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After leaving graduate school, I was hired to develop and direct a very (many argued overly so) ambitious ecological experiment deep in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon. I lived in Brazil from 1979 to 1988, totally immersed in this work. I have been sitting on a half-baked manuscript chronicling those most exciting years in my life for (egads!) decades. Every so often, one of my friends prods me with a question about "the book." The last nudge finally got me to at least begin working on it again and to share what we've got so far over the Internet.

So, here is the very first installment. More to come!

 

One Hundred Months Without Solitude: Tales from Amazonia

By

Rob Bierregaard

(& Others?)

 

Table of contents:

Preface/Introduction.

Chapter 1. The lost city of Manaus is discovered. How I got myself into this mess, what the project's all about.

Chapter 2. Getting there is half the fun? Adventures and misadventures to and fro, with an introduction to South America and some amazing figures about Amazonia.

Chapter 3. Pacific parasites. The geological history of the continent. Plate tectonics and mountain formation; Lake Amazon, pleistocene savannas? Why are there so many species?

Chapter 4. Manaus and Manoarans. The history of the city and a bit of what life is like on the frontier.

Chapter 5. "Speak more slowly, please!" The first year at the helm. Manaus and Manoarans. Running the project alone as ornithologist, driver mechanic, cook, paymaster, accountant, topographer, photographer, social worker, and a few other things.

Chapter 6. Machetes and mateiro (woodsman) lore. Snakes that inject venom with their tails. Siren‑like Uiapurus (Musician Wrens) lure mateiros deep into the forest. Curupira, the forest spirit that protects game and can't be tracked as his feet are on backwards. Roque disappears into the night ghosts at camp

Chapter 7. First impressions of the forest--There's a pattern here?? The first camps ‑ why do they always fall down on top of you at night in the rain? ‑ Finding the reserves, early "topography"‑ the boss doesn't get lost, he's just looking for a new way to get there. How we learned to stop worrying but never learned to love the damn place.

Chapter 8. Antimony junkies. These are a few of our favorite diseases.

Chapter 9. 100 miles with no brakes. The high risk of getting from here to there on 4, sometimes 3 and occasionally 2 wheels.

Chapter 10. Gringos in the MOTFA. Project researchers, interns, media, and, yes, "How the MOTFA got its name".

Chapter 11. Murder at the Posto ‑ or why I don't pay the rent in person anymore. Our landlord wastes his brother‑in‑law as the latter threatens to blow up one of the gas pumps with his bic lighter. Violence on the frontier.

Chapter 12. Judy and the magic bottle. Amazonian moonshine.

Chapter 13. Bushmaster in the Bidet. Close encounters of the reptilian kind.

Chapter 14. Tadpole tales: 1,600 km of trails hiked in search of herpetological enlightenment and the ultimate frog. Some amusing natural history here. The horned frog, Ceratophrys cournuta, placed by Barbara (our resident herpetologist) in the "anything that fits" feeding guild. 32 stitches for a kiss ‑ the taming of macho Brazilians (Barbara writes this one).

Chapter 15. 20,000 birds in the net are worth 1 in the bush? How we trapped and banded 20,000 birds and what we found out about their sordid, private lives in the process.

Chapter 16. In an Eagle's Eyrie. Adventures of an arboreal peeping Tom.

Chapter 17. 500,000 ants can't be wrong. Moving an army ant colony by hand ‑ Scorpions 8‑(10?)‑stepping in my hair, tarantulas ‑ army ants invade camp ‑ wasp nests we'd really rather not have encountered ‑ Marcos studies of parasitic wasps ‑ leaf cutters ants, the first farmers. Terry Irwin's insect collection lead us to believe there are more than 30,000,000 species on the planet (we used to think 3 ‑ 5,000,000!).

Chapter 18. Busman's holidays ‑ trip to northern savannas ‑Wapaxana Indians playing cricket ‑ oil rig visit for Christmas Balbina ‑ hydroelectric projects as disasters

Chapter 19. Burning the forest down to learn how to save it. Just how do you burn something so wet down? Why do we care? What are the threats ‑ cattle, lumber, minerals, hydroelectric, colonization.

Chapter 20. What have we learned ‑ what happens in small rainforest patches‑ Is there any hope?

  

Preface/Introduction

I have written this both to amuse and inform. This is an account of the 100 months I spent at the helm of the Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project, the largest ecological experiment ever intentionally designed and carried out. Robert May argues that the near removal of right whales from the Atlantic Ocean is the biggest ecology study ever done, but our study of what happens to the tropical rainforest when it is“fragmented”was indeed planned from the start and meant to answer important ecological and conservation questions.

