of a team of snake-handlers and he managed to find quite a big one at that. Admittedly, it was dead at the time, which takes a bit of the shine off the achievement but not very much shine;
6m anacondas surely don't die very often and photographing one in the couple of days between death and complete decomposition is quite an achievement (especially seeing as us lot in an overcrowded island have yet to get our hands on even one of the supposedly ubiquitous big cats
that are supposed to be here).

So, apologies to Andre from me and if he's coming to Woolsery at any time, please pre-warn both myself and the landlord of the local pub.... "

And this is the way that disagreements within the Fortean and cryptozoological communities should be managed: like gentlemen, with a handshake and a beer afterwards, and not with endless flame wars and backbiting. There are certain other people within the Crypto community who really should take note of this.

But off my soapbox - over to Andre with a few more pictures....

How can I describe eight months about a journey in one page? I can´t send more images while was traveling by the simple fact was in the forest or in the middle of a poor small cities where a computer was difficult access or days and days without cities. I beginning it in the center of south america and ends it in the south coast of Brasil after the kayak schok in my head while I was returning to the coast between big waves of the Atlantic Ocean, like you can see in the photo with a life guard behind me. I almost was arrested in Uruguay because I was alone without a life boat. I must to do a trailer and buy an old bike to cross Uruguay by land 650 km. In Brasil I return to water and go to the north.I never receive any money cause this or try to receive. I only do my travels by adventure.



CAPTIONS:

(Above left) Tracks of Jaguars where he slept for the night

(Left) "Impossible is only a word. I do it"

(Below Left) Off the Coat of San Catarina

(Bottom) Crossing Uruguay by Bicycle

Dude, it is a pleasure to know you and I hope you remain part of the CFZ family for many years to come!

RICHARD FREEMAN: Giant snakes and goblins in Ecuador

Whilst waiting for the train from Exeter to Barnstaple yesterday I happened to sit down next to an exceptionally beautiful girl. I struck up a conversation with her, and it turned out that she was from Ecuador. Her name was Sandenily and she was in England for ten months. Back home she taught English and she had come over here to brush up. The first month she had spent in Brighton. For the next nine months she was going to be working in the restaurant of the Stag Hunters Inn http://www.staghunters.com/

She asked if I had ever been to South America and I told her of my hunt for the giant anaconda in Guyana. Sandenily told me hat she had not seen much wildlife outside of zoos, having never ventured into the deep jungle. However she said that two years ago a man had escaped from a jungle prison and gone on the run. He had apparently been killed and eaten by an anaconda. His carcass was found after the animal had vomited him back up!

She told me of other strange creatures she had heard of. One was a creature that looked like bigfoot but was much smaller. These ape like beasts were said to kidnap members of the opposite sex. Stories like these are widespread in South America. Indeed wherever there are sightings of relic hominids or mystery apes there are usually tales of them kidnapping and/or breeding with humans.

Another being she mentioned was he duende. Once again stories of these creatures are found in many neo-tropical countries. The duende is supposed to be a goblin, usually depicted in a pointed hat. Sandenily, who was once a journalist had to interview a girl in hospital who claimed to have been raped by a duende. The girl said I had red eyes and wore a tall, pointed hat. It’s hands and skin felt hard. She could no bring herself to describe the face. Sandenily thought she was telling the truth, as she had no reason to lie and seemed traumatized.

Sandenily said her cousin claimed to have been visited by such a creature for a number of nights. It had large dark eyes and a pointed hat. The girl had dark hair, body hair and pale skin, all things that the duende finds attractive. The duende smelled of human excrement. Her mother though the girl was possessed and took her to a shaman. The shaman told her that the only way to stop he duende coming was to eat her own excrement. That nigh the girl did as she was advised and he goblin never returned.

Finally Sandenily’s brother claimed to have seen a duende whilst at military school. He described I as short, with a tall hat and feet pointing backwards. That final detail is repeated right over Latin America and, oddly, is also attributed to he Islamic djinn.

The descriptions of the duende recall not only European goblins but also the Argentinean ‘gnome’ allegedly filmed a while ago. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81OwP7RJ3BI

ALAN FRISWELL: Scary Spider Stories #2

THE SECRET SUPER SPIDER OF THE SUNDAY PAPERS

Forteans have always had a soft spot in their hearts for tabloid newspapers and their Sunday counterparts. These seemingly disrespectable venues for lurid, sensationalist low-brow fodder have often--paradoxically perhaps, and even inadvertently--provided a platform for stories and news items that otherwise would be ignored and abandoned by the ‘classier’ publications who would consider such material beneath them.

Where else could we be afforded the indispensable intelligence that a UFO LANDS IN SUFFOLK, AND THAT’S OFFICIAL, or that FREDDIE STARR ATE MY HAMSTER, or that the wind-turbine in Lincolnshire was actually laid low by a low-flying mothership from Zeta Reticuli, or wherever…

But on occasion, the lower echelons of Fleet Street print something worthwhile, and even educational. The problem, however, is that I can find nobody--and I mean nobody--who has the slightest recollection of the news story that I am about to relate. Richard F has already posted
much of this information on the CFZ forum, but as the blog site is so popular, I am hoping that somebody out there might also remember this item.

In the 1970’s, my dad would regularly buy a Sunday newspaper. I can’t remember for certain, but I’m pretty sure that it was The News Of The World. On this particular Sunday, my dad had been reading all about the “SEX-CHANGE BISHOP IN PERVY PORNO PARADISE“, when he suddenly handed it to me and said: “How about that then!” I looked at the page that he indicated, and there was a reasonably long story about a group of explorers that had launched an expedition into some previously unknown jungle region. I can’t be 100% sure, but I think it was South America.

They had travelled about a mile into dense, almost inaccessible rainforest, having to literally chop their way through the undergrowth, when one of their number suffered some serious stomach illness--I think it was appendicitis but again, I’m not sure--and the expedition had to
be abandoned. They brought the chap out and got him into hospital, reporting that during their short time in the jungle they had seen previously unclassified creatures such as a species of frog that rolled downhill in order to evade predators, and a gigantic spider. I don’t actually remember if the spider attacked them, but they had killed it-- dismembered it in fact--with a machete.

Fortunately, they had taken pictures of the spider’s corpse which, although in pieces, had been ‘reassembled’ for the photo to give some approximation of it’s original form. They had placed a matchbox next to the remains to give a sense of scale, and the spider’s legs must have been at least a foot long, giving the living creature a leg span of well over two feet with the abdomen and cephalothorax in between.

I have attempted to recreate the image as well as I can with Photoshop. It’s not exact--how can it be--but I think that it’s pretty close.

So does anyone out there remember this? Did I actually see it? Or was it the bilious imaginings of a pre-teen who’d seen King Kong once too often? But seriously, it must be in a archive somewhere, or surely someone else has some record of the expedition, so now it’s over to
you…