FATHER HAS NEVER BEEN SEEN WHILE THE CHILDREN ARE BURIED ALIVE

The Big Foot Fowl of Haruku.

When one studies the sea charts of the Indonesian archipelago - an activity I often indulged in when I was employed as a ship’s mate - one can’t help noticing that this vast island realm sprawls over two con-tinental shelves, the “Sunda Shelf” and the “Arafura Shelf”, with several basins of considerably depth in between. Most of the depths on the shelves are less than seventy meters, less than the rise of the sea level after the ice of the last ice age had melted, about ten thousand years ago.
This means that, in theory, one could have travelled overland during the last ice age or, more likely, along the rivers, from as far away as Thailand to the islands of Java or Borneo (its interesting that by reading the depths of the seas over the Sunda Shelf one can follow the great Asian rivers like the Chao Phya and Irrawadi all the way to the Java sea and the Indian Ocean as the depth of the former river is more than that of the surrounding seas).
Arriving in those days at the estuary of the Menam Chao Phya, on the north of the island of Bali, one had to cross the ocean to get to what we know as the Arafura shelf, or trek along the Lesser Sunda Islands or Nusa Tengara (Bali, Sumbawa, Flores, Sumba and Timor) to get on the south coast of Timor from where it was only about a hundred nautical miles to the coast of what was then Australia. This could have been how the Australian aboriginals travelled in their primitive boats from Asia to Australia many millennia ago.
Sulawesi, or formerly Celebes, the spice islands of the Moluccas, the Philippines and New Guinea are positioned in between, with deep seas separating them from the two shelves. The result is that there are several animals existing or extinct, indigenous only to those “spice” islands. Among them is the wild “deer boar” (Babi Rusa) several marsupials and a little chicken-like bird which I will call the “ Big Foot Fowl” (in English it seems to be called the “Wallace’s Fowl or Bird” after Alfred Russel Wallace - a contemporary and col-laborator of Charles Darwin. Wallace was an explorer who’s interest was South-East Asia and he invented the hypothetical line between Asia’s and Australian’s flora and fauna called the “Wallace Line”.
It is about this Wallace Fowl I like to write to-day, but since the bird is rare and mysterious, it will be a sin to eat it, and to write a food column about a bird which one is not supposed to eat is a bit odd, isn’t it? Well, nevertheless, I will cross that bridge when we get there and meanwhile tell you about my personal acquain-tance with the creature, or rather its egg.
Some time ago my sister in Holland sent me a Dutch newspaper clipping with a story about this “Big Foot Fowl”. She wrote on it, “Do you remember that this small bird lays an enormous egg which we once ate in Tondano?” Tondano is a town in the Minahassa, Sulawesi where we went to school. Indeed I do remember. Although the hen is not as big as a normal chicken, the egg is the size of a very large goose egg and we were told that when the hen produces it, she often dies in the process.
The “Big Foot Fowls” are an enigma. I thought they had become extinct which is obviously not true as they are being studied by biologists from Dutch scientific institutions on the small Moluccas island of Haruku. The adult male of the species keeps himself to the rain forest and is never seen, while the female - when the time comes - digs a hole on a beach at night, in which she lays one egg (some species lay the eggs in heaps of decaying leaves in the forest or in warm sand of volcanic nature). She covers it with sand, calls it a day and flies back to her lover in the forest, not in the least interested whatever will happen to her off-spring. When the chick hatches, it needs days to dig itself out of the warm sand. To do this, it has to be quite strong and more developed than, for instance, the chicks of an ordinary chicken, and this is the reason, according to the article, for the oversized eggs. Another mystery is what the birds do in the day time. Nobody seems to know.
Since the eggs are not watched and the locations in the sand where they are deposited are obvious, many of the eggs are dug up and eaten by the natives but the bird as a species has survived this disaster. The females often have to fly for hours before they reach their favourite “nesting” beach and may lay as many as eight eggs a year. The population is, however, most vulnerable as there are only a few beaches known where the eggs are hatched. At Kailolo on the island of Haruku, the local “Adat” (tribal law) requires that only one person is allowed to harvest the eggs while wild animals are chased away to let the birds propagate so that they do not become extinct. The trees in the vicinity of the beach where the birds rest after the ordeal are also protected from destruction.
A few years ago another large area where the birds come to lay their eggs was discovered on the large island of Halmahera. Here the “Adat” protect it as well, albeit in a slightly different way, but once the respect for these ageless laws disappears the precious birds may well become a thing of the past.
At this point I have to do something to maintain this as a food column instead of a natural history class. Therefore, I will give you a recipe for a chicken dish peculiar for the Moluccas and especially Ternate, a small island consisting of one solitary active volcano off the west coast of the above mentioned larger island of Halmahera.