For only the first few months did I work alone. As I built a crew of researchers, interns, and a local staff, Manaus became my home and the Project my family. The whole project moved into my house. When our first computer—an Apple ][ Plus with 64K of RAM!—was installed in my bedroom (the only air-conditioned room in the house), it seemed that most of the project followed it. Field interns from the States and southern Brazil moved into the house as well. We soon had to rent the adjacent house to hold us all. As ringmaster of a rather chaotic circus of a field research station and in-town dormitory-office, solitude was a thing of the past. I don't know why I figured out that my stay in Manaus was 100 months—it just came to me, and with it, the title of these memoirs.

The project was such a family affair that I find it very hard to write in the first person. I know that much of what I experienced and learned was shared by most those who spent time with us in the forest, so I feel comfortable speaking for us all in much of what follows.

Our lives were changed during the time we lived in Brazil, and it is our hope that we can share some part of the perspective that one gains after spending a significant amount of time away from North America. We came to the Amazon for a number of reasons and have come to believe very deeply in the importance of preserving this most vivid expression of all the diversity that life on our planet can be.

There are practical reasons to save the rainforests. If we fell too many of them, we may very well alter the planet's climate. Scientists who worry specifically about this sort of thing differ in their predictions of how the climate will change, not upon the question of whether it will change or not. It is relatively unimportant how the climate changes; if it does indeed change, society will have to pay very dearly to adjust to the changes. Rainforests play important roles in the global climate.

Rainforests also represent a wealth of biological information ‑‑ both in the very genetic material of the plant and animal species that exist in them and are as yet undescribed--as well as in the knowledge of indigenous peoples who have lived in these forests for so many millennia. With each hectare that is cleared of its native forest, with each aboriginie who abandons the ways and knowledge of his people for the lure of the transistor radio, we have all become a little bit poorer.

Although we will mention some of these practical reasons to save the world's rainforests, for us it is sufficient to say that they are wonderful places, which we as a species have no right to destroy. All the more so since the warning call has been sounded. We are making the conscious decision to trade rainforests for cattle, or minerals, or a little bit of hydroelectric power; for our own short‑term profit we are irrevocably denying our children one of the wonders of our world.

Our hope in writing this book is to share with you some of the sense of wonder and discovery and adventure that we have enjoyed while working in the Amazon. While this approach is unlikely to convert anyone who doesn't already feel that we are straining the planet's life support systems beyond the breaking point, perhaps we can reach a few and arm those already on the bandwagon with a few facts with which to spread the word.

We tell of adventures and misadventures in a very light tone and intersperse a fair dose of natural history amongst the not-­so‑very tall tales. We hope that readers in search of interesting information about the Amazonian rainforest will bear with us through the stories and find enough biology to hold their interest and that those more interested in the escapades of a slightly crazy bunch of gringos in the middle of the Amazon will not find the biology too pedantic or complicated.

For those readers who have not been so fortunate to travel abroad, or have done so on packaged tours where everything is planned and scheduled and you might just as well have watched it on PBS without leaving the comforts of home, perhaps we can offer some insights into another perception of the world. Ours is not necessarily the best.

We have come to love the people and culture of Brazil. As we have come to know the people and learn their language, we have learned many things that we never would have discovered about our own culture. There are Portuguese words and Brazilian gestures that once learned make you wonder how people can communicate at all in English ‑‑ and there are words and concepts whose absence in Portuguese is both frustrating and enlightening to those sensitive to such cultural nuances. After living in Brazil we will never be able to live in just one world again.

So share with us 100 months without solitude in the planet's premiere showcase of what evolution can do with a whole lot of sunlight and a whole lot of time.

Chapter 1. The lost city of Manaus is discovered.

The adventure that was to take me to the other side of the Equator 1,000 miles up the Amazon river for 100 months began incongruously in front of a crackling fire one cold, February night way back in 1976. I was at Drover's Rest, the last wayside inn where l8th‑century Virginian farmers and merchants once stopped to rest as they hauled their wares and drove their livestock to the nation's capital. My visit was an innocent one ‑‑ little did I expect that that night would be so pivotal in my life; I had merely come to enjoy the kindly fruits of the earth across Tom Lovejoy's table. Tom, at the time, was Vice‑President for Science at World Wildlife Fund and the current owner of the former inn.

