Home-making in Suriname
AFTER JUST BARELY FINISHING MY LAST-MINUTE TASKS before a trip I’d signed on to as a replacement only a week earlier, I boarded an airplane with one small piece of luggage and arrived after midnight at Suriname’s Paramaribo-Zanderij International Airport. There were no lights in any direction. The jungle was dark. I was approached by a cabdriver who, after a one-hour drive at high speed along a straight narrow road, dropped me off at a hotel where I had been instructed to appear. It was near midnight by then. I stepped onto a silent unlit street into warm humid air. And as I contemplated what to do next, a man walked toward me. He gestured for me to follow him, and with little more ado he led me off the street and unlocked the hotel door and led me through a short dark hallway to a room. Thankful and tired, I stepped into it. My eyes adjusted to the gloom and—I beheld a woman with one bare leg protruding from under a sheet on one of two narrow beds. I took the other, waiting to make introductions in the morning.
Early the next day I met up with not only my roommate, the presumed cook, but also the other two members of our Peabody Museum of Yale University team coming here to collect birds in some pristine mountains where no humans had reputedly ever been before. I had as a college student collected birds in Africa for the same museum and therefore eagerly accepted the invitation, perhaps to relive a time when I was still a wanderer without a home.
We taxied to the “Hi-Jet” Helicopter Services. It’s the only place in Suriname where helicopters can be chartered, and three of them were parked there. We met Glenn, a former bush pilot from Alaska, who had had military training and would fly us in. I was curious to find out how we would land in the jungle. He confided that he didn’t know but offered: “I guess we’ll have to look for our own LZ”—Vietnam-speak for “landing zone.” This was not Vietnam, though, and as far as I knew there are no open spaces unclaimed by trees in an undisturbed tropical jungle, especially in a vast expanse of mostly unnamed mountains. I was thinking of my home now, the New England forest, and my hill in Maine, where keeping my clearing open is an annual chore. However, our leader, Kristof, had mentioned that a herpetologist had at one time flown over the Wilhelmina range where we were going, looked down, and seen what he thought was a bare spot.
Suriname is a South American country of about 262,000 square kilometers that harbors the largest unexplored forest area in the world, and it is adjacent to the great Brazilian rainforest. Most of the people there live along the northern (Atlantic) coast, but our plan would land us in the interior, somewhere among the countless unnamed peaks in the sea of forest surrounding them. Tall mountains are like islands for birds that are at home there. Stranded there, they may evolve to become new varieties and perhaps species, similar to how Darwin’s finches differentiated into a variety of species stranded on the different islands of the Galápagos. That was why we were going there: to try to discover a new species of bird.
All systems were finally go on the third day, after extensive bureaucratic discussions over which and how many “specimens” we would be allowed to take, and whether or not if we took two blood samples and a feather from the same bird we skinned and stuffed that was one specimen, or four. As far as I know, all of the legal issues were not resolved. But we were assigned to take along two men from the Suriname Game Department. One, named Sami, was an elderly bald man of ebony complexion wielding a large bush knife, the necessary tool for advancing through jungle. His steady disposition won our immediate trust. The other, much younger, was more of the hip-hop generation and probably more at home in town than in the jungle. Our cheerful copilot, Lorenzo, a Surinamese of part Amerindian extraction, clad in a bright orange jump suit, beckoned us to load up, and he made sure we were strapped and packed in like sardines in a can. He gave the thumbs-up to Glenn, who then gunned the engine, and we lifted up in the roar of the twirling blades. Only a few seconds later, we were already zooming over the treetops at perhaps some 160 kilometers per hour. And so for the next hour we flew on over unbroken forest that was, after a few minutes, devoid of human signs. The tree crowns were closely interstitched in a quilt of shapes—flat tops, bulges, globes—and colors—mostly a study in greens but with tints of yellow, blue, and brown. Occasionally we passed a flowering tree that would stand out like a light—perhaps one in bright white, pink, purple, yellow, orange, and occasionally also rich blue. I peered down to one dead tree that cradled a huge raptor nest in a crotch, perhaps that of a harpy eagle. A flock of about a half-dozen scarlet macaws passed directly below us. It was an entrancing ride over the mostly green carpet, and it seemed to go on smoothly, tranquilly, and mesmerizingly forever—that is, at least until we got into the interior, where we started to see clouds, and then hit thick fog. There had, so far, not been a single open space between the trees. Not a speck of ground was visible the whole time. Not one LZ in sight. Glenn tried to skirt the cloud banks because the helicopter was not equipped with radar to detect what they might hide, such as possibly the precipitous mountains that we were approaching.
