STORY BOOK

Some years ago, I was visiting my good entomologist friend, Michel Ferrand, a well trained insects hunter, then teacher in a French Guyana village near Maripasoula.
Every day we went and set different traps in one of the very last world primary forests, next to Wakapou. Our main purpose was to catch some coprophagous insects.
The year before, during a mission on Celebes Islands, I was trecking under the canopy with a drove of babiroussas, so I had at hand fresh excrements to feed my traps.
But, in Guyana, my friend Michel had to organise a daily collect of fecal matter among the surrounding indian villages.  The "mother country" meteorologists of the neighbouring weather plant had also volunteered to defecate in little cans.
Thay way we got enough bait for our traps.

As each morning, the two of us on Michel moto, we were speeding on the wide laterite track. On the back seat, with a heavy bag full of little cans, I suddenly doze off because I was nearly worn out by an attack of "dengue" fever. As I was falling backwards, my two boots hit Michel under the armpits and the moto reared.
After a splendid wheeling, "Grand Prix" style, we rolled in the drain, men, bags and moto mixed in a great disorder. For we don't happen to be particularly coprophagous we both keep an acute remembrance of this event.

Marc Soula

See more on the French pages

I invite the entomologists and the other visitors to send to me some "spicy" stories which I will do publish in this rubric.