Tom and I shared, 10 years apart, a truly inspirational biology teacher, Frank Trevor, at a truly remarkable prep school in New York's Hudson valley. Trevor somehow managed to propel a surprising number of his students into productive careers in biology. Graduating from Millbrook 10 years after Tom, I sort of caught up with him at Yale, where he was a graduate student when I began my undergraduate years there. Trevor, sensing two birds of a feather in his two students had arranged for me to meet when I started at school in New Haven. Tom, in turn had introduced me at least by name to some of the birds of the Amazonian rainforest. Until that night I was quite sure that my involvement with tropical birds and forests would probably be more or less limited to such a distant footing.

I met Tom at his house on the hill above all the biology buildings and Yale School of Forestry one late summer day. He was recently arrived from his field site in Belem, at the mouth of the Amazon, where he had been banding rainforest birds for a couple of years.

During my undergraduate days, after I had dutifully scraped breakfast dishes at one of the residential colleges for a semester or two as my work-study job, Tom arranged for me to be shifted to the biology department, where I spent the next two and a half years as his research assistant. My duties were to supervise the coding and key‑punching of Tom's doctoral thesis data on what are now considered stone‑age card punches. While he disappeared sporadically to Belem, Brazil, at the mouth of the Amazon River to attempt to unravel the ecological mysteries of one of the most species‑rich bird communities on the planet, I remained New Haven‑bound, translating field slips written in a combination of numbers, Portuguese (of which I knew not a word), English, and Latin. To make my duties more challenging, words in the latter two idioms were spelled phonetically by Brazilian field assistants whose formal education had clearly stopped early in the grade school progression. I was quite sure that the workers had been quite ambivalent about which hand they should use to fill out the field cards. When one hand tired, they just switched to the other. My alternating groans and sighs of relief as the pencil tracks changed from bad to worse or vice versa must have been distracting at best to those around me at the computer center.

 Six years later, as Tom and I squeezed the last few drops from another memorable bottle of France's finest, the birds and trees of the Amazon rainforest remained familiar by name and, in a few cases, by number. Myrmotherula hauxwelli, Eschweilera, and Pipra pipra seemed like old friends, even though I had no idea what they looked like. That one had bark and leaves and the other two feathers I knew, but that was about the extent of my familiarity with them. I have no doubt that I'll go to my grave remembering the computer code for the most common bird in the Belem study, a 1/2 oz woodcreeper whose elaborate scientific name, Glyphorhynchus spirurus, I had, for the benefit of the IBM mainframe computer, translated hundreds of times to 0939. I would trade one of my cherished possessions ‑ a little one, anyway ‑ to be able to use that memory location in my mind for something a bit more useful.

 As we sat on the living room rug pouring over large maps of some place called Manaus, whose very existence up until about 5 minutes previously had been as closely guarded a secret to me as the whereabouts of Atlantis, Tom told me of his recent trip to this lost city somewhere in Brazil. The latin names of my old friends began to whirl around in my head. He explained that he had been to Manaus to talk to scientists at Brazil's National Institute for Amazonian Research, or INPA, as it's known in a land nearly as rich in acronyms as it is in tropical birds, about the possibility of running a gigantic (no other word, save perhaps preposterously ambitious, seems appropriate) ecological experiment.

 At the time (1976) the world's attention was being drawn, in large part by Tom himself, to the alarming rate at which the rainforests of the world were disappearing. Tom's charge at World Wildlife Fund—he was the first Ph.D. on the staff—was to apply his scientific training and expertise to the development of conservation strategies for tropical forests. This shift from almost exclusively sentimental to scientific justification was important for World Wildlife Fund and for conservation in general. Indeed, the need for rigorous science in the face of ominous environmental and ecological trends was attracting the attention of a burgeoning number of biologists. The Society for Conservation Biology was at some embryonic stage at the time—the first volume of its journal would be published 5 years later.

 A controversy was raging in the technical journals read by ecologists and conservationists. The debate had been sparked by a paper published by Drs. Dan Simberloff and Larry Abele of Florida State University. In their paper, Simberlof and Abele argued that ecological theory relating to islands and the numbers of species that can coexist on them cannot be used to predict whether more species would be conserved by a single large reserve or several small ones of roughly similar combined area. It is well known that islands support fewer species than nearby mainland areas of similar size and that large islands tend to support more species than small ones. A decade or so earlier, Robert MacArthur of Princeton University and E. 0. Wilson of Harvard University had proposed an elegantly simple explanation of this pattern. They argued that species' populations on small islands would be smaller than those on larger islands and therefore would be more likely to go extinct, just as someone starting with five chips would be more likely to go broke playing roulette than someone starting with 100. They also argued that islands farther from the mainland would be less likely to be colonized by individuals of a species that had become locally extinct on the island. Using these two concepts, they could predict that big islands close to the mainland should have more species than a small island similarly close to shore. Likewise, a small island near shore should have more species than one of comparable size more removed from the mainland.

