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:
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?
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.
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.
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