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The Yarapa River Rainforest Reserve: An Ecology in Recovery
by David Rosane
Photos by D. Sherman
People call me birddave. The guy who studies birds with Dr. Eloy
Rodriguez. The nut who keeps on flying back and forth across the
Atlantic. Yes, I am a very fortunate individual. I live a precious,
albeit dichotomous life. For the past decade, I have had the privilege
of spending half of each year collecting chemo-ornithological data
for Cornell University, mist-netting tropical feathered jewels in
the deep, dark jungles of Venezuela, the luscious cloud forests
and coastal subtropical brush of the Dominican Republic. There,
I share the life of Indigenous communities. They generously invite
me into their villages, teaching me the foundations of their culture,
sharing their vast knowledge of animals and plants. I meet new people,
make new friends.
The rest of the year, I am lucky enough to live in Paris. When
in the urban jungle, I flirt with starlings, talk to pigeons, argue
with house sparrows. I have an office in my apartment; hammering
out new ideas for research, designing databases, editing footage
of wild bird behaviors, writing books and papers for the scientific
and popular audiences. Some days, I awake reading the paper, coffee
in hand. A few years ago, I stumbled across something that looked
like an obituary. A small paragraph at the bottom of the last page
of the International Herald Tribune. It was written by Dr. John
Terborgh, a great ecologist of the neotropical rainforests. The
title ran: “the silent Amazon forest”. It said, with reference
to the jungles around Iquitos, Peru : “ The expected sounds
of parrots, macaws and monkeys (are) missing.[] Today thousands
of loggers and miners, agents of the current bonanzas, are mopping
up any animal populations that survived the earlier booms[]. Soon,
I fear, the entire Amazon will be an empty forest, save for a handful
of inadequately protected parks and reserves.”
| I started to cry. I was born in the rainforest
of Guyana 36 years ago. My first words, so the family legend
goes, were : “shut up little birdies”. Of course I
didn’t want them to shut up. I needed peace as a baby.
And now, as an adult, having been a bird lover since the age
of 5, I have had no peace at all. Every where I look, every
where I go, I see destruction. The birds, their habitats, are
disappearing. I have, and continue to be, a broken albeit fortunate
individual. |
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Last year, thanks to the generosity of Dr. Charles “Charlie”
Mango, Dr Jay Hyman, George Howell and Ms. Esther Bonderaff, Dr
Rodriguez and I were invited to north eastern Peru to conduct our
summer research with a tribe of eager, brilliant, and wide-eyed
Cornell undergraduates. I feared the worst: were we to see no animals,
hear no birds, witness what American author and activist Terry Tempest
Williams calls “the unnatural history of death” ?
For four weeks, we hemmed ourselves into the mosquito netting and
grand hospitality of Yarapa River Lodge, located 4 hours by boat
south-east of Iquitos, on the western fringes of the great Amazon
forest. We studied the flora, fauna and biochemistry of the area.
Walking, talking, learning, discovering. We had the river in front
of the lodge. We saw the dolphins everyday, diligently foraging
for the hundreds of species of Amazonian catfish and piranha. Parrots
flew overhead in continuous shrieks of raucous laughter, screaming
for berries and palm fruits. Coral snakes slithered across our trails.
Tarantulas crept under our beds, tree-frogs leaped onto our heads.
I even stepped on a scorpion and survived. And yes, we did dance
with big blue morpho butterflies. Believe it or not, we even swam
with anacondas ! We were lucky. The power and vibrancy of life was
still there, although incomplete. Bruised and scarred. We found
the bullet-ridden corpse of a margay cat, a victim of the pelt-trade.
And the harpy eagle was no where to be seen, the haunting hoots
of nocturnal curassows were no where to be heard. They had disappeared.
