After collecting a bucketful of live caterpillars, what next?

This no doubt varies a great deal by region and by species, but for the women I’ve spoken to here:

1. Wash them. Caterpillars (they’ve been traversing sandy soils, after all) should be washed thoroughly - at least three times with fresh water, and any leaf debris etc picked out by hand.
2. Kill them. Dissolve potassium in water and add this to a thick-bottomed metal cooking-pot. (Optional: Add salt to the water at this stage. Doing this will improve the flavour, and will also help to preserve the caterpillars) Add the caterpillars (the volume of caterpillars can be about 4 or 5 times the volume of water). Heat over a steady fire for 4-6 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the water boils up and over the top of the caterpillars and all are very definitely no longer alive.
3. Drain them, reserving the black liquid for the next batch, if you like.
4. Now comes a choice: Sell them, dry them, or eat them?
a. Sell them: Great. They are ready to be sold. Put them in a bucket and wander to the nearest thoroughfare – e.g. any dirt track that goes between the villages. Present them to a woman who will inevitably be sitting by the side of the path with sacks of caterpillars and a large tin known as a ‘boite’. She’ll fill it to the brim, and then pack more on top until it is overflowing. Then she’ll tip it into her sack, and add a handful just for good measure. This is ‘one boite’, and you’ll be charged per boite.
b. Dry them: Lay them on sackcloth in direct sunlight for 2-3 days.
c. Eat them: The most common method here, when cooking with fresh caterpillars, is to fry them. Add some oil to a pan and heat. Wash the caterpillars and – here people have differing preferences. Some break them in half, some remove the heads, some cook them whole – add them to the pan. Chop onion, tomatoes, chilli pepper, as you like, and add these to the pan, stirring well to ensure everything is cooked thoroughly. The mixture will be ready to eat after 10-12 minutes. Some people claim the caterpillars are best enjoyed in a sandwich, others ate them with rice or maizemeal, and others prefer them unaccompanied.

So these are the methods by which people reap their harvest of caterpillars. And what are the benefits?

When selling them fresh to a woman on the road (and these women will usually have traveled from the nearest large town), you can expect to receive between 350-700 francs per boite. This is the price range I’ve recorded at my study sites this year. The variation is due partly to the huge fluctuations in availability during the short season, and also to the variation among my study sites in their distance from the nearest car-accessible road.

When selling dried caterpillars, I’m told you can receive between 1000-2000 francs per boite. However, the caterpillars shrink when dried, so three boites of fresh caterpillars become one boite of dried caterpillars. Therefore, it’s not necessarily financially astute to dry them – unless you live far from the nearest road and would rather make a single trip and sell all of your caterpillars in one go, rather than day by day.

As for the benefits of eating caterpillars, watch this space! But I definitely agree with the enthusiasm of everyone I’ve spoken with here – nearly all of whom claim to eat caterpillars at every opportunity during the season, and as a result they get to ‘eat meat every day’ – that they definitely make a tasty and filling meal.
 

The caterpillar harvest belongs to the community. There are no rules about who can collect, or where – they are for ‘tout le monde’. And during the caterpillar season, from 3am to 7am every morning, every woman, child, and many men are out by torchlight carrying buckets and scouring the fields for their tiny prey. So, as soon as the season began, I decided to join them.

I woke at 1.56am with a strong conviction that I had to be somewhere, and I was already as good as late.

Somehow combining haste with being still half asleep, I pulled on my clothes, grabbed a bucket, and started to walk out into the moonlight.

By 3am I had reached my destination - a small village a few kilometres from where I am currently living. On my way, passing some familiar trees, I switched on my torch a few times. My eyes did their best to adjust as I scanned the lower trunk and base of each tree. I did so hastily, not expecting to see anything as it was not yet 3am, not quite yet. But on the fourth or fifth tree, I saw them - unmistakably striped caterpillars, each one larger than my little finger, shuffling down the bark towards the soil below.

‘If their spit is green, they’re not ready. If it’s chocolate-brown, take them’.

I remembered the words of my teacher and picked up one of the descending caterpillars. They spit on defence, so I quickly saw brown discharge splash across my palm and knew that my poor captive was indeed ready to be harvested.

I dropped it into my bucket. At this point I had a mixture of emotions - awe (the caterpillars are beautiful, fascinating, and for the moment prolific - a rare and awe-inspiring combination), guilt (it’s not my tree, it’s not my caterpillar, yet I’ve just taken it like a thief in the night, and in one way or another I will profit from having done so…), pride (I have been looking forward to this moment!), and of course greed (now I have collected one, I know where I can collect so many more…).

I continued on my path. One by one little pools of light began to light up the bark on each of the many shea trees that dominated the landscape, and I could see the outlines of many, many figures - head down, eyes to the ground - pacing the fields.

I retreated to the forests that I knew well, anxious for this short while to make the most of the anonymity given to me by the night, and knowing that my GPS would save me if I were to get lost. The forest was empty of people – but the trees, albeit surrounded by thorns, were plentiful in caterpillars! By 5am I had quite a lot at the bottom of my bucket, and I decided to go and find my friend. She took me to the fields and I began to understood why no one collects in the forests – the shea trees in the fields are larger, evenly spaced, easy to find, and surrounded only by bare soil and young crops. This means that caterpillars are at a higher density, and are easier to spot. We wandered the fields, eyes to the ground, as a classic, enormous and spectacular sunrise flooded the sky above. Walking back, I met nearly every woman and child – and several men – whom I knew in the village, and we compared our bucketfuls. I resolved that today I’d go along to sell these caterpillars with my friend, and find out a bit about the local trade.
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​Left: A Shea tree stripped bare by the caterpillars (the leaves visible in the tree are those of parasitic plants; all the Shea leaves are reduced to their pale yellow spines. It's a bit like when English trees shed their leaves, and in winter the mistletoe is visible as a result). Right: a 7-cm long caterpillar eating a shea leaf

​A is for Agroforestry – the landscape here is dominated by fields of crops scattered with trees, mostly shea (Vitellaria paradoxa) and African locust bean (Parkia biglobosa).
 
