Diary - Van Deusen Pindiu Patrol Post 22 April 1964 (Wed.) Great excitement this morning while I was making up the "fox". A man came in with a green tree python, very "tame", very beautiful. A combination of faint blue streaking on a lovely green bakcground. He almost seems to "enjoy" being handled. Ken purchased him for four marks (shillings). Ru Hoogland's tent bag makes a fine python home! "Ren" Willard had come over to watch me measure, skin, and catch Dobsonia's ectoparasites. She seemed quite swept up in the feeling of excitement in a camp full of naturalists. "Ren" sent us half a tea cake for lunch. Ken has arranged for a cook and a laundry boy until Kim and the others arrive in Lae on the "Bev" from Samarai. Ken has contrived a cook shed out back made out of old swag bags. Ru and Ken have also rigged the botanical tent. In the afternoon Stan and I cut north from Pindiu into what looked like good forested country, but, even though there are enough trees to put up a good show from a distance, the forest is much bash[illegible] about - garden patches are everywhere. The trail wound through a sago palm swamp. Bird life was not very plentiful and few were observed. We found one pile of cut and bundled sago leaves, and a pile of logs cut for a banus (fence). Tonight Stan, Tobram, and I jacked the same trail. Stan shot his first New Guinea mammal, a Dobsonia, but it fell in a tangle of brush and a half-hour search failed to turn it up. We collected a