Expedition Diary: Inside a Rain Forest Quest

Stuart Pimm
for National Geographic News

March 5, 2004

(Page 2 of 4)

I ensure that my tent, pack, water bottle, and the remains of last night's pizza are with me. There's a break in the clouds and I'm off, accompanied by a worker from the fazenda.

As we cross into the next valley, the clouds break. At the landing spot, it's bright sunshine.

The fazenda worker and I get out, grab my gear and move well away from the helicopter—if wind tips the helicopter, the still-rotating blades will hit the ground, and the resulting shrapnel will turn me into hamburger. In a minute, the pilot is off to collect Maria and Alline at the fazenda.

Fifteen minutes later the helicopter is back in our valley but isn't coming this way. He lands a mile (1.6 kilometers) or more below us in a depression.

We wave. We strip off our shirts and wave them. Through the binoculars, I watch Alline and Maria Alice unload gear. The helicopter leaves.

A silence descends. I slap on the sunscreen I had the good sense to pack. We call Maria Alice on our radio. "I told the pilot it wasn't the right place, but he said your site was not safe," she tells me.

"So why didn't he then come to fetch us?" I ask.

"I screamed at him that he had to. He ignored me and left," Maria Alice said.

"Well," I reply, "you have too much stuff to walk up to us, we'll have to come to you."

"Your companion is called Gilmar," Maria Alice tells me. He was expecting the pilot to return to the spot where he dropped the two of us off, as we all were. Now, not only does Gilmar have no way home, he has nothing but the clothes he's wearing.

Between us, Gilmar and I can just manage to carry everything we unloaded. The route down to Maria Alice and Alline is partly a bog filled with tussock grass six feet (two meters) tall. A few yards take us five minutes—and another five to get our breath back.

Gilmar and I head for a low forest, only to find it's a tangled thicket of bushes and bamboo. The only practical solution is to park the gear and cut a trail with our machete, then come back for the gear and repeat the process.

It takes us three hours to reach Maria Alice and Alline. By that time, the sun has turned to rain and we're sodden.

Maria Alice has already set up our mist nets, which catch small birds as they fly between the trees.

My job is to listen for the gray-winged cotinga, to play a tape of the cotinga's song to entice it to respond, and to record songs of birds we do not recognize.

That evening, glad that we have an extra tent for Gilmar, we set up our shelters in the rain.

The final insult is that the gas stove doesn't work. As you attach the burner, it's supposed to puncture the gas canister through a rubber seal. It doesn't.

The prospect of cold food for two days sinks in. Out comes a pocketknife. We puncture the canister and screw on the burner before all the gas escapes. Hot noodles taste so good in the field.

Saturday, December 6, 2003

The day starts cold and misty, then variously fogs, drizzles, sheets, spots, torrents, and all the other verbs we Britons have for rain.

As the rest of us band birds and listen for songs, Gilmar cuts a trail up the hillside to our north, in the direction of "home," the fazenda—just in case something goes wrong, we tell ourselves.

Scientists know almost nothing about the gray-winged cotinga, other that that its closest relative is the black-and-gold cotinga. The black-and-gold's song is one of the extraordinary sounds of the Brazilian mountains—a pure whistle several seconds long that rises by half a note midway through the call.

They say the gray-winged cotinga occupies forest at a higher elevation than the black-and-gold cotinga. That worries me, because I'm hearing plenty of black-and-golds, which suggests we're too low. And if we want to climb higher, the going is anything but easy.

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