Students and faculty stand together at the base of a huge tree.
By Denice Wardrop
We arrived at Los Amigos Biological Station yesterday afternoon, after a 5 hour journey upriver by boat from a Town called Laborinto. Laborinto is a gold mining town; think of Deadwood, move it into the present, give it a South American flair, and put it in on a river. Quite a place, but I’ll describe that some other time; I’ll just say that the public bathroom is an experience not to be missed. The general price for bathroom use in Peru is half of a sole to use it, 1 sole if you want paper (it’s about 3 soles to the dollar). The students have all gained a valuable skill concerning taking care of bodily functions.
Life at a tropical research station is something unique, so I thought that I’d simply describe a day. Life is structured around three things: meals, the time that the generators operate (electricity for charging devices), and wifi use. Meals cannot be missed, since snacks and groceries are basically unobtainable when you are 5 hours upriver by boat from anywhere with even a small store. Your day starts at sunrise, approximately 5:30 a.m., because your cabin is merely a screened-in porch, no windows or curtains to be found. Even with the screening, you sleep under mosquito nets, which still give a magical quality to bedtime since it reminds you of blanket forts when you were a kid. The trip to the bathroom generally involves turning on a light and seeing if anything scurries; most often not, although much is possible. You greet whatever animal roommate you might have (mine is a tiny treefrog that I’ve named Benny, for some completely unknown reason), rinse off your face, and put on the same pair of field pants that you’ve worn for three days straight and maybe a clean shirt. Fortunately, any kind of vanity has been long abandoned by everybody, which is quite refreshing. Breakfast is 6:30 to 7:00 a.m., and field time in the morning in the rainforest is precious (animals are most active, and it’s cool), so everyone here is pretty business-like about fueling up and heading out. Names, times, and destinations are written in chalk on a big blackboard, giving the place an aura of a TV medical drama; people are heading out to track ocelots, follow troops of monkeys, census birds, map habitats. You don long pants and long-sleeved shirts, cover exposed areas in bug spray, and never, ever forget your water. Our morning hike involved 4 hours on a few of the 15 miles of trails that are maintained through the jungle so that researchers can access all parts of the reserve; the sights and sounds are simply overwhelming. For example, there are 200 tree species in all of Pennsylvania, but you will see 200 species of trees in a single half-acre here. You strain your ears, trying to tell bird calls from monkey chatter from sounds of things moving through brush. The sheer lushness and diversity and cacaphony of life can be one of the most moving and intense spiritual experiences ever; 5 kinds of monkeys, 150 ft high Brazil Nut Trees, Ficus trees with buttressed roots that extend 50 meters into the forest, thousands of shades of green, a trail of leafcutter ants crossing the forest floor, hundreds of meters long and all carrying pieces of leaves on their back, giant blue morpho butterflies flitting about, macaws flying overhead, and on and on it goes (and this was truly on our morning hike). And so you arrive back before noon, shower off all of the sweat and bug spray (cold shower, mind you, no hot water here) and hope to make it in time for lunch, which is only served from noon to 1:00 p.m. Since meals are served in the dining hall, it is always a noisy and social place at mealtime. The only starch that is served is generally rice, and since it has been a while since anyone has had bread (no oven, and it would have to be baked from scratch every day), people speak of breadmakers with a reverence generally reserved for priests and their mother’s cooking. What is palpable here is a sense of urgency to everyone’s study. Just a few facts for context: 33 percent of all species on Earth occur in the Amazon; there are 40,000 species of plants alone; there are over 120 species of ants here at the station; 25 percent of prescription medications are derived from Amazon plants (e.g., tamoxifen). Given the richness, the potential for loss of species from habitat destruction (e.g., deforestation, gold mining) alone has been estimated at 20-40 percent; the loss due to climate change could take that number even higher.
So here is an analogy: just as we are learning to read the Book of Life, we are tearing out pages at an alarming rate. And so the people here are trying to learn as much as they can, as fast as they can, trying to stay ahead of the page-tearing. Quite a motivation.
We took a short siesta after lunch, as many do since it is the largest meal of the day; since the animal activity slows down in the heat of the day, most researchers take this time to do the documentation, data dump, and other mundane parts of field work. We held class for a few hours in a large screened in classroom, designing and building the survey questionnaire that the students will use as they interview ecotourists, researchers, lodge/station managers, and community members. The students then headed out for another hike with our guide, Esau, to see as much as they could and to try to gain experience in identifying the 7 plants assigned to each. There is an old Chinese proverb that says, “If you wish to know something, learn it’s name”; being able to at least pick out a few familiars makes the rainforest experience less daunting (even though your “tree” might only occur once every acre or so).
Joe and I checked out our field site for tomorrow, it was getting dark on the way back and we stopped at the top of a new overlook created by an enormous and recent landslide. We were about 100 ft above the river, the sunset was magnificent, and the sounds were the macaws returning to their nests and the slow, easy swish of the wide and brown river as it rounded the bend. There was unusually bright half moon; when we encountered a gap in the forest our moonshadows were clear and distinct. We all arrived back in time for yet another cold shower before dinner (never have multiple cold showers per day been a chosen activity). It is dark by 6:00 p.m., the generators operate from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m., dinner is 6:30 to 7:00 p.m., and so the the Dining Hall is bright and visible and abuzz. Electronic devices are plugged in and charging, people are using the wifi (with no bandwidth it is painfully slow, there is a general rule that you avoid downloading any video) and swapping stories about the days successes and challenges (e.g., the female ocelot eluded her tracker for yet another day, a new bird for the station was observed, the monkey survey yielded the usual data). We have learned from experience that the fastest way to make friends at a remote field station is to bring along Girl Scout cookies, and so we passed out two boxes of Thin Mints and a box of Samoas (the boxes are a bit bruised from the long journey to another hemisphere, but at least we managed to keep the students from opening them). A minor food riot ensued, we have friends for life, mission accomplished. We had an evening class using our new pico projector, evening classes trade off with presentations from a resident researcher. And that’s the magic of a research station; you get immersed in questions and investigations that you couldn’t imagine, while the researchers get to practice communicating their projects.
Everything shuts down by 9:00 p.m.; the generators turn off, the Dining Hall goes dark, everyone heads for the dormitory or cabins. You look up to the sky and something shifts deep inside you, because the very stars are different from the ones that you know and you realize that you are far from home. Even with the moon, the Milky Way shows up as a virtual ribbon across the sky. You don your selected sleeping gear (for me, its tights and a long sleeved shirt to hopefully provide one more deterrence to the odd mosquito that makes it under the net), you tuck in the mosquito net under your mattress along every edge, and are generally fast asleep by 10:00 p.m., with crickets and frogs providing a range of lullabies. Not a bad day.