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Mark Moffett

Natural History, Dec, 2000

Anyone can have an adventure. What nature photographers have is a whole lifetime of adventures. Just off the top of my head, I clearly remember: in Peru, backing a jeep a quarter mile down an obscenely narrow mountain road flanked by a drop-off of hundreds of feet after meeting a vehicle that was too wide for me to pass ...

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accidentally sitting on the New World's most deadly snake, the fer-de-lance, again in Peru ... crawling a hundred yards on hands and knees while tracking an ant column in Thailand, to suddenly realize I had accidentally sneaked up on a bull elephant that loomed overhead ... being among the first to visit one of Venezuela's flat-topped tepui mountains (subject of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Lost World) ... crouching out of view in the back of a taxi to get past protesters burning American flags in the southern Philippines the day Benigno Aquino was shot ... vaulting the front steps of a cheap Australian hotel to avoid the amazing hordes of leaping fleas that hung out there ... for a photo, persuading a girlfriend to provoke a huge spider into throwing its toxic hairs at her at night while we waded in a crocodile-infested swamp in Guinea ... watching an ape climb down from the trees to unbutton another girlfriend's dress in Malaysia (she had made the mistake of wearing "orangutan orange") ... using tribal blowguns for self-defense against smugglers in Colombia ... being driven out of a tree by a spectacled bear, again in Colombia ... searching a Montana cave for ice-loving beetles on Christmas Day ... hunting the world's largest tarantula for dinner with a shaman in the Orinoco basin ... tagging behind two Texan spelunkers to stumble upon an Aztec burial chamber in a cave inhabited by giant spiders ... having my helicopter dive down into the trees of a rainforest interior to avoid a severe storm in Brazil ... being caught in stampedes of both Asian and African elephants in the same week ... attempting to concentrate on insects at a topless beach resort, the only place my colleague and I could find to stay for a night in Mauritius ... having a tent washed from around me by a nocturnal flash flood in Chile ... being surprised by a tiger in Nepal that leaped out of the forest in front of us to kill a spotted deer ... realizing a companion had collapsed from heat exposure as the temperature hit 132 [degrees] F in Paraguay ... in Namibia, learning it is right to be suspicious when a !Kung bushman says something is within "walking distance" ... discovering two new ant species while on a tour of a Balinese temple ... having a tethered horse killed and eaten by lions in Kenya ... watching the cook flay live snakes at a restaurant in Vietnam ... eating scorpions in China, rats in Africa, and beetle larvae on five continents ... arguing with Iranian militia at 3:00 A.M. while chasing scorpions near the Afghan border ... descending with a flashlight into tombs in Egypt's Valley of the Kings to photograph hieroglyphs ... sitting in Darwin's writing chair to study his beetle collection at his house in Downe, England ... remaining motionless for a painful seven-hour stretch, arms furry with mosquitoes, hardly daring to breathe while waiting for a caterpillar to stalk an aphid in a swamp in Japan ... seeing a centipede in Trinidad that was so huge it yanked stones out of the roadbed during its death throes after our jeep ran over it ... having my safety harness snap open while climbing a hundred feet up a rope in a tree to photograph biologist (and doctoral mentor) Edward O. Wilson in Panama ... tracking down the world's largest dung beetle in South Africa, largest frog in Cameroon, and largest cricket in New Zealand ... living in India for six months on a $100 traveler's check ... and, along with my teammates, being the first to ascend the world's loftiest tree, a California redwood 365 feet tall ... and managing somehow to never be sick along the way and to keep my total lifetime excess baggage expenses below $500.... But I've rambled on so long there's probably no room left for any of my pictures.

Mark Moffett

Natural History, Dec, 2000

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