Looking like something out of War of the Worlds  (the original , not the crappy Tom Cruise version) this picture really does show a Tenerife  invasion of sorts though of course not of intrastellar origin.

The black spiky things in the picture are lime urchins. In a balanced eco-system they have a very important role to play in  keeping the reefs and corals healthy but in Tenerife, the lime urchin population has exploded. They are hungry little blighters and munch their way across wide swathes of underwater landscape leaving not much edible matter in their wake. (Sort of like when my brother comes to visit)

Like the Tribbles in Star Trek  (again the original version) the urchins are insatiable and unless controlled they may end up eating the whole spaceship!!!  Aaaahhhh ….

Bumping back down to earth, the lime urchin invasion is not actually news. Plans have been afoot to curb the voracious  little buggers for some time – including turning them into a lunchtime delicacy – but as Pamela Heywood of  Secret Tenerife said:

It just goes to show you how important balance is, with the right number of the various members of the food chain hierarchy, each having their part in the “grand scheme” and, how important it is that we protect these marine areas and not keep overfishing them, nor tipping heaven knows what kinds of waste into them.

See this picture and more scuba diving photographs at the Tenerife Diving Gallery.

Okay, so I understand that not everyone will appreciate my excitement at finally capturing a few of my batty friends on video. I admit the quality is not great and as yet David Attenborough has nothing to worry about but you would have to know that one of these guys nearly clipped me on the head one dark morning.

Ever since, I have tried to catch a glimpse of one of the bats.  I hear them nearly every morning but its always dark and they fly past so quickly it is hard to get a good look. Describing the feeling of some substantial creature whizzing past my ear at six o’clock in the morning tends to have people nod wide-eyed and inch away but it is when I get into imitating the noise that they actually reach for the strait-jacket.

Now, after weeks of laying in wait, I have proof. Ha ha!  ( Well, you try laying in wait for wildlife with a 55 kilo Presa Canario and a Boxer with a hip impediment!. David Attenborough has it easy!)

My early morning walks with the dogs are most often pretty quiet. With the kids to get ready for school and him-indoors ready to leave for work, I need to be up, out and back with two relieved rovers by just after seven. While a lie-in would be lovely now that the kids are off school for a week, it is very hard to sleep with two large dogs dancing cross-legged through the bedroom.

From November to January the mornings have been inky black but now, they’re getting lighter and it’s possible to see my hand in front of my face without the help of my trusty torch. Skye, good girl that she is, potters about and does her business without any fuss. Tito is more skittish and behaves like a shy schoolgirl getting ready to pee behind a bush. Every noise or car door slamming miles away has his head up, ears cocked and all thought of the toilet flushed out of his brain.

This morning as I stood about waiting for Tito to perform, up his head went again and he stared off to the side, into the murk. I looked at him, then off to the side to see if I could see what he was looking at. Not a bean in sight. I huffed a breath impatiently and turned to the front and … WHOOSH … I just missed getting scalped by a huge bat!

I gave an involuntary gasp and staggered back a few steps clutching at my chest to try and massage my heart back into action. Mr. Alert by my side was by this time happily in the middle of business and cast me a glance which was obviously meant to tell me to stop messing about and give him a moment’s peace.

To the Chinese, one bat is lucky but five bats even more so. I suppose I am lucky that I wasn’t mobbed by five bats. But seriously, bats are cool. Not one of life’s winners in the looks department, granted, but imagine how many more tons of mosquitos there would be to keep you awake if bats were not around to eat them.

The Canary Islands has its own species of bat. Called Plecotus Teneriffae (or more commonly the Canary Long Eared Bat) these little guys are on the endangered list and live on only three or four of the Canary Islands, surviving in rapidly shrinking forest habitats. If this was my morning mugger than I was very lucky indeed to nearly be decapitated by such a rare specimen.

I suspect, though, that my batty friend might have been Rousettus aegyptiacus or the Egyptian Fruit Bat to his friends. Alleged escapees from Loro Parque, these fugitives are wreaking havoc on Tenerife’s endemic flora and fauna.

The wiki page for Rousettus aegyptiacus includes the information that their fur is very soft and their wings feel not unlike pantyhose (what was that writer on?). The males also have a large scrotal sack apparently which makes me feel not only lucky but highly blessed not to have been hit in the head by this creature.

Added April 14th 2009: I still don’t know if the photograph shows my morning mugger but I did eventually manage to get a little video of the bats early morning antics which at least shows that they are of a significant size. Look at this for batty acrobatics.

It’s taken a while but I finally got round to joining Facebook and still don’t think I have quite got the hang of it. Though the social networking aspects of it are obvious it is all the peripheral add-ons that steal my time.

In the same week my Facebook friends introduced me to one video that was so beautiful it moved me to tears and to another whose very description was enough to tell me that it would move me to tears of an altogether different nature.

I hope you get as much joy out of Christian the Lion as I did and that you will take a moment to sign the Animal Saviours petition against the skinning alive of cats and dogs for the fur industry – even if you too can’t bring yourself to watch the video.

Have you lost your hare? Apparently according to Google, a hare in Tenerife is a kind of sea slug but I am talking about the four legged, floppy eared variety. You see there was one in front of my house yesterday. He seemed long in the face to be a rabbit and was quite obviously off his beaten track and way out of his depth considering the bit of green in front of my house has more dogs per square inch than it has blades of grass.

My kids were out playing in front when my daughter started yelling about a rabbit. I thought she was pulling my leg but no, there it was, sitting out there looking cute. And vulnerable. Expecting my son to flank the wee thing and send it back towards me was a bit ambitious as he immediately ran towards it waving a stick and it, not surprisingly, took to its heels.

Thinking that was the last we’d see of Brer Rabbit I went back to what I was doing but the kids soon ran to tell me he was back. This time Mega, the black lab had chased it under a plant pot. And Mega’s owner was calling for her away on the other side of the park. Great. I know you can’t sugar coat life for ever but this was not the day I wanted my kids to learn about the internal workings of all creatures great and small.

Mega gave up when I started to show some interest and went off in search of something to play with that wouldn’t sit quivering under a pot and I was able to just pick up the little guy. I couldn’t leave it there because with all the dogs and cats around he wouldn’t last half an hour. I couldn’t take him home because with all the kids, dogs and the cat in my house, he would die of nervous exhaustion in an hour.

I decided to take the rabbit to a fenced off area where I knew there was long lush grass and a lot of possible hiding places and let him go there. I’ve no idea if that was the right thing to do but I do know he wouldn’t have survived long where he was. It was only later on at night that I couldn’t sleep and I started to wonder. He was brown-grey like a wild rabbit but he was so tame…

I had the horrible thought that maybe he actually was a pet rabbit that had got out of a pen in one of the nearby gardens and I had just thrown him out to fend for himself.

Gulp.

That’s when I started looking up Google for Tenerife rabbits and hares and found out that he was a rabbit after all and that in Tenerife a hare is actually a sea slug.