A FOOL FOR TARSIERS - Once ridiculed for his quest to save the Philippines' tiniest primates, Carlito Pizarras is now viewed as a national treasure

International Wildlife, May-June, 2000 by Floyd Whaley

CARLITO "LITO" PIZARRAS walks silently along a jungle trail on the island of Bohol in the central Philippines. Clad in camouflage, he listens closely for his prey. A high-pitched tone stops him suddenly and he snatches a chirping cricket from the ground. "That's one," says Pizarras, a diminutive 45-year-old with dark eyes and a quick grin.

During the next two hours, he will catch nearly 50 other insects, as well as lizards and small frogs. The creatures are destined for his backyard, where they will be fed to tiny animals with huge eyes and suction-cuplike toes and fingers. These alien-looking critters, primates known as tarsiers, are normally fearful of people, but they cling like babies to Pizarras as he feeds them and coos reassuringly in their ears.

Pizarras started keeping tarsiers more than 30 years ago for his taxidermist father to stuff and sell. But his increasing fascination with the strange animals turned him into an observer and protector of the species. His nightly forays into the woods for bugs and other efforts on behalf of the tarsiers initially provoked ridicule from neighbors in this remote area. But in the past few years, researchers with advanced degrees (Pizar-ras only completed high school) have been coming to his village, seeking to know more about the curious and fast- disappearing animals. And recently a foundation for protecting the tarsiers has sprung up around him, bringing global attention to what was formerly a one-man cause.

When Pizarras was growing up in the remote town of Corella, Bohol, the tarsiers were so abundant they could be picked up from the trees around the village at night. Of all the animals his father stuffed and sold to tourists-wild cats, monitor lizards and snakes-the strange, monkeylike tarsiers were the most popular. Buyers told him it was as if God had created a perfect children's toy.

By the age of 12, Pizarras decided to try to keep a pet tarsier in a cage at his house. But there was little information about the animals in the town library and, despite the fact that they were everywhere, nobody seemed to know about them. The only book that mentioned tarsiers said they ate charcoal. After a week on a diet of charcoal and water, his first pet died. After losing two more to the charcoal diet, Pizarras decided to find out for himself what tarsiers ate. He hiked into the nearby mountains in his thin rubber slippers, shorts and T- shirt to spend nights with the nocturnal creatures.

After weeks of patient observation, Pizarras finally saw a tarsier in the forest that looked like it might be eating charcoal, as the book suggested. The creature was digging its tiny hands into a burnt log, and its face was covered in black soot. But Pizarras could see that the tarsier was not feeding on the burnt wood; it was actually searching for insects buried inside the log. By the time he was 15, Pizarras was keeping a group of tarsiers alive in captivity on a diet of crickets. He later discovered that they eat a variety of insects and small creatures.

By the time Pizarras was in his 20s, he was keenly aware that tarsiers were no longer abundant. Rampant trapping and slash-and-burn farming of their habitat had driven them deep into the forest. The animals that he loved were disappearing. Realizing that it was trappers like himself who were contributing to their decline, the young man made a decision.

"I don't want to kill the tarsiers anymore," he told his father. With that, Carlito Pizarras became a fledgling wildlife conservationist in a place where no one had even heard of the phrase.

The younger Pizarras, by then a part-time farmer and shopkeeper, couldn't stop his neighbors from trapping the tarsiers. It wasn't even against the law. But when people came to the little store he ran in front of his house, he tried to bluff them by concocting wildlife protection laws before they existed.

"That's five years in jail and a fine," he said, knowing he wasn't telling the truth, when someone mentioned trapping a tarsier. His neighbors were skeptical. The town's tiny police force had to deal with communist rebels, among other problems. They weren't about to arrest people for poaching.

Pizarras persisted in his quest to understand and protect the animals, working his farm all day and tending at night to the tarsiers he kept behind his house. Despite the species' aversion to captivity, he successfully bred dozens of the animals. After the babies matured at about six months, he would hike deep into the forest, where he hoped they would be safe, and release them.

"Why are you creeping in the jungle every night?" his neighbors sneered as he disappeared into the forest. Pizarras picked up the derogatory title "tarsier man." Villagers gossiped that he was part monkey.

Soon enough, Pizarras would be vindicated. In the early 1990s, government and university researchers from Manila started showing up at Pizarras' house and asking about tarsiers. The animals by then had nearly disappeared from the forest around his village. They only lived deep in the jungle and nobody knew how many were left.