Most of the people who have lived here all their lives don’t realize what a wonderfully diverse environment surrounds them. My great-grandfather was a medicine man, a “hill doctor”. He could take two seemingly identical plants and point out differences in their structure and use, and he successfully treated people for many illnesses, using only the plants that grow in the mountains. According to my grandmother he always said that no plant is without its use and all are living treasure. I am fortunate in having grown up in a family who has always treasured the native Appalachian plants.

Sadly, many of these plants are now endangered. There is a big market for Ginseng and Goldenseal, and a lot of people will destroy plants in their efforts to harvest them for money. Also the mining and timber industries destroy native plants, either directly or by polluting the surrounding habitat so that the plants cannot survive. A hideous practice called “mountaintop removal”, which in reality is total habitat destruction, is wiping out entire ecosystems that have been existing for millions of years. You can go here to Appalachian Voices to see what mountaintop removal strip mining is doing to our country.

But native reports of the orang pendek of Sumatra are remarkably consistent. Natives seem genuinely perplexed that Westerners don’t believe it exists. They don’t have any of what we tend to dismiss as legends about it; they simply regard it as part of the local fauna. They’re emphatic that they don’t consider it human, or posessed of special powers, or anything like that; it’s just another animal.

The Sherpa of Nepal seem to believe the same thing about the yeti. I remember reading once a long time back about a Sherpa being asked to list the local fauna, his response being something like: let’s see, snow leopard, blue sheep, goral….um, red panda, yeti, wild boar, maybe some wolves, a few bears…

I can’t believe that I have never, in all the time I have been outside, ever seen a plant or an insect that was unknown to science at the time I saw it. It MUST have happened sometime.

What impresses me sometimes almost as much as what scientists know are scientists’ blind spots. Locals usually don’t have that problem.

Why does this not surprise me in the least?

This same sort of local attitude is quite prevalent with other cryptozoological or cryptobotanical lifeforms reported around the world.