When the drought came last year in June the one good thing that could come out of it was mangos. In the Highlands, we get too much rain for the mango flowers and buds to stay on the tree, the rain just knocks them off. When the drought comes, the flowers and buds get to stay on the tree and months later, mangos form. We have fruit bats, or flying foxes that come and eat ripe fruit - bananas, papayas and mangos (when we have them). The bats don't get mangos too often, so as they were growing, I was worried the bats would eat the mangos before we could harvest them. I tried to explain to the bats that they needed to share and couldn't take them all, I wasn't sure if they would understand, but it seems like the have.
100s of mangos have grown on the tree, and 100s of them have already fallen to the ground. Each night the bats come for their evening meal of mangos. In the process they also knock some down, so we don't have to climb the tree to get them. Initially we were only getting mangos that the bats knocked down, but recently, the mangos are just falling out of the tree as they ripen. Each morning Bill picks up somewhere between 20 - 40 mangos, and we have sure been enjoying them. We certainly can't eat them all, so we have shared with everyone else on station, but we will be having lots of mango ice cream in the days ahead and Marsha's mango jam is very good. We never know when another mango harvest will come so we are trying to make the most of it.
