The Rarest of the Rare: Vanishing Animals, Timeless Worlds

by Diane Ackerman

  Perched below me, Peter checks the best route down. Although I know it’s going to be painful, I must somehow turn around and hold on to the rope tightly with my left hand. My hands are what will save me. I turn and grasp the rope. That small movement sends lightning forks through my chest and back. Peter calls out footholds.

  “Stretch your right foot down to where my feet are,” he says. I do. “Now move your left foot below you to an open space beside those two narrow rocks.” He steps down six inches. “Right foot just above where my right foot is …” And so we climb down to where the rock face quits and the lava hill begins. There, struggling to keep my torso straight, I put my hands on his backpack and follow him slowly down to the bottom of the dune.

  Hiroshi runs forward, anxious and sympathetic. The two men try to pinpoint the pain bleating low on my left side, which has made it impossible to bend at the waist—or cough, speak loudly, sneeze, or laugh, as I soon discover. I will be doomed to a life of shallow breaths for some weeks. Guiding me up onto the crest of the lava dune which is our lookout point, they dig a pit, brace it with knapsacks, and settle me into the hole. Later I will learn that I have broken three ribs—complete breaks, with the rib spars lying parallel to one another. For months, I will not be able to lie down or stand up by myself, and pain will be my constant companion. But when I watch the albatrosses coast overhead, holding the sky upon their wings, filled with the restless ongoing of their flight, I would not trade my lot for anyone’s. Life is too full of easy entrances and exits. The birds need their fortress, which is all that has saved them. I do not welcome this pain, gnawing like a wolf pack, but if that is the toll that must be paid, then it is well spent. Taking a breath, I laugh quietly to myself. No wonder they have survived here. I am proof that their fortress works.

  At twilight, when like monks we finish our silent beholding, which for me is a form of prayer, we gather up our knapsacks and consider the ascent. Hampered by a tight straitjacket of pain, I cannot move the left side of my body; yet somehow we must climb back up the cliffs. Hiroshi loops a guide rope high around my shoulders, and Peter lifts me bodily. We are a good team, in calm and in distress. Working together, the three of us finally emerge from the fortress and climb wearily back down toward camp.

  “A great day, despite everything,” I tell them, and I mean it. “Who would drink from a cup when they can drink from the source?”

  The next morning, Peter and Hiroshi set off by themselves, the government men prepare to leave on a chartered boat, and I spend the day in camp. The pain has gotten much worse, and I can feel bones shifting like mah-jongg tiles when I inhale. Soon a fever begins, and will not relent under an assault of aspirin, acetaminophen, and antibiotics. The closest hospital is eighteen hours away by fishing boat. I know breaking your ribs can swiftly lead to pneumonia, and as my fever soars, I drift in and out of consciousness. In lucid moments, I consider grim possibilities. I may die on this remote island, alone in a stone bunker, far from home and loved ones. When one of the engineers returns for his gear, I whisper the Japanese for “Help.” Using pantomime and a few words from a Japanese phrase book, I tell him, “Sick. Broken inside. Please, find Hiroshi and Peter. With albatrosses. Please go fast, fast.” I give him a short note to deliver. When the runner leaves, I wrap myself in a heap of clothing and blankets and wait. A young Japanese woman arrives—I do not know if she is real or a hallucination. She feels my burning head, takes off her white shirt and washes my face with it, fills the shirt with ice—Where did the ice come from?—and lays it across my forehead. Then she disappears. Deep within the bunker, I watch a few rays of sunlight construe the narrow room. The outside world trembles with light. I dream of blinding-white albatrosses, whose yellow heads sparkle as they whirl in the twilight like an unnamed constellation. Suddenly a shape appears at the door. Panting, sweat pouring off him, his hair slicked back like a steel helmet, Peter looks as if he had just fallen down a birth canal. Taking off his pack, he sits down, and we discuss the various ways off the island. The safest is to go on the government charter boat, which will be leaving soon. The fever is steep and mysterious, and we must act quickly. He has already said good-bye to Hiroshi, who stayed behind at the fortress, at his post with the albatrosses, where he belongs.

