The bull didn’t lower its horns or scuff its front leg in the soil, like they always seem to in movies. One second it was looking in my direction. The next it was charging full-tilt straight at me.
This field season in Colombia is the first that I’ve worked outside of forest, or indeed in what in many ways can be considered forests’ antithesis: farmland. I’ve had a few mildly close run-ins with forest elephants in the past. But I’ve never felt especially unsafe or threatened by an animal.
So, when this buffalo-sized bastard came hurtling towards me looking like it wanted to skewer me in two, I can shamelessly say that I almost cacked myself.
This is one of the reasons I prefer forests to farmlands. For sure, there are other more commonly held reasons. Yes, forests do tend to support way more–and way cooler–wildlife.Yes, they are much better at sucking up carbon, and I’m all for that. And yes,they are generally much more pleasant an environment to work in, providing a bit of shade against the baking sun.
But on a purely philosophical note, at least if you twist your ankle in middle of a jungle,nearly get trampled by a forest elephant or even get bitten by a canopy snake,you have an interesting story to tell at the end of it.
By contrast,if you come fairly close to getting gored by a bull in the middle of flat and really quite spacious farm, people just think you’re a plonker (maybe I am)that was probably antagonising it (I definitely wasn’t) or that at least isn’t especially agile (“C’mon man, matadors have been dodging those things for literally centuries”).
And while we’re on the subject of forests being far superior to farmlands, some exciting news. For a week now, we’ve been sampling in the cloud forests of El Taladro in the Eastern Cordillera , right on the doorstep of the largest congregation of Taoist Monks in Latin America.
Speccy bears are around. We can see it in the claw marks left on tree trunks and in the uprooted and torn open bromeliads that make up one of the mammal’s favourite foods.
A sightings still eludes us. But just yesterday we got the next best thing. A faint recording of a nearby spectacled bear. Just a snippet. But a definite growl of the animal can be heard in the background of one of the bird song recordings made at our point counts.
So, to conclude, forests trump farmlands. Hands down, all day long and it’s not even a close comparison. It’s almost as if we should be letting farmlands revert back to forest, ey?
***The cover photo is a sun bear in Borneo–not a spectacled bear, which I unfortunately don’t have a photo of… yet.
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