The woolly flying squirrel: On the trail of the world's largest glider
Posted
The mountainous northernmost reaches of Pakistan are dry, bleak and devastatingly beautiful.
They're also home to an animal that is a metre long, with a pelt of silky fur as long as your pinky finger, and whose dried urine is said to have aphrodisiac qualities.
It's a mammal that can glide, a woolly flying squirrel that was thought to be extinct until 1996.
Named by one of the most prolific animal labellers in history, Oldfield Thomas, the woolly flying squirrel was described from skins brought back from the mountains.
Thomas never saw a live woolly flying squirrel, but he did note that its teeth were very different from anything you'd ever expect in a glider.
"They've got what they call high-crowned, or hypsodont dentition," says Stephen Jackson, an associate of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History.
"Normally when you think of hypsodont teeth in mammals, you think of ungulate or hooved animals, which feed on really abrasive material like grass.
"When you see a flying squirrel with hypsodont teeth you go: 'What on earth are these things feeding on?'"
The other unusual thing about the woolly flying squirrel is its scream, which has been likened by some to the sound of a yeti.
"The way it was described to me was of a chain smoking child falling off a cliff. It's quite unnerving," says Peter Zahler, regional director of the Asia program for the Wildlife Conservation Society, a field conservation group run out of the Bronx Zoo in New York.
In the early 1990s, Mr Zahler was a young zoologist in search of a project. And not just any project.
Colonel D L Lorimer, a British soldier and explorer, had found what was thought to be the last woolly flying squirrel in 1924, caught and incapacitated by a rope around its neck.
Undaunted, Mr Zahler mounted two expeditions to the Gilgit-Baltistan area of far-north Pakistan in 1992 and 1994 in search of the squirrel.
"Before we headed up, we stopped at the local police station at the foot of the valley, because the area is considered a little dicey for outsiders," says Mr Zahler.
"We told them what we wanted to do and they all thought it was pretty funny.
"It turns out there is a material called salajeet that local people collect, that is supposed to be an integrated matrix of woolly flying squirrel faeces and urine and is used for various medical purposes, including as an aphrodisiac."
The expedition set cage traps with squirrel bait of oats and honey, and caught all manner of things, but no woolly flying squirrels.
"One day, a very large bearded gentleman came out of the bush, toting a gun on his back. He said: 'I am a salajeet collector.'"
The man said he knew the animal that Mr Zahler was looking for and could get him one for $40.
"He asked me for a bag that we had used to hold food provisions, and I figured, why not?
"He had the gun, so I gave him the bag. About six hours later he came back with a woolly flying squirrel in the bag.
"I was flabbergasted."
Over the course of the night, Mr Zahler observed the animal, which they put into a large cage.
The woolly flying squirrel remained quiet until 7:45pm, when she woke and began to groom herself. Like other gliders, she was nocturnal.
At 10:00pm, she began to move around the cage, alternating between rest and activity until about 4:00am, when she finally went to sleep in a sitting position.
"We managed to get a lot of pellet samples. It turns out that they, for want of a better word, poop a lot.
"We got about 900 pellets over a 12-hour period, which is pretty enormous."
It was this woolly flying squirrel poo that solved the mystery of the unusual teeth: they feed almost exclusively on pine needles.
"The only vocalizations were four soft grunts, and a quiet 'chirr' sound upon transfer from the capture bag into the cage," wrote Mr Zahler.
"We observed the squirrel overnight and brought it back to where it had been captured and released it the next morning where it just ambled off up the side of the cliff to its cave."
It was the first time a woolly flying squirrel had been seen alive in 70 years.
One of the only other people to have encountered the elusive squirrel is Vladimir Dinets. In 2004, while between jobs, the zoologist and rare animal enthusiast decided he'd go to Pakistan.
He travelled through valleys in the high mountains, keeping to himself alone in hiking huts. The last place he visited was Paradise Valley.
"It was winter, so there was maybe a foot of snow in the ground and the snow was still falling. I went outside and it was totally magical," says Dr Dinets.
"I could see Nanga Parbat in the moonlight when there were breaks in the clouds. There were smaller Kashmir flying squirrels around, eating pine cones and having fun.
"Then I found these two huge, huge, flying squirrels, one of the largest gliding mammals around. At nightfall, they climb up the cliff to the plateau where the forest grows and feed on pine needles.
"They have this beautiful slightly blueish grey; they look like shadows moving on the snow."
Dr Dinets observed the two squirrels gliding, eating and chattering to each other. He witnessed them gliding from tree to tree rapidly and without sound. When they landed, they quickly ran to the other side of the tree, an owl avoidance strategy.
That there are owls big enough to disembowel a flying mammal one metre long gives an idea of the hostility of the Himalayan environment.
Despite his best efforts, the video camera that Dr Dinets had with him could not focus through the snow and the darkness of the Himalayan night. The images he managed to get of the squirrel were very blurry.
"They simply leap over from the cliff edge and make a huge loop over the canyon. There is a big glacier below and you can see them flying in the moonlight above the glacier. They do a big loop and land somewhere on the cliff close to their den.
"They probably flew out at least 50 metres, maybe 100.
"It was the best night of my life."
There's a connection between this massive Himalaya flying squirrel and the town of Orange in NSW. Discover more by subscribing to Off Track.
Topics: animals, animal-science, science-and-technology, environment, endangered-and-protected-species, pakistan
