Since when man first walked the Garden of Eden, he was charged with the task of naming all the animals that God had placed there. And not silly names either, like Rover or Pussums. Proper names, with kingdoms and phylums and all that. For example, Ursa americana a.k.a the American brown bear. It's brown, and it's a bear that lives in America. Perfect. However, Adam wasn't always so on the mark, and some animals have been cursed with names that are wholly inappropriate. For example, the hissing sand snake. It's a snake that neither hisses, nor lives in sand. Go figure. Then there are the animals whose names belie the true form that the animal itself takes. For me, the shining example of this is the megapode. Mega. Pode. Meg-a-pode. MEGApode. Okay, so it's probably just me, but it does sound like something that should be large and prehistoric, lumbering through the lush jungle foliage, ripping leaves down form the trees as it goes. It's definitely the sort of name that you'd give to a komodo dragon-type creature.

What it actually is, is a small bird with black feathers that's roughly the size of a chicken.

This came as a bit of a let down to me when I finally learned the truth of the matter. I think it's the prefix of 'mega-'; it conjures up mental images of, well, MEGA things. I'm still convinced that toxic megacolon should be the name of an evil superbeing. Such a name is wasted on what is actually a (admittedly potentially fatal) complication of inflammatory bowel disease.

Such is the way of the world.

The megapode is indigenous to the South Pacific, and I have encountered the legendary beast whilst in the Solomon Islands, an archipelago of volcanic origin stuck between Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu. Not many people go there; this is economically a bad thing, but I do hate to think what will happen to the place when the tourists do arrive. And they will one day arrive. Many of the islands can boast of containing at least one active volcano; the downside of this is the lingering smell of sulphur. The upside is the revenue made from megapode eggs. The megapode lays its eggs in the warm, volcanic sands to incubate. These eggs are oval, about twice the size of a small chicken's egg, and have a very large yolk that is (in my opinion) perfect for toast soldiers when soft boiled. That's how I've been eating them anyway; the villagers tend to cook them in the steam vents that litter the islands.

The villagers harvest the eggs by making their own megapode rookeries. This is done by taking a large patch of soil and sheltering it by placing a rough roof woven from banana leaves propped-up fairly close to the ground. The patch of soil is then dug out, and the surface of the chamber that this creates is loosened, creating a sandy floor. The megapodes will then bury their eggs in this man-made sand, and the villagers will come and remove the eggs a few days later.

This is a well run operation. The rookeries are declared off-limits for one month a year to allow the megapode population numbers some stability. For the rest of the time, the eggs are sold on at a fair price: S$2 on the island of origin; S$2.50 at the nearest town; S$4 in the capital, Honiara. A good rookery should yield ~20-40 eggs a week, and an income of ~S$60 a week per rookery is not to be sniffed at, especially when you consider the average wage for someone working in a shop out here to be ~80cents an hour.

The megapode rookeries are dotted about in the jungle that covers the sides of volcanoes. The few visits that I have made to such places are probably the closest that I'll ever come to being Indiana Jones. By the very nature of the operation, the rookeries have to be left alone by humans for the vast majority of the week to allow the megapode some privacy to 'do their thing'. So what's to stop an enterprising individual from helping himself to another villager's rookery when no one's looking?

God, that's who.

Thanks to the efforts of various missionaries sent out to tame the heathens over the last 200yrs, Christianity is the religion of choice for 97% of the Solomon Islands. They take their religion seriously out here. I admitted my lack of Christian convictions to one young man, and, I swear, he cried tears for the state of my immortal soul. Okay, so he was high on betel nut at the time, but I was touched none-the-less. And yes, the irony of a native despairing over the state of my soul is not lost on a waetgele such as myself. As ye sow, so shall ye reap.

Each megapode rookery has two forms of protection against thieves; one traditional and one biblical. The traditional one consists of a complicated totem constructed from twigs; every time I asked for the story behind the working of this device I was given a one-word answer. Tabu. The other device is a small sign with various things written on; the most significant part being the statement "Exodus 20:15".

According to the village headman, they work.

I decided to test this anti-theft device out for myself; we'd been having problems at the guesthouse that we were staying in of things going missing from the communal fridge. A pawpaw here, a can of Pepsi there... The final straw for me was the theft of my can of tinned tomatoes. The loss of a packet of Tim Tams I took in my stride, but this was too much. I sequestered a piece of plain A4 and emblazoned upon it the words:

"Exodus 20:15, God's watching you."

Then pinned it to the fridge with magnets.

And that solved that problem.