I stopped the other day on the side of one of La Selva’s long trails and started to take pictures of what was happening on a section of a fallen tree, glued to one sport because there was so much going on. Three or four groups of people walked by my spot in the hour that followed: two on bird walks (binoculars, spotting scopes, enormous lenses, tripods and knowledgeable guide); one a group of students on a break (water bottles, shorts, loud chatter, not the right kinds of shoes); and one a self-guided tour, (foreign accents, more enormous lenses, photo vests, kaki-clothing throughout, a strong and lingering smell of bug repellent). Not one of them stop or wondered what I was photographing or observing. They just walked by, said ”hi” and went on, either looking up for birds or just chatting with each other. I find that puzzling, mostly because there is so much to see even is a small patch of space, on a tree trunk, under a bunch of wet leaves, along the edge of a trail. There are many more stories than a bird checklist and I wonder why they are not told more often.
This morning, I decided to go slow-walk on the patch of forest behind the house and look for stories, for drama, see what I could find. I thought of doing a little experiment: take a small patch, let’s say 10 meter by 10 meter (that’s like ten long step by ten long steps square) and just wonder through it to see what was there. I spent about 2 hours on this patch, and I couldn’t quite make it all the way through the perimeter, never mind reaching the center or other areas within. How come?
First of all, this little patch is not simple. It is three-dimensional, with the height dimension being 40 or 50 meters high. So as I walk around, things fall from above, flowers, leaves, small branches, feathers. Frass (a nice way to call “insect poop”) literally rains down continuously. A small group of caterpillars on a shrub can produce quite a volume of it in a few hours. On occasion, a branch laden with bromeliads, mosses and whatnots detaches from the parent tree and comes crashing down, veritable “widow-makers” in the forest, and something that researchers and hikers are warned about on some trails near dead giant trees. Above my head, the bulk of the forest lives and breathes, letting gravity pull down to the ground all of their waste materials and the products of the resident creature’s lives for the soil to recycle them into nutrients again. The portion of the patch I could easily explore is only a small fraction of the entire “cuboid.” Without a ladder, ropes or a canopy tower I can only explore what’s on the ground and up to a height of no more than 1.5 meters or so. That beautiful orange-yellow butterfly that just landed barely 4 meters above my head will escape the prying eyes of my camera or loupe.
But this area, this human-scale cube of forest provides an enormous amount of action, activity, tragedy and comedy. I notice I walk around in some sort of a pattern: I take a step, watching my feet so as not to step on a snake, a ground-dwelling creature, a poison-dart frog or a pile of peccary dung; then I stop, stand quietly looking around, scanning the area within sight. Something moves, or emerges from the chaotic pattern, and I stare. What is it? Is it alive? The shape resolves into an animal, a fruit, or an interesting piece of action and I stalk, moving quietly but steadily towards it, camera in position, manually focusing until it is framed and then…
Focus…Click! Flash! Wow! The “wow!” is often part of the reaction, because it is usually unexpected. A little swaying leaf resolves into an immature praying mantis, its movement an exact mimic of a green leaf moved by the breeze. Or while looking at one thing, something else comes into the patch I’m watching, like a translucent but brightly colored tortoise beetle landing on a leaf smack in front of my camera. The “Bio-Files” in my brain make a quick identification (more often than not there’s no data in these files and I’m clueless about what species I’m watching, thus the photos), a package of natural history comes to the conscious level (I recall that the larvae of this particular tortoise beetle feeds on the leaf tissues of certain palms, covering its body with curled strands of its own feces until it resembles a patch of lichen or moss on the leaf), take the photo, shake my head a little (the wow! part) and move on.
