Picture this if you dare. I’m less than halfway through a morning of traipsing through the rainforest collecting dung beetle traps when the sudden urge to empty my bowels hits.
To many a tropical ecologist this is not a problem. Simply drop your sweaty trousers, pick a suitably unprickly leaf (better to do the old back-of-the-hand test rub before committing sphincterally), squat and crap while the gibbons howl above.
But to us dung beetle trapping researchers–we strange folk whose scientific output correlates so tightly with both our fibrous input and our capacity to direct our buttocks towards a spare Tupperware whenever the need to defecate arises–shitting in the forest just seems like such a waste.
But I was desperate. So it was with tangible self-loathing that I proceeded to fertilise the roots of a dipterocarp tree–I believe it was a Parashorea malaanonan.
Anyway, fast forward several minutes, I’m walking through the forest, and I start to feel that something isn’t quite right. In fact, it’s not quite right in exactly the place one wouldn’t want it to be not quite right. And if that last sentence sounds like a double negative, then let me state it in no uncertain terms.
I glanced down my boxers once. I did so again. I was double positive. There was a leech on my willy.
What one should do upon making such an unfortunate discovery is not well documented. I went through what I assume to be the best available advice: three or four seconds of absolute horror, a deep breath and then a hand-plunge down into my nether regions.
But this slippery bastard (here, I’m referring of course to the Common ground leech, Haemadipsa zeylanica) just would not prise free. So, at this point, I change tact. I pull my trousers and boxers past my knees so as to better see my nemesis and pray to the hornbills above that my research assistant does not choose this, of all moments, to turn back and ask why I’m lagging behind.
With the benefit of close scrutiny, I succeed in dislodging my unwanted passenger. I catch up with my research assistant and tell them what has just happened.
And that, I like to imagined is how the sentence “I had a sodding leech on my todger” was introduced to Borneo.
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