  An hour later, we climb aboard a boat three times as large as the one that ferried us to Torishima. This one, only two months old, gleams with stainless-steel fittings, pile carpets, and sleeping bunks. A charter boat, it cruises the islands to the north, mainly on scuba-diving and fishing trips. The mystery woman who bathed me with her shirt is a crewmember, and the captain has radioed ahead for an ambulance to meet us at dockside. Before heading north, the captain circumnavigates the island, which gives us a fine view of the bolts of lava where the village was washed into the sea. Sulfur Peak stretches up raggedly, as if to pipette the blue sky. At last, the fortress of the ahodori drifts into view, with its cantilevered walls, amphitheater of jagged rock, and small green apron dotted with white. Surrounded by the frozen cascades of rock, the birds look delicate and fragile.

  “The world’s entire population of nesting short-tailed albatrosses,” Peter says sadly. A moment later, he grins broadly. We both do, feeling the same indelible thrill at having seen them. “Look, there’s Hiroshi!” He points to a lone figure sitting on a dune of lava underneath a snowstorm of soaring birds. We wave to him, and Hiroshi lifts his hat and waves back. As the boat turns north, and the sun begins to set in a thick welter of clouds, a recording of “Auld Lang Syne” gushes from the loudspeaker. Short-tailed albatrosses swoop and slide across the wave crests. One dives just off the bow of the boat, picking up speed as it enters the realm of calm air. Now it turns across the wind, skates behind a wave, and then tips its wing, turns up, and rises fast, almost vertically, behind the wave crest, tilts around, and then starts across the wind once again, zigzagging at colossal speed. For some time, we stand in the glow of the setting sun and watch the albatross cartwheel over the waves, changing from white when it’s framed by the dark water to black when it’s framed by the paler sky. Positive and negative, it dives from the transparent air down to the thick gelid water and up again, lacing the sea and sky together with its swooping flight. It is the wind’s way of thinking about itself. At last, it flies straight down the sun street and out toward the horizon, under a tumultuous bruise of sky, where shadow haikus dance on the water, and disappears into a bright kingdom of clouds.

  GOLDEN LION

  TAMARINS

  In summer, at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., golden lion tamarins run free in the park, climbing on rope pathways through the treetops. In time, they will be flown to Brazil and turned loose in the rain forest, and the zoo hopes that while they are in Washington, they will develop the skills necessary to survive in the wild. But animals raised in zoos lack many of their natural behaviors. For example, these golden lion tamarins have to be taught how to deal with disappointment, how to fulfill their nature and discover themselves as primates. They must be taught to thrive as monkeys, because when all the daily trials of life in the forest are missing, the instincts forged by those trials disappear too. What does this tell us about the necessity for stress, ambiguity, struggle? A captive life is also a stress-free life, but the longer one lives in a reduced state, the more reduced one becomes. There are no predators, but there is also no sense of escape or salvation, no hunger, but also no thrill of accomplishment. Golden lion tamarins are monogamous, with strong rivalries and soap-opera-like sex dramas. Some of their family problems seem only too human, offering a hint of what life may have been like for our early ancestors. Because I find such mysteries irresistible, and because golden lion tamarins are among the most beautiful and most endangered creatures on earth, I decided to lend a hand with the reintroduction project, and accompany tamarin families to Brazil, in the hope that they would he fruitful and multiply.

  In the rain forest, no niche lies unused. No emptiness goes unfilled. No gasp of sunlight goes untrappe
d. In a million vest pockets, a million life-forms quietly tick. No other place on earth feels so lush. Sometimes we picture it as an echo of the original Garden of Eden—a realm ancient, serene, and fertile, where pythons slither and jaguars lope. But it is mainly a world of cunning and savage trees. Truant plants will not survive. The meek inherit nothing. Light is a thick yellow vitamin they would kill for, and they do. One of the first truths one learns in the rain forest is that there is nothing fainthearted or wimpy about plants. They are aggressive about self-defense. Some trees protect their circulatory systems by putting a layer of strychnine or quinine under their bark. Others have poisonous sap, leaves, or berries. There are tannins and scents that mimic insect juvenile hormones and enzymes strong enough to tenderize meat (or your tongue), and agents powerful enough to paralyze a wayward insect or animal. One ingenious plant is the Derris vine, whose bark Amazonian Indians crush in the river to poison fish. Some plants develop colorful red-speckled or streaked leaves so that they appear to be dying or dead and therefore of no interest to hungry mouths. Others evolve long vicious spines. Strychnos can stop your heart with its beauty … or its curare. And then, of course, there are the hallucinogens, produced by tree and vine bark, flowers, beans, cacti, and fungi. Some of the toads are hallucinogenic, too, which isn’t at all surprising when you look at their burst of free-floating hop-and-color squatting on a branch, brazenly daring you to touch. On a rain-forest walk, I found a vibrant aqua-blue-and-yellow arrowhead frog that was covered with a poisonous mucus. Tiny but pungent with death, it sat right out on a felled tree and let me get close enough to breathe on it.