The fog banks got larger and became more frequent, but turning back and forfeiting a nineteen-thousand-dollar ride was a hard option. We had no way of knowing if we could find clear skies on another day and, I presumed, again that much cash. We still had a long way to go, but for now, still in the lowlands, there was a cleared area, possibly a small airstrip. We turned to find it and landed there to wait out the weather. Here, I saw puffbirds digging their nest holes in the sandy, undisturbed grassy runway, next to a hand-painted sign reading “Vlieguela Paesoegroenoe.” There were no aircraft here except ours. In a bush near where we landed, a dark sparrow-size bird hopped endlessly back and forth in a monotonous dance. We walked to a nearby river and saw deep dark water flow by. A man in a dugout canoe paddled by, and one after another, Uraniidae—day-active moths that superficially look like swallowtail butterflies—crossed over the water, each of them flying in almost precisely the same direction. It was a migration of some sort, and it didn’t make any sense to me. Where were these moths going, and why?
After a wait of a couple of hours, Lorenzo had us load up and we lifted off, but within several minutes Glenn turned around and we came back to the same spot; it was still too risky to fly. We again went to the river and took pictures. A group of kids appeared and posed with each of us for photos at the helicopter. We were clearly still in civilization. We still had a long way to go.
Eventually Glenn decided to give it yet another try. This time we flew on farther, yet dense fog banks reappeared. He tried to fly around them. Steep rocky cliffs suddenly emerged in front of us. Glenn swerved the machine, making a hairpin turn to avoid being smashed by cliffs or trapped by the fog. After several such hairpin maneuvers we sat clutching our seats, white-knuckled, sweat dripping from our faces. Those who could turn pale did. I smelled vomit.
It was more difficult than ever for me to imagine how there could be an LZ among steep, densely jungled mountains. But after skimming close over the peak of one and then down its steep slope on the other side, we finally spied a black-brown patch that could only be rock. Glenn instantly swooped down and tilted the machine so we could look more closely. We then turned a tight circle so Lorenzo could get a close look from the open door: he gave the thumbs-up—“It’s good!” There was enough space that the rotor would not hit trees. Gas was running low—there was not enough left to search further and also allow the copter to fly back.
We landed on the rock shelf, jumped out, and unloaded. In a couple of minutes, Lorenzo had jumped back on and the rotors sprang back to full force, the helicopter leaping over the lip of our rocky place, and then disappearing as a speck between the craggy peaks that were still half shrouded in clouds. The sound of the engine faded, and we were alone.
We had landed on ancient black-weathered sandstone strewn with flat loose rocks between which grew some grass, small aloes, and orchids. A bare ledge rose steeply to a forested ridge above us. A three-hundred-meter drop-off into a forested valley yawn
ed below us, from where a river roared. Dark tree-clad mountains on the other side of the drop-off showed two huge yellow scars of steep ground where a forest had recently been pulled down by a landslide. Strange birds? One sounded like a saw ripping through metal, unlike anything I’d ever heard. Clouds started swirling down from the peaks, contracting our world. It was then, very soon, that we felt the first raindrops.
