From cucarachas to colibrís

As I child I used to go around singing that jolly song about “La cucaracha…morning, night and even noon…” without once suspecting I was serenading a cockroach. What’s more, it wasn’t just any cockroach. My son’s Spanish teacher says it’s an allegorical song about a very adaptable Mexican President in days gone by who, even when he’d been stripped of everything, still fought on, along the lines of Monty Python’s Black Knight.

I suspect cockroaches and mosquitoes – or cucarachas and zancudos – exist all over the world, in many places humans have never managed to settle. But just because they are clever little adaptors it doesn’t mean I have to like them. We have them here in Guatemala too, but we also have other things, both naughtier and nicer.

We saw our first firefly in the garden on the night of 1 May. And, since it was international Labor Day, and a public holiday here, I assume this insect was either a strikebreaker or a mayfly in disguise. I get excited about fireflies, the way they blink their tiny lights on for a second, then off again, then on again, seeming to jump from one point to the next at the speed of light. I can’t help being amazed that these tiny things can produce their own power, without burning coal, or building hydroelectric schemes, or nuclear power plants. The local Spanish word for them is luciernágas, which strikes me as a very long word for a very short light.

Another insect, which is dangerous to people and dogs alike, is the poisonous black caterpillar (guzano) that lives on the leaves of the guava tree. Last year my son accidentally touched one on the ground while tying his shoes and the black hairs penetrated like splinters and caused him acute pain. Apparently a full dose of their poison can require hospitalization. This year we found someone who sprayed the tree with organic, non-toxic pesticide (we had to take this on faith of course, but the referral was from a reliable source). So we were hoping we wouldn’t have to deal with another crawling black mass of them this year, but unfortunately they reappeared yesterday, albeit in smaller numbers. They seem to have hatched from the tree bark. Eeeuuugh!

We may live inside an eight-foot brick wall with razor wire around the top, but a lot goes on in here in addition to insect life. Our garden is large and quite wildlife-friendly, at least for creatures that can out-run or out-fly the dogs. We have mature pine trees and fruit trees, including oranges, a rose apple, an avocado, guavas and banana palms. Even so, it’s surprising how much wildlife manages to appear in our backyard, given that we live in a large city with almost no public parks or other large green zones. However, there are quite a few street trees in our area as well as some walled estates around the city that appear to harbor small forests, and from the air you can see that the plateau on which the city is built is slashed with steep green gullies, called barrancas. The bottoms of these are smelly drains that become rivers in the wet season, but are too steep and inhospitable to use for recreation, even in the dry season. In poorer parts of the city, jerry-built shanties cluster on the edges of the barrancas and spread down into them, forming slum neighborhoods, or barrios. Even so, these gullies probably act as unplanned green corridors in this city of around four million people.

Now that we are in our second year here, we have an idea of what wildlife to expect, and when. For example, now that the first rains have come the woodpeckers are passing through. Here they are carpenter birds – carpinteros – which I think sounds much more purposeful than merely pecking wood. I’ve only heard them so far; that characteristic tap-tap-tap which echoes in the tree trunk, but other members of the household have spotted three this week. Last May I was thrilled to watch two carpinteros working on each side of a tall tree stump just outside the kitchen window. Their vivid reds and blues, speckled backs and sharp-angled heads made them look like animated cartoons. But they weren’t felling the tree like Woody Woodpecker, only eating bugs from under the bark. They stayed for half an hour and then flew away. I think we were just their lunch stop.

Any day now we should be invaded by the ants of May – hormigas de Mayo. Last year they flew in overnight, and then almost covered the ground with discarded wings and their large, inch-long bodies ambling around. They didn’t bite and were very tranquilo, but also seemingly without purpose. Our gardener and cleaning lady both told me (the latter with undisguised disgust), that some indigenous people like to fry the ants’ bodies and eat them in bread as a crunchy sandwich. Needless to say no one offered to slay one and fry it up for me, so I still haven’t tasted that particular delicacy. But the strange thing about the ants is that, after wandering around minding their own business for two or three days, they suddenly disappeared. I still don’t know whether they all went and buried themselves somehow. They had no wings and surely couldn’t walk very far, but if they died en masse why was there was no sign at all of their bodies? Did another army of smaller ants move their carcasses?

We have furry creatures too. A small gray squirrel used to frolic in the fruit trees, just out of dog-reach, and would sit there carefully holding a guava in its tiny hands, munching happily while the big dog went hysterical below. Unfortunately our squirrel wasn’t so clever with cars, and came to a sad end on the street near our house. One night we also had a short visit from a bat that I managed to rescue from the hysterical dog. I got to see the bat swoop over the high fence into the safety of the neighbors’ yard. It was only the size of a well-fed house mouse and had a lovely ginger coat, like a red fox.

But a more formidable furry friend has emerged in force recently. It is the large native rodent called a tacuasin (ta-kwa-sin). Apparently they live in burrows (I had wondered about that strange hole under the avocado tree) but they can also climb trees and love to eat any kind of fruit, including bitter oranges. I’ve now seen some at close quarters, both dead (compliments of our hunting spaniel) and alive (cornered in a tree by said spaniel). They have large and beautiful eyes, cute ears that point up and move around, and soft gray fur. But they also have distinctly rat-like teeth and tails. I’m torn between revulsion and fascination with the creatures. Our gardener tells me we have an entire nest of them in our yard. The dog has killed some of the smaller ones, about the size of sewer rats, but the parents are too big even for him. The first time I saw one of the adults at night, with its fat bottom squashed into the fork of a tree, casually looking down at me as if I was something the dog dragged in, I thought it was a cat. But then I noticed the long rat-tail. I decided not to argue with it and persuaded the dog to take a break indoors. Tacuasin can apparently bite quite viciously if cornered, so I’m glad the dog is up-to-date on his rabies vaccinations. I’m not, but I also don’t plan to have my rabies resistance put to the test by tackling one of them.

But of all the exotic little creatures, the ones I love most are the hummingbirds - colibrís. I had never seen a hummingbird before coming here, except on those BBC nature shows, in which the slightly breathless British-upper-crust voice of David Attenborough confided that the wings of the humming bird can beat up to 70 times per second…. But the breathlessness was warranted. Ours are tiny, green-tinted birds that you can mistake for butterflies at a distance, and their wings really are an unfocused blur. I can lie on the back lawn and see them busy in the treetops or, just occasionally when the dogs are sleeping, feeding from a lily in the garden bed. But the other day, while we were sitting in our living room admiring the cascade of pink, purple and white fuchsias in our enclosed courtyard, a tiny hummingbird darted down to the hanging pots and began systematically to visit each flower. It darted, hovered while it drank the nectar, darted again, hovered again, sipping from a dozen flowers while we watched in silence. Then it paused in mid-air, just for a moment, and flipped itself back into the blue sky.

That made my week.

Mariposa Pesada