Forests: RUSSELL MITTERMEIER: Into the Woods

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I soon discover how awkward I am on this kind of walk: if Mittermeier is Tarzan, me Jane's grandmother. I stumble frequently and cut my hand on a rock, but eventually I turn clumsiness to my advantage by forcing everyone to slow down. I am seeing the jungle for the first time. Here alone are 300 species of trees. They are at once the pillars and the superintendents of the rain forest, the frame of the house and its chief occupants. The spiny understory palm trees make baskets from branches growing out of their trunks, which become compost machines for falling leaves, which in turn sustain the trees. Since the soil is not deep enough for roots to penetrate, the larger trees like the ceiba have buttresses that lie flat on the platform of the forest; some of the narrower trees are supported by stilt-roots at the base that look like whisk brooms. The Parkia tree rises to the sun and spreads a flat umbrella over the others. There is full employment. Trees support lizards and insects, which themselves support birds and monkeys. Army ants bivouac and hang from tree limbs in living nests, with their pupae asleep in the center. Sometimes the trees become food; they can be devoured by strangler figs, which grow from seeds dropped by birds, then rise and surround a tree like a parasitic vine, swallow it whole and take its place.

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, according to Mittermeier, he would be better off. He tells me that the scariest sound he ever heard in the rain forest was the explosive crack of a dead trunk, followed by a rush of plummeting branches so loud it might have been a storm.

The sound of the moment is the screaming piha, a dull brown-gray bird whose sex appeal lies in its voice--specifically a three-syllable whistle that cuts through the air. As a mate getter it is evidently as attractive as the brilliant orange-and-black plumage of the cock of the rock, the cock of the walk of Suriname's birds. We catch sight of one preening on a high branch. Its head has a flattened crest that looks like a fan from the side, with an eye at bottom center. It makes its nest on the sides of rocks like the Voltzberg, where predators cannot get at it.

I see my first wild monkey, a squirrel monkey, small and elfin-faced. One hears a monkey in order to see it: it rustles branches or drops a piece of fruit. One's senses grow keener after a while; the idea of coming to one's senses takes on new meaning. I pick up a scent that the others identify as that of a tapir, a large, smooth, big-nosed mammal the size of a small cow. An electric blue butterfly flutters by my ear. Mittermeier snags a vine snake, green and camouflaged in its habitat. Everywhere is a sign of life and death. We pass gaping holes in the earth that giant armadillos call home, and the shell of an armadillo that a jaguar called lunch. A microteiid lizard shoots along a palm leaf lying close to where a column of golden ants marches across our trail.

Here's a remarkable structure: a kiddie pool, perfectly round, dug by a Hyla boans tree frog as a nest and nursery for its tadpoles. The pool's sand walls look as if they have been carved and smoothed by a sculptor; they hold the tadpoles until they are transformed into froglets.