Chapter 21 Traveling Notes

It was snowing on the mountain but the temperature at the bottom of the mountain was still very high. There were a number of snack kiosks set up at the 96K Nature Reserve. It was already dark when we came out of the mountains and arrived at the reserve, so we were able to see that there really were a lot of fireflies there.

There were a bunch of tourists there, all trying to take pictures of the fireflies with their cell phones. We asked the boss of the local meat industry company to help us meet the leaders of the development office so that we could submit our proposal to build a chicken farm near the 96K Nature Reserve. The leaders recommended that we use another spot of land that was about ten mu.⁽¹⁾ The rental price for this land was very cheap—seven hundred yuan per mu. If we rented ten mu for a year, then the total cost was seven thousand yuan.

After we arrived, we found that there were chicken farms all around, but they weren’t large-scale. The farms were all free-range so the chickens were running around everywhere.

“Eagles always swoop down and try to catch them, so the owners built a lot of shacks and raised a bunch of dogs. As soon as an eagle got close, the dogs would bark and the chickens would hide in the shacks,” a neighboring chicken farmer named Yangqian Cuomu said to us with a smile. “Later, the dogs were also carried off by the eagles. If you want to raise chickens, it may be better to raise mules as well. Mules can also make loud noises to alert the chickens, but the eagles won’t be able to carry them away.”

Fatty handed over a cigarette as we inquired more about it. The supply of Tibetan chickens for the local area wasn’t enough, especially the free-range chickens near here, which ate all kinds of insects from the nearby mountains. There was even some propaganda saying that these chickens ate caterpillar fungus. Local tourism was also booming right now. We might be able to take one or two of these chickens back with us, but it would be hard to form a large-scale enterprise here.

Of course, there was a large Tibetan chicken farm further south in Linzhi, but the chicken tasted different because they were fed fodder.

We also met several other amazing people here, who were engaged in the business of making rainforest terrariums. There was a rainforest in Motuo that contained a lot of semi-slugs⁽²⁾ and many strange snails. In order to raise these things, the people would put water and foliage inside the glass terrariums they built so that the environment inside would have the same humidity levels as the rainforest outside.

“If slugs are being raised by people now, then their material life is indeed prosperous,” Fatty said.

When I asked them whether slugs were easy to raise or not, they told me, “These things are very particular when it comes to the temperature and humidity of their surroundings. It’s not difficult to raise them, but it’s considered a disgusting job. The current retail price of slugs is about a hundred to three hundred yuan per catty.”

I sighed. That’s more expensive than our signature dishes.

As we squatted by the side of the road and chatted, we ended up learning a lot of information. For example, the kind of barren fields that were surrounded by wooden fences, full of weeds, and difficult to cultivate were great places to raise slugs.

All you had to do was cover the wooden fence in greenhouse film and then brush it with a mixture of salt and lime to keep the slugs inside from escaping. A hole would initially be cut in the film in order to attract wild slugs to come inside the enclosure, but it could eventually be blocked with a basin of salt water.

What was the bait to lure them in? Beer. As long as the weather wasn’t dry, if you placed a jar of cheap hops in the center of that field, then the whole area would soon be full of slugs. The side of the hop jar would be covered in such a dense cluster of them that you wouldn’t even be able to see it.

Slugs ate rotten grass leaves, so any grass leaves that had been weeded out by the farmers could be thrown directly into the enclosure. Slugs also had an amazing reproduction rate. When the man showed me a picture of their farm, Fatty immediately threw up. After only seven months, I felt that their farm was already full without any room to spare.

It was a sea of slugs, among which were a lot of giant snails that turned out to be an invasive species of African snails.

“There’s nothing we can do now. Those big snails are everywhere, and the biggest ones are about the size of a fist. There are said to be even bigger ones out there, probably bigger than your head. African snails not only carry a lot of germs but also eat up all the herbs, drive out the native species, and alter the local ecosystem’s food chain.”

“This snail looks very bulky. Can it be used as food to raise other animals?”

“Like giant Amazon snails, this thing is too big.⁽³⁾ It’s difficult for ducks to eat and it has no medicinal value; it’s a complete ecological disaster. It reproduces very fast—much faster than slugs—and its growth and eating speed are so fast that native plants can’t grow quickly enough to keep up with it. So, we can only find people to go in every once in a while, pick them out, and smash them into pieces to feed to the ducks.”