 These predictions dove‑tailed neatly with observations from real islands and the "theory of island biogeography" gained widespread, but not universal acceptance.

 The conceptual leap from oceanic islands to isolated patches of forest in a sea of corn, or soybeans, or even parking lots is not a great one. Conservationists quickly latched onto the idea and applied it to nature reserves and conservation areas, many of which can be likened to "islands" of forest (or prairie, marshland, or whatever) in a "sea" of man‑altered habitat. Based on MacArthur and Wilson's theory of island biogeography, conservationists argued that, given that the goal of conservation is to maintain species richness, the bigger a conservation area ‑ be it a national park, a wildlife sanctuary, or whatever, the better. To be fair to Simberloff and Abele, it must be said that they never proposed that small reserves are preferable to large ones. They simply pointed out that one couldn't use island biogeography alone to defend the creation of large reserves when there might well be advantages to several smaller reserves in the place of one large one. A series of smaller reserves, each of which would admittedly have fewer species than a large reserve, might each support a slightly different group of species, such that, when taken in aggregate the total number of species in the smaller reserves could conceivably be more than in one large reserve of similar area.

 No small number of scientists were alarmed that unscrupulous developers might latch onto this idea and use it to justify ravaging extensive stands of pristine habitat, leaving in their wake countless "reserves" so small that only extinction could await those species able to persist at all in the habitat islands.

 As the intellectual lines were drawn and salvos fired by both camps, Tom realized that Simberloff and Abele's critics were arguing from a rather weak position. None of the islands that were used to show how many species would be lost in small patches of habitat, with the exception of Barro Colorado Island in Panama, had been studied prior to their insularization. Tom saw the need for an experimental approach. There was no need for any more theories or speculation about how many species would disappear from a reserve of a given size; it was time for someone to get his hands, feet, and come to think of it, the whole rest of himself good and dirty in the field watching, studying, measuring the process of species loss in reserves of different sizes. As the fates would have it, one of those someones turned out to be me.

 After his years of field work in Brazil, Tom knew of the Brazilian law that requires any landowner developing forested land in Amazonia to leave half his land untouched, as standing forest. Here Tom saw the chance to manipulate a destructive process to a good end. If the ranchers would be willing to leave some of the 50% standing in the middle of the pastures they were opening to graze cattle, a crew of field biologists could mark off those very areas, study them while they were part of extensive, virgin forest, and then continue to monitor changes in the ecosystems within the plots after they were isolated from the adjacent forest. Analyses could later relate the number and kinds of species that disappeared from the forest islands to the size of those very islands. The idea was preposterous, but might just work.

So Tom packed a bag with the appropriate tropical garb and a wild idea and flew to the Amazon to meet with scientists at INPA and officials at the Manaus Free Trade Agency. The Free Trade Agency (SUFRAMA) oversees, among other things, the deforestation and ranching operations in a special agricultural district of about 500,000 hectares, whose southern border lies about 30 km north of the city of Manaus. I think, if pressed, Tom would admit to having been a bit surprised at the warm and enthusiastic reaction his plan received. The INPA scientists were all for it and the SUFRAMA bureaucrats munificently promised to cede a 10,000 hectare tract of land to the project.

Several months after his return, as we talked late into the night about the plan in front of that warm fire, I began to wonder if I might not be headed for the tropics. Tom told me that he planned to set up forest reserves of 0.1, 1, 10, 100, 1000, and 10,000 hectares to study the area that different rainforest species required to survive. I was a couple of years from finishing my own Ph.D. thesis, so the timing looked like it might be perfect, and the idea was intoxicating.

As I drove home, no doubt remained in my mind that I would soon be headed for this city somewhere in the rainforests of Brazil. As soon as I got home, I cracked out my Rand McNally and discovered out just where it was that I was heading. I also found out that a hectare is about two and a half acres.

I got back to work on my studies of ecological community structure in birds of prey and waited for the phone to ring.

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