Predators I Have Known - Alan Dean Foster [30]
For example, the first rule to remember while walking through rain forest and jungle is simple: No matter how attractive something is, no matter how much you may think you know about it be it plant or animal or unidentifiable, assume that everything you encounter can bite, sting, or otherwise hurt you.
With that caution in mind, I took my walks alone, reveling in the sounds and sights of the forest, free from the enervating chatter of visiting housewives and day-tripping tourists. I saw much that I had seen before and plenty that was new. Back at the lodge, I cheerfully discussed my encounters with the staff guides whenever they could spare a little time to sit and chat.
I was especially fond of the conversations I had with an energetic young female guide who I will call Anna. She had committed to the lodge for a year, following which paid sojourn she hoped to return to Lima to further her studies in tropical biology. We were sitting and talking one day when she happened to ask, “Is there anything you’d like to see that you haven’t seen? I mean, besides a jaguar or a harpy eagle or something really difficult?”
I thought a moment. “Yes. I’d like to see an isula ant nest.”
She blanched. I always thought that was purely a literary description of someone’s reaction, but you could see her actually go a little pale. I had expected a response, but not one quite so strong. I hastened to reassure her.
“I’ll be careful, I promise. I know the isula ant. I won’t take any chances.”
She hesitated a moment longer before nodding reluctantly. “OK. As long as you promise. I know you’ve been here before, but as a guest I’m still responsible for you.”
“I won’t do anything stupid.”
She rose from the rattan chair. “I actually know where there’s one not too far from here.”
Those who have never spent time in real rain forest assume that to see exotic and sometimes rare animals one has to spend days or at least hours traveling by canoe and hiking on foot. While this is true of certain specific locales like Langoué Bai in Gabon, in many other instances it’s a misnomer propounded by decades of television nature documentaries in which the suffering of the photographers to get the picture is emphasized in order to add drama to the process. Cutting back and forth from the subject plant or animal to a cameraman or woman sitting motionless in a blind can get pretty boring, and is as devoid of action as it is of the human interest so beloved of sponsors and their ratings monitors. Far more drama is to be had from watching people stumble through raging jungle streams, or rappel down rugged mountainsides, or shimmy up liana-draped trees. All of this does happen, of course, and sometimes it’s unavoidable in the course of conducting real science, but it’s not always the only way to see interesting things.
I remember spending a week in Ecuador’s fabulous Yasuní National Park trying to catch a glimpse of the park’s signature species, the golden-mantled tamarin. Like all small primates, this spectacular small monkey is not easy to see. Both on my own and in the company of the lodge’s guides I spent days searching for them, each time without success.
It was my last morning at the Napo Wildlife Center. The other handful of guests were all birders and were out in the forest busily indulging in the orgy of aves spotting that was their chosen passion. Yasuní is considered one of the best places in the world for birding. Birders are more obsessive about their pastime than a foot fetishist locked overnight in a Manolo Blahnik store. A jaguar could attack an anaconda directly behind them, and they would ignore it in their anxiety to identify the subspecies of parrot feeding on palm nuts that they happened to be observing.
Sitting alone on the open terrace of the lodge’s restaurant, I heard a burst of idiosyncratic chittering. Thinking it was only some common monkeys, I nevertheless roused myself and walked out behind the lodge, following the noise.