On the road, again!!!
Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams
Chronicles of a Footloose Forester
By Dick Pellek

Flipping the Bird

 It took an Internet newsfeed story to spark this attempt at a chronicle based on a similar gesture, both acted out some decades ago.  The Internet story in early 2025 was short, a text caption really, that mentioned the first known photo of someone flipping the bird in a photograph. And the group photo was of a baseball team, presumably in Boston, Massachusetts in 1915 or thereabouts.  The brief caption did not elaborate.  The Footloose Forester will try to provide a bit more context about the circumstances of him also flipping the bird and the moment being caught on camera.

Our mixed crew of environmental specialists, for lack of a better description, were camping out on the banks of a marabou, a canal-like meander of the Senegal River, during a USAID-funded inspection tour pursuant to the publication of an Environmental Impact Statement in 1975-77.  Some of the full team were busy in Dakar, and our group consisted of 7-8 individuals with individual specialty tasks, although the team effort was part of the story itself.  For example, the noted ichthyologist, Don Dorfman, a world-class specialist in small riverine fishes, made us laugh loudly in the silent night of the desert air when he announced (from afar), that he dropped the flashlight because his pants were falling down.  Chief wildlife biologist Doug Reagan was in charge of collecting bats in the corners of an abandoned building, but he needed someone to hold the flashlight as he attempted to capture bats in a net.  Even Don Dorfman was laughing—a memorable event for us all.  

As a safari expedition in the early stages of our 800 km route up the Senegal River, we took precautions to have enough food and water to meet our needs.  At the marabou where we were camped, the drinking water came out of the marabou itself.  It had to be treated, and for the purpose, Ted Mooney, the trip organizer and general guide, took on the responsibility of dosing 5-gallon jerry cans of marabou water from a pipette with 10 ml of pure iodine, whenever there was a need.  The iodine-laced and decidedly muddy water tasted terrible, but it was rendered safe from microbes before we drank it.  And that was the exact frame of reference that conjured up the bird-flipping episode.

Footloose Forester and two others were seated at a folding table in broad daylight and contemplating drinking the muddy, iodine-laced water, when someone with a camera snapped a photo.  The Footloose Forester flipped the bird in the direction of the cameraman, not in anger, not with malice, but just as a response to being a target guinea pig about to drink muddy water. End of reverie, at least at that campsite.

We were all enthusiastic about our joint and individual adventures. Later on, miles upstream in the vicinity of Bakal, Don Dorfman asked us to help him deploy and retrieve a seine net in the Senegal River, to find out what the waters held as local resources in fishes and crustaceans.  We probably laughed again when we hauled in hundreds, many thousands of tiny fresh-water shrimp.

 Freshwater shrimp

At that very spot on the banks of the river, Don Dorfman suggested that we take them to the local hotel and ask the cook to prepare them for a shrimp-eating contest.  That is what happened.  Footloose Forester does not remember who won the context, but he does remember quitting after eating about 100 shrimp.  You just can’t make this stuff up! 

Oh, yes, then there was the capture of a live puff adder (the deadly poisonous species) near Poder, downstream on the Senegal River and earlier in the safari expedition.  That was a Doug Reagan coup, with a snake stick, a canvas bag and the help of a few of the crew.  The inches-long fangs of that puff adder are the longest snake fangs that Footloose Forester ever saw. Doug said that those fangs contained enough venom to kill everyone in camp.  The specimen is preserved in a Senegalese museum.