Into the Night: Tales of Nocturnal Wildlife Expeditions

8. Volcanoes and Fruit Bats

167 eIght volcanoes and Fruit Bats Fear and Loafing on Montserrat Scott C. Pedersen The volcano had been grumbling for several hours, rolling great glowing boulders down the flanks of its steep slopes in my general direction. It was July 1997 and I was nearing the end of a very long night after a very long day. I tried not to take any of this too personally as the volcano was nearly two miles away. Still I was mesmerized. Standing there in the dark, engulfed by a near-deafening chorus of tree frogs, watching gigantic embers crashing down the mountainside, showers of sparks and debris marking each collision—I had a front-row seat at a private and very surreal fireworks display. My abject fascination with these sights and sounds was quite rudely interrupted by a great searing pain radiating up my arm from my hand. I had been careless, distracted from the task at hand: removing a muscular pig-nosed bat from one of my mist nets. The young male bat had opted to impress this fact upon me by latching its teeth into the flesh of my thumb. Before I go on, let me provide some background for the events that led up to this rather painful vignette. The old tattered field notes DOI:10.5876/9781607322702:c08 Scott C. Pedersen 168 covering my research on the bats of Montserrat, British West Indies, are a good place to start. The first couple of pages present a remarkable multilayered tapestry, replete with coffee-cup rings; subsequent pages are partially laminated together by what appear to be sweat rings left behind by beer bottles (undoubtedly Carib lager—the Beer of the Caribbean). Within the first few pages, I find a half dozen mosquito carcasses with blood and guts splayed around their mummified remains in bleak testament to their last moments and their last meal . . . me, if memory serves. Several business cards, tax stamps, expired driver ’s licenses, and peeled-off beer labels are stapled haphazardly along the page margins—the staples exhibiting a crusty patina of rust here and there. Today, my students tease me that my field notes resemble papier-mâché sculptures decorated with my unintelligible ink-blotchy Sanskrit. But my field notes are historical artifacts, testimony to my experiences on Montserrat. 8.1. Author’s field notes volcanoes and Fruit Bats 169 A Night on a Bench I made the first entry in my Montserrat field notes on August 22, 1993, the echoes of my dissertation defense still throbbing in my head like a mid-range hangover. Here I was, stuck between delayed flights on the island of Antigua, in the airport bar, scribbling away at my notes on three-hole 8.5 × 6.5-inch 100 percent cotton-rag paper with my trusty refillable Koh-I-Nor Rapidograph ink pen, trying very hard to make some sense of the previous couple of days. I was heading to the neighboring island of Montserrat to answer a cryptic two-line, sixteenword job posting I had seen in Science—something about needing a gross anatomist in Montserrat, British West Indies. A fax number was included. I remember pieces of the subsequent phone interview with the academic dean of the medical school: “Do you have a pulse and a current U.S. passport? You’re hired. Be here in three weeks.” Click. I wasn’t overly impressed, but hey, I was soon to be solvent! And, for the first time, independent. I was no longer a student under the direction of a professor: the decisions—and the mistakes—would all be mine. Montserrat? Hell—I needed a powerful magnifying glass to find this flyspeck in my atlas of the world. Chris Columbus never even bothered to set foot on this rugged volcanic island in 1493, although he dubbed it Montserrat after mountains of the same name near a monastery back in Spain. The small (one hundred square kilometers) and extraordinarily beautiful island is located in the northern Lesser Antilles about 450 kilometers southeast of Puerto Rico. The British eventually colonized Montserrat in 1632 and had some luck growing sugarcane, cotton, and limes there. These were the limes that kept the British Navy from getting scurvy during long voyages, in turn giving these sailors their nickname—Limeys. Montserrat remains one of the very last British Crown colonies still in existence. But here I was at the airport bar a...