Identifying Predators

September 5 2015 - Camille Warbington, Ph.D.

I am a science fiction nerd, and I don’t care who knows it.

Being a lover of science as well as science fiction has its quirks.  Sometimes, this obsession interest overlap of mine leads to conversations about the feasibility of bringing dinosaurs back to live among us, or similar topics brought up by pop culture.

In the story I am about to relay, however, it triggers a small dose of paranoia, before leading to my determination to reassure myself solve the mystery.

What mystery?  Follow along for the tale of Quest for the Predator ™

This is the characteristic noise made by the Predator ™

, arguably the protagonist in such films as Predator, Predator 2, Predators, Alien Versus Predator, or Alien Vs. Predator: Requiem.  If you are not familiar with this franchise, I highly recommend the first one – simply for the one-liners typical of the 1980’s action movie genre, delivered by such acting greats as Jesse “The Body” Ventura.

Anyway, the Predator is an alien baddie that hunts humans (and other extra-terrestrial species), and is terribly efficient.

One day, while sitting in a machan in Uganda, I hear a noise that sounds exactly like the Predator.  I consider myself to be a very reasonable and rational person, but the noise has been ingrained in my head enough that I start to look around for the source of the noise.  That first time, I was unable to pinpoint the source, and the noise was not repeated, so I mentally write it off and go about my work.

A few days later, while in a different machan, I hear it again.  After a minute or so, I hear it again, closer this time.    I ask the staff member working with me what that noise could be.  His response – “which noise?”  At the time, there were dozens of frogs and insects calling as well, that it was quite difficult to identify the particular noise that I wanted to identify.  I tried to describe the noise, and he assured me that it was one of the frogs, which were active at sunset.

A week or so later, I was walking through the bush by myself at about 3 pm, and I hear it again.  From head level.  Only a few feet away from me.  I stopped in my tracks.  While scanning the shrubs and trees near where the noise came from, I was reassuring myself that I was becoming anxious about a movie character – and then I hear it again directly behind me.

After standing completely still for a ridiculous amount of time, I worked up enough common sense to turn around – and obviously I saw nothing there (which proves nothing, by the way.  If you have seen the movies, you know that Predator has advanced camouflage capabilities).  But I continued on my way, resolving to find out what was making me unreasonable made that noise.

It took a long time to figure it out.  But, obviously, as I was mere feet away from it and lived to tell the tale, I was not encountering the Predator.  The truth is not really that exotic, nor is how I discovered the creature in the act.  As it happens, I was in another machan for a sitatunga survey on my second-to-last-day in Uganda when the culprit was identified.  The noise occurred behind me again.  And again.  By the third time, I turned around so fast that I smashed my elbow into a tree.  I was able to pinpoint the direction from which the noise came, and so I stared at a woodpile left behind by the charcoal burners for the next few minutes.

Then, I saw it.

A Brown-Crowned Tchagra – a smallish bird – taking off from the woodpile, was the apparent source of the noise.  Another tchagra from the far side of the woodpile also took flight, making the noise along the first few wingbeats.

Actually it looks like this-

And so the mystery was solved, a weird paranoia was vanquished, and I will always wonder if the tchagra were the inspiration for that simple, yet creepy, noise of the Predator.