My, what a yummy mango...

I have a huge mango tree in my yard. Every year it produces several hundred fruit, of which I manage to eat at most a couple of dozen or so.

This is not for dislike of mangos or any other reason, the problem is that I share the mango tree (or its fruit) with at least four other species, all of which are far better adapted at accessing the contents than I am.

The tree is the year round home for a few million green tree ants. These are large ants, and they bite, quite painfully. Every branch of the the tree is covered with them, and they inhabit the ground around the tree as well. So actually climbing the tree is out of the question at any time of the year, and in particular during mango season.

The tree is very high, so that makes the fruit in the top half inaccessible. Using a bit of ingenuity, a windsurfer mast and some wire I have a rig that I can use to access fruit in the lower half of the tree, but the rest remains out of reach.

So during mango season the yummy fruit is there for the taking, and I will take a few from the lower branches. The rest feeds the birds and the bats.

Fruit bats. Flying foxes. Whatever you call them, they feast on ripe fruit during the summer. The bats have one constraint when dining on mango: they need about three meters of height to take off. Rather like parachuting, you need a bit of fall for the chute to open.

If they do end up on the ground, they have to find a nearby tree, and climb up high enough to launch. So if a tree is lower than this, they won't take the fruit. When you see a mango orchard, all the trees are short and trimmed that way. Fruit bats won't land on a bush because they'd never get back into the air.

My tree doenst have that problem, it's about 8m high, which is plenty of space for launching. So nighttime in summer, you hear the noisy creatures feasting away in the tree.

Round about dawn the bats retire to their castles or wherever (trees) and the birds take over. Rainbow lorikeets especially seem to enjoy a nice mango or two.

There are large mango trees all over town so there seems to be no shortage of fodder for the various fruit eaters. Probably keeps the mango growers happy having free and accessible food available elsewhere. Anyway, my tree keeps me well fed, and I don't begrudge the local wildlife the rest.

Of course during mango season you can buy the things for next to nothing anyway!

"My, what a yummy mango" was a line from a very old computer game. It eventually found its way into nethack, but I remember encountering it much earlier in a variant of adventure. There was a slime mold in there as well and if you ate that you got "My, what a yummy slime mold"