The Attack of the Killer Rhododendrons (21 page)

In years gone by, each hole had to be uncapped and inspected manually. Now a wonderful device is used to speed things up. A piece of paper is inserted between two small wooden slats. Embedded in the paper is a thin metal conducting strip that completes a circuit to a transmitter. If termites find their way into the hole, they chew into the wood along the seam between the slats. In doing so, they nibble through the paper and conducting strip and break the circuit. Inspectors come by with hand-held devices that look like
metal detectors used to find coins at the beach. When waved over the cap of a hole with an intact circuit, the device makes the sound
too-too-tee-tee-tee.
But if termites have invaded and broken the circuit, the detector makes the sound
too-too-tee-tee-tee.

“The Big Easy” may be New Orleans’ most frequently used nickname, but I prefer the less common moniker “The City That Care Forgot.” It seems to encapsulate the aura that New Orleans residents emanate. Life unfolds, and it is pretty damned special if you just allow it to be. There will surely be a time when citizens of New Orleans will be able to claim that they have thrown off the cloak of Katrina. However, shortly after Rob and I flew home, word came down the pipe that Formosan termites may have been far more destructive than anyone had realized. Professor Gregg Henderson of Louisiana State University published a paper in the journal
American Entomologist,
discussing the possibility that the subterranean termite may have subverted New Orleans’ flood defences by weakening expansion joints in concrete floodwalls and excavating soil levees. Katrina was bad. Introduced Formosan termites may have made it worse.

REASON NUMBER NINE FOR INTRODUCING A FOREIGN SPECIES: ACTUALLY, IT HAPPENED SUCH A LONG TIME AGO, I DON’T REMEMBER.

M
ONKEYS ARE LIKELY SO APPEALING
because they remind us of us. Looking into the face of a non-human primate is to see a quieter, simpler reflection of ourselves. They have big eyes set in big heads, and gentle and dextrous fingers to gather food and tend their infants. In our closest relatives there is a reminder that we are, after all, just reasonably sophisticated monkeys.

The closer the resemblance of a monkey to humans, the greater its appeal, and perhaps this is why the Barbary macaques have so many fans in Gibraltar. Unlike most monkeys, they have no tails. They move slowly, and when they sit, they do so with rounded shoulders. The skin around their eyes and mouth is nearly hairless, and their inquiring eyes are olive or hazel.

As macaques go, the Barbary is a large and heavily built creature, but at eleven kilograms for an average adult male and slightly less for a female, they have roughly the proportions of a fifteen-month-old infant. Relative to the body, the head is large and set
on a short neck, just as it is on a child. The individual variation in faces is considerable. The macaques’ hair is thick and shaggy in the most delightful combination of grey, brown, and blond; it is the sort of colouration that stymies hairdressers. The incisors are a bit pointy, but the remainder of the teeth are not particularly scary. All around, they are rather pleasant-looking creatures, and so iconic as to be Gibraltar’s national animal and appear on the country’s currency. But they didn’t get there by themselves.

Landing in Gibraltar is a surreal experience, in part because it is hard to believe that so many flights are needed each day to service a population so small, and partly because of the country’s peculiar geography. Two kilometres wide and six kilometres long, Gibraltar is shaped like a really big deerstalker cap with its earflaps laid flat. One flap hangs onto Spain, and the rest of the hat juts out into the Mediterranean Sea. As our plane approached Gibraltar’s airport at the north end, I was seated on the port side. On our final approach, with the plane just a few hundred metres above the waves, because of our approach angle all I could see was sea, and I got the unnerving impression that we were going to find out how many of us had been paying attention during the pre-flight safety demonstration. Then, with a small path correction, all I could see was the rapidly approaching peak of the cap, and it looked certain that we were going to crash into the cliff. We didn’t. Even so, I am glad not to be a pilot on the route to Gibraltar. Pulling up short would mean a swim in the Mediterranean. Running long would mean pitching into the Atlantic. Technically, it would be the Alborán Sea or the Bay of Gibraltar, but you get the idea.

Despite the presence of army personnel with bullet-proof vests and machine guns at the airport, customs was a quick and pleasant experience. Indeed, Gibraltar is probably the only place in the world with the word “Welcome” on its passport stamp, although I was a little confused by a huge sign that proclaimed THANK YOU FOR VISITING GIBRALTAR—BLAND TRAVEL. Hopefully this was not a comment on the state of tourism opportunities.

