hiking in the rain

It's like splashing your way along a sidewalk with your umbrella, but you do it on a forest trail. Tap dancing is not encouraged. Singing is fine, but it appears to bother the cicadas somewhat, and, as I soon found out, they have a tendancy to dive bomb anything that bothers them.

It felt good to get back up into the forests in central Miura peninsula, wading my way through exhuberant greenery. I haven't been hiking around here for so many months, it was almost a pleasure to get back into the cicada-infested woods, with flies, bees and mosquitoes zooming everywhere. I had, somehow, forgotten just how big the spiders get, and just how huge and sticky they think their webs needs to be. But then again, if they're planning to catch those 10-cm wingspan butterflied that flit around the underbrush, maybe big is better!

The rain, coming in fast and erratic downpours, gave quite a springy feel to it all. This was added to by the huge flocks of Japanese quail clucking around the forest floor. And believe me, these here quails have no trouble flying at all! Back to the biology books - part 1.

Another thing undoubtedly brought out by the rain was a sort of white, soft-looking crab. Now I've seen a few of these dead in streams, but this one was quite alive, and we must have been over a kilometer from the nearest stream at that point. Everyone knows of coconut crabs, but small forest crabs live in temperate forests? Back to the biology books -part2!

Other critters out on the move were about 5 herons, all fishing in the same stream, a big crow trying to eat a large red fresh-water crayfish that wasn't dead and was not giving in. I ended up staring at the crow till it went away, and last I saw of the crayfish was a swirl of murky water as it scuttled back under its tuft of grass. I also saw a snake who was having some difficulty with the slippery mud of the hillside, but as I was having a bit of trouble coping with the steep, slick path, I didn't stick around.

After 4 hours of tromping around, and still managing to get utterly lost, despite the numeroushikes I've done around there, I finally made my way back to the station, and to some drier clothes. The biology lessons can continue, though, as there is just as much wildlife around my room as in the forest, with huge batalions of cicadas in the trees, and this cute little gecko that came to look in the window at me.