Creatures of the Rainforest

Rainforests are great. My favourite times in Ghana have been when I'm in the rainforest. They are not "accessible" places, in more than one meaning of the word (those that are easily accessible have already been cut down) but their charm is all the more for requiring a bit of effort to get to know them.


In the interior of a rainforest, it is shady and damp - an incredibly welcome contrast to the searing dry heat and beating sun outside, where land has been cleared for farming. They even feel relatively cool by comparison, but it's all relative; you will still be drenched in sweat in five minutes.

But the best thing about rainforests is that they are brimful of all sorts of incredible animals and plants. For the newcomer this is hard to believe: you can walk through a forest and see nothing but trees and lianas, but take your time and the creatures start to come into focus. Most obvious are perhaps the butterflies. Ghana has around 900 species of butterflies (compared to Ireland's thirty-odd) and the majority live in its rainforests.


The smaller one in the picture above has long "tails" and fake eyespots, so that to a hungry bird, it looks like the head is at the back. This gives the butterfly a better chance of surviving a flycatcher attack, and just losing a bit of wing rather than its head.

Look a little bit harder and you will start to see (at least in the wet season) frogs. There are dozens of species of frogs here, and some of them are very funky indeed. This one has had graffiti scrawled on it by someone called Jo (for shame):


There are gazillions of cool birds too, but a lot of the time they are lurking in the understorey or zipping about in the canopy, and aren't very keen on having their pictures taken. And the mammals are even more tricky to see. If you wander about with a torch after dark you'll find little glowing pairs of eyes in thickets chittering at you - tiny bushbabies, like cute gremlins with squirrels' tails. And I have been lucky enough to see monkeys on several occasions, including the critically endangered White-naped Mangabey.

I think I'll leave caterpillars to another post, because they are so amazing...