I
T IS CLEAR
from archaeological excavations that Gibraltar has been occupied by people since people were still Neanderthals. Much later, the Phoenicians and Greeks had a go at the region. The Moors set up shop in 711 CE and stayed until the Spanish came barging in around 1390. Twenty-five years on, the Moors took Gibraltar back, until the Spanish regained it in 1492. Then the British took control under the Treaty of Utrecht, and despite a four-year siege in the late-eighteenth century have held power ever since. Gibraltar is now a Crown colony working under its own constitution but leaving such matters as foreign affairs and defence to Great Britain. Today, with nearly 30,000 people crammed into just 6.5 square kilometres, Gibraltar is one of the most densely populated places on Earth. Thirty-three times more packed than China, fourteen times more crammed than Japan, more densely jammed than even the Vatican City and Taiwan, Gibraltar gets nudged out only by Hong Kong, Singapore, Monaco, and Macau.

And yet the population continues to grow, and I found the region awash in high-rise apartments under construction. A cab driver told me that the cost of new units was so high that those already living in Gibraltar had no hope of ever buying one.

I asked around, hoping to find out what drew more and more people to Gibraltar. I was told that new arrivals were mainly British expatriates who fell into one of two categories. The first group were pensioners who decided they had lived through one too many cold and dreary winters in Britain and wanted to live somewhere exactly like home, only warmer. The second group were wealthy citizens who had grown tired of paying taxes and moved to Gibraltar for tax relief. Some of these apparently lived in Gibraltar for as little as two weeks each year to get the benefits of the tax haven. I was also told that you can drink in Gibraltar at any age, although it is illegal to provide alcohol to anyone under the age of sixteen. On Main Street, one shop window after another offered a litre of hard alcohol for less that £10, although that didn’t seem to me to be enough incentive to emigrate. Cigarettes are free, or so close as to make no difference, and McDonald’s appears to have discovered
a region so isolated that even anti-smoking laws for restaurants haven’t found it.

This didn’t really seem like my kind of place. There were too many people and not enough serenity. There wasn’t a vacant parking spot in sight, and many residents had taken to tootling around on scooters they could park on the sidewalk. These vehicles help make Gibraltar ridiculously noisy, with the sound of their
rin-tin-tin
engines reverberating off concrete offices, apartment blocks, and hotels. The air is filled with exhaust fumes, and the view of Gibraltar Bay from the promenade is completely obscured by an unbroken queue of shipyards, warehouses, docks, and high-rises.

I was counting on finding a bit of tranquility as I searched the slopes of the Rock for Barbary apes. I was also scheduled to make a presentation on Labrador Ducks to the Gibraltar Ornithological & Natural History Society (GONHS). I met my hosts at the administrative offices of the Botanical Gardens.

If Gibraltar is a sea of noise, then the Botanical Gardens are a small harbour of tranquility. I joined John Cortez and Charlie Perez of the GONHS for tea, which they have every day after work while solving all of Gibraltar’s problems. These include such puzzlers as where to put all of the new residents, given that every square metre of Gibraltar is already spoken for.

As the time for my lecture approached, it became clear that I was going to speak to a rather small audience. Without being too specific, it was fewer than nine. Admittedly, I was up against some pretty stiff competition that night. According to the
Gibraltar Chronicle,
citizens had a choice of Bingo Night at the South District Senior Citizens Club, Quiz Night at the Cannon Bar, or a meeting of the Gibraltar Psychological Support Group. But the gathering was enthusiastic and laughed at appropriate times. After my presentation, I walked to a pub for a pint. Despite what the pump collar said, I wouldn’t have guessed that it was Bass Ale if I had been given fifteen guesses. I got about half of it down while reflecting on what I knew about the wildlife of Gibraltar.

