Creature record / 1925
Western Java. The slopes of Mount Salak. A young naturalist named Ernst Bartels hears of an animal that hides in caves behind waterfalls and pulls fish from beneath the stones of the riverbed. Grey fur. A monkey's head. Claws on its wings. Its name is its call. "A-hool!" The popular telling puts Bartels beneath the creature in 1925, and beneath its cry in 1927. The oldest printed version, in Ivan T. Sanderson's 1972 book, is stranger. It is built from the voices of a guide, a cousin and a hunter. No photograph exists. No specimen. Only the call.
West Java, the 1920s. The Dutch East Indies. Ernst Bartels was born here in 1904, son of Max Bartels, plantation manager and ornithologist at Pasir Datar. In Ivan T. Sanderson's account, the young naturalist grew up speaking three languages, studied in Europe, then took work on an estate "on the slopes of the Salak Mountains". Mount Salak is an eroded stratovolcano, 2,211 m high. On its slopes, people spoke of the ahool.