The elderly woman who came running into her village close to Astore in the early 90s claiming to have seen a giant black flying djinn; hadn’t. What she had seen was an animal that had been thought to have been extinct for a hundred years or more – a flying squirrel.
This was not any old flying squirrel; this was the gran’daddy of all flying squirrels, jet-black and with thick fur. It lived, and still does live, in the cliffs of remote parts of Gilgit-Baltistan and has since been found in other places than around Astore. It comes out to forage in the forests and glides from tree to tree using a membrane of skin that stretches between its front and back legs. And yes, if you had never seen one before you might well think it was something other than of this world. I saw a photo of a captured specimen at the offices of the Aga Khan Rural Support Programme in 1995, and like everybody else wondered at how such a large animal could have been thought extinct when it clearly was not.
Ismailimail 