Despite being a minuscule place, Gibraltar has an amazing
collection of fauna and flora. A wide assortment of plants call the territory home, including Gibraltar thyme, Gibraltar restharrow, Gibraltar candytuft (the national flower), Gibraltar saxifrage, and Gibraltar sea lavender. Not all of Gibraltar’s plants and animals are thriving. Neither Schreiber’s bat nor the soprano pipistrelle are faring particularly well despite fifty kilometres of limestone caves to roost in. A small mollusc,
Acicula norrisi,
is found only in Gibraltar, and although it has never been seen alive, collections of fresh shells from under rocks indicate that it is hiding somewhere. The Gibraltar campion, a cute little perennial with pink flowers and a heady fragrance found on Gibraltar and nowhere else on Earth, was thought to be extinct until a few specimens were discovered in 1994.

For much of the threatened wildlife, the challenge comes down to nasty introduced plants and animals. More than sixty species of exotic flowering plants have become established, and some are considered to be a serious problem, running roughshod over native plants. These invaders include the rooikrans (an acacia from Australia), the stinking sumac (China), the Hottentot fig (Africa), and the prickly pear cactus (Mexico). Black rats have been introduced from India, and goats from Central Asia. Feral cats, found everywhere in Gibraltar and aided by well-intentioned but misguided persons who feed them, are a real pest for young Barbary Partridge and European rabbits.

M
ACAQUES OF ONE SORT OR ANOTHER
have been around for about 7 million years. Some 5 million years ago, the ancestral macaque emerged from Africa and went wandering across the Middle East, Europe, and Asia, diversifying as it went. Today, the group has between twenty-two and twenty-five species (depending on who is counting), all in the genus
Macaca.
They all reside in Asia, except for the Barbary macaque. During the last glacial period, which finished about 10,000 years ago, Barbary macaques ended their residence in Europe and were thereafter found only in northern Africa.

So how did Barbary macaques find their way back to Gibraltar?
There are a number of fanciful explanations, including the possibility of a tunnel known only to the macaques, stretching from Ceuta on the north shore of Africa, thirteen kilometres under the Straits of Gibraltar, emerging on the north side at the series of caverns known as St. Michael’s Caves. A little less fanciful is the notion that the macaques were introduced to Europe in the Carthaginian and Roman eras. Many feel that macaques were introduced to Gibraltar by Moors in the eighth century. It is all a bit hazy, and the first written reference to macaques in Spain dates back only as far as 1704. By the time macaques were first described in Gibraltar in 1782, they were already well established.

Well established, perhaps, but not necessarily secure. In the early 1900s, a few macaques were brought to Gibraltar from northern Africa to help prop up a flagging population. Numbers continued to decline, and by the end of the 1930s everyone started to get a little skittish. There is a saying that as long as Barbary apes persist in Gibraltar, so too will the British. When the Gibraltar population of macaques plummeted during WWII, Winston Churchill took a personal interest, directing the British Consulate in Morocco to introduce more. At the end of hostilities, the macaque population in Gibraltar starting doing a little better, and it soon became necessary to control their numbers by shooting some and exporting others to zoos. Until 1980, the population was actively limited to about thirty-five animals. Given the small population size, it probably isn’t surprising that the group is starting to show the consequences of inbreeding. Today there are between 200 and 250 macaques in Gibraltar living in six groups, all found in the ninety-seven hectare Upper Rock Nature Reserve.

E
STIMATES OF THE NUMBER OF VISITORS
to Gibraltar each year fall between 4 million and 6 million. Most of them step out of their cars or off their cruise ship, take a quick stroll down Main Street, and then bugger off. However, nearly 800,000 tourists visit the Upper Rock per year, most of them drawn by the apes. Guidebooks warned me that every spot with macaques is crowded with visitors,
but I hoped to miss all of that by rising early. When I turned over my room key at six thirty in the morning, the front-desk attendant looked as though she had never seen a hotel guest at that hour. The skies were still dark, but I wanted to be on the hillside before any tourists got there. I tucked in behind the Garrison Library, climbed the Referendum Stairs, and ascended a combination of steps and pathways. The hillside was alive with wildflowers.

The Apes’ Den is about halfway to the top of the rock, under the cable car line, and despite the name I was a little surprised when I turned a corner and was confronted by a group of six adult macaques, an immature male, and a couple of teeny troupe members. After glancing at me and presumably assessing the likelihood of getting breakfast, most of them returned to looking up at the cable, as though willing it to start moving. I gather their first meal of the day is brought to them by someone on the first cable car run. I pressed on, keen to see the larger group of apes at the top.