This morning I repeat that step, stop, stand, scan a number of times, each of them with amazing results. I really can do this all day! I see an extremely large bullet ant, a full inch long if not longer, walking an area foraging, searching, doing its own version of “stop, stand, stare” back at me (all it can probably see is a puzzling, very large piece of round glass a few inches away and sudden bursts of lightning from the twin flashes), giving me the best opportunities to examine it in great detail. A group of large ants (in the 1/4-inch range size) slowly harvest nectar from the tiny, bulbous flowers of a young palm tree, posing aggressively at my lens when I get too close. Several species of spiders, jumping spiders, a wolf spider and others, carry out their sit-and-wait strategy, waiting patiently long periods of time on flowers or fruits or leaves for the sudden pounce or rush to the net to bite and paralyze its next hapless meal. I interrupt one of them as she eats an insect and she ignores me. Flies land and take off from leaves, the sudden stop of their buzzing triggering in me a spider-like reaction of rushing and pouncing, lens first, on my prey. Click! Photo. Under a leaf moved by a tiny breeze, a shadow resolves into a resting land snail. Click! A small ant looks up from something it found, little white spots scattered on a leaf, its mandibles ringed with a white chalky substance making me think “Got Powder?” Click! Little flowers growing from the trunk of trees…Click!…the fruits looking familiar…Click!…they look like…oh gosh, tiny cacao fruits! Click, click! Must check what species this is. Step, stop…Something looks like a mosquito…stalk…Click! A midge, one of my dear little chironomids, sitting here, oh so pretty, on a leaf, with white legs, curled up abdomen, feathery antenna. Click, click, click!
The hours go by, my shirt is sticky with sweat. I don’t even care anymore about the buzzing mosquitos around my ears. If they land on my hand or arm I’ll take a photo of them too. Tiny mushrooms of all sizes and colors; the discarded molt of a growing spider; a swarm of fungus gnats frozen in death within the invisible strands of a spider web; more ants doing their thing; and then a prize. I see movement on the ground. A bluish-black wasp drags a similar-sized spider along the ground, seemingly having difficulties. I kneel on the wet ground looking for an angle and an explanation, trying not to disturb the wasp. These wasps hunt spiders or caterpillars to feed their larvae, paralyzing the spiders and packing them in underground chambers or mud retreats (among them the famous pipe-organ wasps) sealing the chambers with a supply of live but paralyzed spiders and one egg, which will feed on this fresh food for weeks until maturity. The wasps are diverse, from tiny ones, about half an inch or less, to the giant tarantula wasps, two or more inch impressive warriors capable of fighting and paralyzing the enormous and invinvible-looking tarantula. This one seems to be having troubles dragging the spider.
I look more closely…The wasp lets go of the spider for a second and I see the spider move backwards! Wait a second! What the…? I look closer still…two, no, three ants have a hold of the spider, one ant holds one spider leg, the other two teamed up on another leg, and they are dragging the spider away. The wasp comes back and tugs, the ants tug back, three against one. The wasp lets go and goes after the ants. One of the ants fights back, enemies with similar weapons, mandibles, stingers, the wasp’s advantage its wings, the ant’s advantage: colleagues! Two ants chase the wasp while another tugs at the spider. The wasp retreats and rushes back to the spider and starts dragging it again. It needs a clear path to its burrow, but the ants go back too, each grab a leg, and the struggle is on again, strengths well-matched. The spider can fly, but not carrying so much weight. Neither is giving up. Finally, the wasp uses its wings to add strength to its pull, jerking hard, dragging the spider and the ants down a hole where they all disappear in a tangle of legs and leaves. I wait to see if they come back out, but the struggle continues out of sight, leaving me wanting, the story unfinished, probably invisible repeated many times in this forest, thousands of times, thousands of hectares, thousands of species.
Later, at home, I look through the images, gathering more detail, recounting the moments, amazed at the details now splendidly magnified in my screen. There’s no end to this, there can’t be. Every patch of ground holds hundreds of stories, processes, species, lives, complex, interacting, irreplaceable, in danger. From us!
This is why I write and take photos. I can’t be the only one experiencing this rush, this amazement, bear solitary witness, bewildered and puzzled. I need an army of observers and recorders, kids and students, photographers and artists, people seeking the thrill of discovering the world at our feet. Then, perhaps only then, these forests will remain, persist and endure.
Carlos de la Rosa
Photo album for this story at:
Recent Comments