B is for Bigamy - most men in the villages, when they can afford to, take a second wife. Islamic tradition here permits up to four wives.
 
C is for Caterpillars - this is why I’m here! C is also for ‘Chitoumou’, the name used across Burkina for the edible caterpillar Cirinabutryospermi.
 
D is for Dolo - the millet beer brewed in large terracotta pots by several families in the village, each of whom serve it in their courtyard as soon as it is ready to drink, in large dried gourd-halves for 100F per litre. It is drunk by men, women and children alike.
 
E is for Elephants - Burkina has one of the largest remaining elephant populations. They don’t often come to this part of the country often, although I saw them here in April.
 
F is for Fieldwork - I’m spending my days collecting data, and this includes collecting, measuring and weighing caterpillars, collecting samples of other insects, measuring trees and the defoliation caused by the caterpillars, doing bird surveys in fields and forests, and also conducting interviews with men and women in the village.
 
G is for Garden - I have some land outside my house that I’m allowed to cultivate. Rain is scarce, insects are abundant, and it’s late in the season, but I’ve planted some okra and aubergine.
 
H is for Herding - when a person buys  a cow, goat or sheep, s/he (probably he) can lease it to a person who is essentially a wandering shepherd (and of a distinct ethnicity). The shepherd is responsible for grazing and caring for the animals, and in return is entitled to one of every two newborn calves/lambs/kids. Most of the people shepherding the animals are young boys, in groups of two or three.
 
I is for Immigrants - there are many economic/climate immigrants living here, most of whom were born in the northern, dry, Sahelian regions of Burkina Faso and travelled here in the past few decades in search of fertile land. They speak a different language and are of a different ethnicity, but (partly also because of female exogamy - women often marry outside their village) many ethnicities live here, speaking many languages, and there is no animosity evident along ethnic lines.
 
J is for Jula - the main local language, although Moore and Dagara are also spoken commonly, and those who have been to school (most of the men, few of the women, especially older women) speak some French.
 
K is for Karite - the French name for shea, the tree that dominates the landscape and yields sweet fruits, which contain a seed that is roasted and cracked to reveal a nut, which is then process to make shea butter. Shea butter is used locally as a cooking oil and as an ointment, and is sold to an international market for use in both confectionary and cosmetics. It is a major export crop for Burkina.
 
L is for Liana - found in the small remaining patches of forest, with one very common species bearing a sweetly sour orange fruit. During my first two months here, I often came back after forest surveys with pockets filled with this fruit!
 
M is for Moto - in the quiet of my house, which is surrounded by trees, scrub and fields with my nearest neighbour over half a kilometreaway, the only sound other than birdsong and thunder is the occasional motorbike passing by.
 
P is for Palm - there are many palm trees in one of my field sites, and they are tapped to make palm wine.
 
Q is for Quarrel - I’ve not yet seen any real disputes, unless you count an argument between husband and wife one day when he accused her of not preparing any food for him that evening and she retorted by pointing out that he hadn’t brought any food home with him for her to prepare. It was 10pm and they were drinking locally-distilled cane spirit.
 
R is for Religion - The village is a mix of Muslims (slightly in the majority) and Christians (a significant minority). They mix socially, and again, I’ve not seen or heard any animosity along religious lines.
 
S is for Spirits - of the otherworldly kind. There are at least two people in the village who communicate with spirits from the forest, on behalf of others. I’ve only just encountered it and am not sure how common it is. But there is one elderly man here who is allegedly so renowned that people travel all the way from Ouagadougou (the capital city, which is 6-7 hours away by road) to see him.
 
T is for Tailor - for clothes, most people purchase lengths of cloth known as ‘fani’, which are typically colourful and patterned, in batik, print or tie-dye, and are also worn without adjustment as a wrap-around skirt - and pay one of the village tailors to make their trousers, skirts, dresses, shirts. This is a far cheaper option than the few second-hand clothes that are sold for high prices on market day.
 
U is for Umami - the savoury taste, which here is achieved using fermented locust beans known as ‘soumbala’. Coincidentally, the fermentation is similar to that of Japanese natto.
 
V is for Velo - the most common form of transport here is the bicycle, and I now have one of my own!
 
W is for Water, Well, Wheelbarrow - Like many households here, I walk to the nearest groundwater well to get my water. But unlike the women and children who balance their 20 or 30 litre jerrycans on their heads or cycle with them strapped precariously on their bikes, I use a wheelbarrow.
 
X is for XX - women (and girls) here collect the water, work in the fields (hoeing, planting, harvesting), gather wood for the fire, buy and sell the produce at the village market, prepare the food, make and sell the beer - and all this with their babies strapped to their backs.
 
Y is if for YX - men (and boys) here do some of the work in the fields - they plough using hired cattle, and those who can afford to spray their crops with agrochemicals. Some men own businesses - they are mechanics, fixing bikes and motorbikes, or they have small shops selling soap, sardines, tea, sugar, etc. There are exceptions to every rule and tasks are divided along lines of both wealth and gender - but for the most part, men seem to have control of most of the wealth while women seem to do most of the physical labour required by everyday life.
 
Z is for Zebra-donkey