This, our new home for the next three weeks, we identified by the GPS coordinates of 3 degrees and 45.02 minutes north, and 56 degrees and 31.20 minutes west. We were in the Sipaliwini District of the Wilhelmina Mountains, at an elevation of 905 meters. These numbers, and only they (if Glenn and Lorenzo had secured them as we presumed), would mitigate the chances of our becoming permanent jungle residents, because our satellite phone, the only link to our homes, would become inoperative by the next day. But for now, the soon-to-arrive downpour had consequences for our trying to make ourselves a home before night.
A level place with soil for pegging down tents had to be found; tree stems were needed for poles; frames had to be set up for tarps to cover the tents. We needed not only poles, but also firewood and drinking water. None of this could have been even considered during our need, and then haste, to land. But we were lucky to find a patch of thin soil in a tangle of growth at the edge of our rock shelf. This was mangrove, and the trees’ gnarly brushy branches sent down a phalanx of solid roots into the ground. A thick, thin-stemmed tangle of bamboo filled in every square meter to create an almost solid wall. A saving grace was that a few thin trees had penetrated the thicket, and we used them to erect a framework that we lashed together with twine. Thankfully someone had thought ahead to bring this essential but easy-to-overlook item. We spread our tarpaulin over the frame to make a rough shelter, cleared the ground as well as we could of bamboo, and set up both our sleeping tents and a work tent. Major requirements for our temporary home had been met, except for water—but we soon got more than we wished for.
The rain picked up as darkness set in, and then we heard frogs. One that was stationed near us made a resounding, hoarse, muffled, and not very welcoming moof. Or was it a move? It repeated this call endlessly at about one-second intervals. The sound echoed around the hillsides and was answered by others. And then the heavens opened in a deluge the likes of which I had never before witnessed. The pounding, pummeling rain roared onto the tarp, and within minutes water came rushing down from the slope above us, straight into and through our campsite. We frantically dug trenches with our machetes to try to divert some of the flood but could not prevent it from washing under and around our tents. A wet and uncomfortable first night ensued, one not unlike others that followed, except for the fact that the aforementioned satellite phone was eliminated (despite having been wrapped in plastic as a precaution against wetting) as a possible connection to home and loved ones, who would be expecting to hear from us.
At dawn that first morning I crawled out from under my rumpled wet sheet, imprinted with the roots, rocks, and sharp tops of bush stumps we had not cut off quite flush against the ground. The mountains all around were shrouded in drifting veils of fog that wafted slowly up from the valleys, with tall trees standing in the fog on the ridge top above us. One ridge after another extended into the distance. Water roared over falls and between the precipitously steep mountains in rivers and rivulets, presumably eroding the gullies ever deeper, as they have for millions of years. These are the oldest rocks on Earth, Precambrian. Fog in the deeper valleys drifted up slowly like the smoke from a thousand fires—and thinned out and joined the clouds. A constant din of crickets was muted by the roar of the water and punctuated by strange grunts, whistles, trills, and screams of birds waking up to start a new day. The next day we found a coral snake slithering out from under a tent. But it wasn’t only snakes we worried about. Flies could be more dangerous, because you can’t always see them, and identification is difficult because the dangerous, disease-carrying ones don’t advertise themselves with bright colors. Even before I could hope on the first morning for the hot coffee that wasn’t, I learned from one of the crew members for the first time about a fly that injects a parasite that devours the host’s cartilage, starting with the nose, moving on to the ears, and then, as it multiplies, also the cartilage in the joints—it’s a painful death. Naturally, we tried to keep the work tent flap zipper tightly closed to keep out insects. But after three days of constant zipping and unzipping, the tent flap zipper zipped no more.
Sami, chopping brush with his machete to enlarge our space, found a big green snake, one he thought was a harmless “python” but later turned out to be an unusually aggressive and deadly viper. Kristof managed to lift it with a stick, grab it behind the neck, and inject it with Nembutal, at which point it opened its mouth and revealed long and pointy white fangs. Sami also made the first trail out of our enclosure, almost prison, on the rocks and found a nest of honeybees—the recently imported so-called killer bees—in a hollow tree—or rather, they found him.