“Can you raise fireflies?” I asked him.

Although he didn’t know, he was very familiar with insects and said that the slugs could be food for fireflies. But African snails were too big; there was still a question of whether the firefly larvae could even prey on them.

“Why do you want to raise fireflies?” He asked me. “Do you want to restore the firefly population or something? But that’s very difficult to do. As long as the environment is polluted, fireflies can’t reproduce. Their larvae live for ten months before the adults emerge, but they die quickly and are very fragile.”

When I told him that I wanted to breed firefly larvae to feed chickens, he said, “That’s extremely difficult. There are a lot of fireflies here so the chickens can eat some of the wild species, but if you breed on a large scale, how many do you have to raise?”

My studies back in school had been focused on the sciences, so after doing the math, I realized that this endeavor really wasn’t realistic. There were many types of fireflies in Fujian, but if we wanted to reach the scale where we could raise chickens, it would take us more than ten years. This kind of insect bred once every ten months, which was very inefficient. Moreover, the guy also said that breeding fireflies domestically was ethically controversial.

That was enough for me to drop the idea, but Fatty said that we could still go back and try it. I knew that African snails had caused some problems near the village recently. If we wanted to stabilize the ecosystem, we could use beer to attract the African snails, which would in turn attract the fireflies in the area. Then we could breed some Tibetan chickens and kill some snails. It all sounded pretty feasible.

One of the chickens given to us by the blue-robed Tibetans was named A-Mu while the other one was named A-Gong.⁽⁴⁾ One male and one female, they were breeding chickens representing the hope of the whole village.

There were also two sheep, one male and one female. Fatty was planning on eating them when we got back instead of raising them so he didn’t bother naming them.

“Then do you plan to eat A-Mu and A-Gong’s children?” I asked Fatty.

He wiped the drool from his mouth and said, “You know, by the end of the year, we’ll have hundreds of chickens. We’ll definitely need to help reduce the burden on those two.”

Afterwards, Fatty went to get us another vehicle. Our original car would no longer work since we had a bunch of animals now, so we got a pickup truck instead. It took a bit of work to fit the chickens, sheep, and feed in the back, but then we finally got back on the road. It was very late when we returned to the temple, but I could see that the whole temple was lit up.

Oil lamps had been lit everywhere, and people looked like they were preparing for some kind of festival. The young lama ran over and told us that this was because the temple wouldn’t begin preparations to formally welcome us until a few days after we arrived here (it was some kind of complicated algorithm).

When we walked into the temple, we were presented with colorful hada,⁽⁵⁾ and everyone was welcoming us.

“While it’s true we just arrived, we came here before. But it almost seems like we didn’t,” Fatty wondered.

<Chapter 20><Table of Contents><Chapter 22>

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TN Notes:

(1) 1 mu= 1/15 of a hectare or 0.1647367761672 acres. So 10 mu= 2/3 of a hectare or 1.65 acres.

(2) Semi-slugs are land gastropods whose shells are too small for them to retract into, but not quite vestigial. The shell of some semi-slugs may not be easily visible on casual inspection, because the shell may be covered over with the mantle. Info here.

(3) The giant African land snail (GALS) is one of the most damaging snails in the world and consumes at least 500 different types of plants. The snails also pose a serious health risk to humans by carrying the parasite rat lungworm, known to cause meningitis in humans. The adult snail is around 7 cm (2.8 in) in diameter and 20 cm (7.9 in) or more in length, making it one of the largest of all extant land snails. Giant Amazon snails is a species of large freshwater snail with gills that devastated rice paddies in China since their introduction in the 1980s. The size of the shell is up to 150 millimetres (6 in) in length.

African snail on left; Amazon snails on right

(4) A-Mu (阿母) can mean grandmother/ polite address for an elderly female relative. A-Gong (阿公) can mean grandfather/ polite address for an elderly man.

(5) Hada is also known as khata, a Tibetan ceremonial scarf.

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This is more than I have ever cared to know about slugs and snails. At this point, I might be missing the snakes lol