The gorillas were not the animals we had come to Zaïre to look for. It is very hard, however, to come all the… — Douglas Adams
The gorillas were not the animals we had come to Zaïre to look for. It is very hard, however, to come all the way to Zaïre and not go and see them. I was going to say that this is because they are our closest living relatives, but I’m not sure that that’s an appropriate reason. Generally, in my experience, when you visit a country in which you have any relatives living there’s a tendency to want to lie low and hope they don’t find out you’re in town. At least with the gorillas, you know that there’s no danger of having to go out to dinner with them and catch up on several million years of family history, so you can visit them with impunity.
p. 62Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
More from this book
Until 1987 Fiordland was the home of one of the strangest, most unearthly sounds in the world. For thousands of years, in the right season, the sound could be heard after nightfall throughout these wild peaks and valleys.
It was like a heartbeat: a deep, powerful throb that echoed through the dark ravines. It was so deep that some people will tell you that they felt it stirring in their gut before they could discern the actual sound, a sort of wump, a heavy wobble of air. Most people have never heard it at all, or ever will again. It was the sound of the kakapo, the old night parrot of New Zealand, sitting high on a rocky promontory and calling for a mate.
p. 111
[On the kakapo’s tendency to freeze in confusion when faced with a predator:] It’s frustrating to think of the difference that language would make. The millennia crawl by pretty bloody slowly while natural selection sifts its way through generation after generation, favouring the odd aberrant kakapo, which is a little twitchier than its contemporaries, till the species as a whole finally gets the idea. It would all be cut short in a moment if one of them could say, “When you see one of those things with whiskers and little bitey teeth, run like hell.” On the other hand, human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.
p. 116
I have a well-deserved reputation for being something of a gadget freak, and am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that it would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand.
p. 38