The bees later also found the rest of us; they started entering our work tent and buzzing around as Kristof and I were skinning and stuffing birds after our morning hunts. With no sweets nearby, they were not after food. But, knowing what bees like for a home site, I suspected that they were scouts searching for a potential nest site. If they found our sheltered spot, such as a cozy corner under our tent flap, a suitable nest site, they might consider our temporary home a suitable permanent one of their own and bring their swarm. Thinking of my friend and colleague Tom Seeley’s work, I knew it was essential that they not get a quorum for a collective positive swarm decision, and I made a special effort to squash each and every one that got into our tent. I killed about a dozen.
Bird nests were high on our list of desirables, aside from their makers, and already on the second day we found some. Close to our tent at the edge of the clearing a wren had attached its nest to the tip of a long slender branch. This nest was clearly visible, but probably inconvenient for a rodent or a snake to reach. Another was hidden on the ground in grass by our bare ledge at camp. I showed it to Kristof, an ornithologist who is knowledgeable about South American birds and their nests, and he then looked around and found another one just like it within five meters of the first. This one, probably from the second clutch of the same bird, contained one white egg. We subjected the egg to the water test; it floated, indicating that it had been incubated, so this was indeed a one-egg clutch. Tropical birds face high nest predation by snakes, which find the nests by watching birds’ activity of returning and leaving. So, the fewer the young, the fewer the nest visits by the parents, which increases the possibility of raising the young to fledging. We set up mist nets and caught the bird. It was brown with a strikingly bright scarlet iris, identified as the rufous-tailed tyrant, Knipolegus poecilurus. This was the first bird we caught at our new home base, and it was new for Suriname. Furthermore, the nest had never been recorded even from other parts of the species’ range in South America.
In this forest the most conspicuous nests were those of termites. Some were a half-meter long and nearly as wide. They looked like grotesque black growths on the trees’ trunks. I cut into one of these termite homes with my machete and was surprised that the material it was made of felt and looked like plastic. It was obviously water resistant, since it does not dissolve in the constant drenching to which it is subjected. Like all termite nests, it likely contained the makers’ feces as a binder. Might its composition hold a secret to a new and less toxic plastic substitute?
Frogs, from the sound of it, were very much at home here. But of all of the various animals that are home builders, frogs are not distinguished. Instead, they have evolved ways of parenting that for the most part do not require nest making. Akin to primates and some spiders, they have invented ways of carrying their offspring around with them (on their backs or, in the case of one species, in their mouths).
All of the frogs I know back home simply deposit their eggs into ready-made pools. Bu
t here on our mountain, just above our campsite on the rocks, there were no natural pools. Even if there were a rock cranny that might hold some water where a frog might then lay its eggs and hatch tadpoles, all would be washed down the rock face by the water torrents that came through regularly at night. If not that, then the hot blazing sun would evaporate all moisture in the daytime. This rock face seemed the most unlikely frog habitat that I could possibly imagine, especially in this otherwise watery world. Would or could a frog really make a home here?
The question was rhetorical, because right there on the slope we found what looked like a mug-size gob of white foam jelly stuck to the rock and anchored to some grass coming out of a crack on the rock face. Looking closer, I saw a small frog half submerged in it. A frog in a nest of bubbles? It was no hallucination, though—because looking around I found a second one near it.
Suriname frog guarding eggs and already relatively large (four-centimeter) tadpoles in its pool, apparently created by bubbles
After I kept track of the frogs’ nests for sixteen days in succession, it was clear that these frogs had accomplished something elegant. The frog homes looked like the very common and familiar little foam bubbles (“cuckoo spit”) where the larvae of leafhoppers, genus Cicadella, live. Each leafhopper larva makes its own home from secretions of glands in its abdomen that it whips into a froth using an air pump (derived from its breathing apparatus). The bubbly froth protects the larva until it matures to the adult stage, when it looks like a miniature cicada, though usually a very colorful one such as bright green, blue, white, yellow, or black and decorated with red spots and stripes.
The Homing Instinct Page 15