The Yarapa river, whose source lies near the foothills of the Brazilian
border, is one of hundreds of tributaries of the great Ucayali River,
forerunner of the gargantuan Amazon. Endowed with white and black
water river systems, and the affiliated oligotrophic, nutrient poor
soils, sculpted over geological time into a mosaic of high and low
terrain, the Yarapa area is today an intricate mélange of
seasonally flooded Igapo and Varzea forests, and Terra Firme (or
high-ground) forests. Each of these forest types support its own
guild of plant and animal species. Together, they form a community
of communities, a kaleidoscope in which we managed to identify more
than 200 species of birds, countless arthropods including bullet
ants and rainbow colored orb spiders, and the ubiquitous nine species
of primates. The marmosets, capuchins, howlers, squirrel monkeys
and more. We also collected more than 100 species of medicinal plants.
Ecologists today have surveyed the rainforests of the world. They
have come to the conclusion that the highest biodiversity on earth
is found in Peru, along a rim of forest, a belt of chlorophyll-fueled
“green hell” connecting the Andean Foothills to the western
rim of the Amazonian basin. Yarapa lies just east of that belt,
and is thus potentially endowed with the second highest diversity
on plant earth. We must not let it go. The aforementioned mosaic
of Terra Firme, Varzea and Igapo is practically unique. The latter
two ecosystems are the most common in the Yarapa area, supporting
flood-tolerant trees and undergrowth plants adapted to the capricious
overflows of the Amazon.
The Varzea forests flourish along whitewater, sediment rich waterways
and streams. They offer us festoons of arboreal epiphytes; the bromeliads
and aroids that house Lilliputian frogs and mosquito larvae, that
anchor their celestial existence to the towering 35 meter heights
of Bombaceae, Rubiaceae, Moraceae and Leguminosae trees. In the
early morning, these forests resonate with the piping serenades
of the musician wren, the ringing decrescendos of wood-creepers.
At night, you hear the flip-flop wing beats of some 50 species of
bats; the insectivorous, the nectar-sipping, fruit eating or blood-sucking
chiropterans. They fly by, caressing your ears with the encouraging
sound of biodiversity. The power of DNA, the life-force of natural
selection.
The Igapo forests, on the other hand, root themselves in the sandy
soils bordering blackwater lakes and clearwater rivers. They are
not as rich in epiphytes, but do support fruiting plants of many
tropical families, with up to 48 species of trees per hectare. For
the fruit-addicted electric blue cotingas, screaming pihas and small,
multi-colored araçari toucans, the Igapo is a cornucopia
of tropical ambrosia. A paradise for the birds. A paradise to be
saved. A paradise that will be saved.
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For I have just received, as this
“Emanations” 4 goes to press, a busload of beautiful,
refreshing news. An email from Dr. Charles Mango : “David,
the land at Yarapa lodge has been increased and now encompasses
two square miles. The lodge has 3600 meters along the Yarapa
and extends almost 2000 meters into the jungle. The Yarapa River
Rainforest Reserve, on the opposite side of the river, constitutes
almost 8,000 hectares. This amounts to 24,000 acres. We have
a 50 year lease with the village of Jaldar. I am now trying
to increase the size of this reserve. We are working with the
other villages that are upriver from us in the hope of creating
a huge reserve along the entire Yarapa river. The idea recently
received impetus, when a few of the local lodges in the area
decided to market their trees for profit. The local village
heads approached Victor, my son and director of the lodge, and
asked for our help. We convened a meeting at the lodge with
the chiefs and the officials in Iquitos. It was here that the
idea to make the entire Yarapa basin into a reserve was born.” |
Thank you Charlie. Thank you Victor. I think I see the future.
I see respect for the dignity of human beings and biodiversity.
Thank you too, Dr. John Terborgh, for sounding the alarm. Thank
you Jay, thank you George, thank you Esther. And thank you Eloy.
A tribe is growing, a tribe fighting for the love of life. At Yarapa,
I am now comforted with the news that my “little birdies”
will never shut up. In the coming summer course of 2003, the Harpy
eagle may return, and the curassow just might creep in beneath our
huts and boom, pouring fountains of peace into our sleep.
Dr. David Rosanne is an Ornithologist from Cornell University and a research associate to Dr Eloy
Rodriguez
Dr. Eloy Rodriguez is Director of Field Studies, Cornell Biodiversity laboratories of
EsBaRan/Yarapa - Peru and Punta Cana - Dominican Republic
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