  In temperate northern forests, one finds fewer species of plants in an area, but many of each species; it’s not unusual to see large glades of hemlock or maple. But in the rain forest, there are kaleidoscopic numbers of different species, and very few samples of each one. When you look at such a forest, it has depth, texture, variety. Yet the members of each species are spaced far apart. There is not much breeze to carry seeds about. It’s hard to have a sex life when you can’t move, so jungle plants have become incredible tricksters and manipulators, conning others into performing sex acts with them. In a rain forest, it’s no use spilling their seed on the ground beneath them. There would be too much inbreeding, and one of the best aspects of sex, from a plant’s point of view, is that it freshens the gene pool. So plants lure hummingbirds, bees, bats, butterflies, moths, insects. Plants are willing to dress up in animal disguises. Some plants are carnivores. They are not mild-mannered, even if they aren’t quick-footed. They are promiscuous, and they will stoop to every low-down trick. They would dress up in a gorilla suit if they could.

  Some orchids, for example, living high up in the canopies, have learned how to divert bees with their splashy color and blossoms that lure the unsuspecting bee to brush up against their sex organs. Other orchids have evolved to mimic the female tachinid fly, so that males will try to mate with them and end up dusted with pollen. Still other orchids mimic the territorial movements of a male Centris bee and need only wait for passing males to take up the fight. Sex or violence will do equally well: whether the orchids are courted or fought with, they rub pollen on the visitor. Some of the best pollinators are male orchid bees, which are bright metallic blue or green and are after not pollen but fragrances, which they use as part of an aphrodisiac brew and store in pockets on their hind legs. Going from flower to flower, they collect a note of fragrance and blend it in their hind-leg pockets; at some magical point, the mix begins to simmer just right, and they become such Adonises that even other males take notice. Soon, a swarm of brightly flashing males dancing in the sunlight attracts female orchid bees, just as the flowers attracted the males. Now the males are the beautiful, fragrant blossoms of the jungle. Who could resist them?

  No other place on earth is as biologically complex as the rain forest. Animals swerve and flutter through dense walls of green. The riot of lushness comes in part from hanging mosses, ferns, cacti, orchids, vines, and bromeliads. Each tree is a palimpsest of other plants. Most plants one sees hanging on to trees are not parasites; they merely use the trees as a perch. Ninety percent of the world’s vines live in the rain forest, and the lianas can grow as large as a human leg and lie like glutted snakes on the floor. Each sunrise, the bird chorus sounds like a rehearsal of a Charles Ives symphony. Howler monkeys yodel as they swing among the trees. One can find three-toed sloths, jaguars, bats, bamboo rats, owls, rhinoceros beetles, hummingbirds, coral snakes, large lizards and rodents, wild dogs, giant spiders, African bees, and legions of lesser-known, rarely observed insects and birds.

  This extraordinary habitat is also the home of the golden lion tamarin, the most beautiful monkey in the world, a sunset-and-cornsilk-colored creature that lives nowhere else on earth. Not long ago, I paid a visit to Russell Mittermeier, director of Conservation International and a lifelong explorer of rain forests. He raved about golden lion tamarins. “Their color is magnificent,” he said. “They’re really spectacular-looking mammals. When the Jesuit chronicler of Magellan’s voyage around the world first saw these monkeys in the sixteenth century, he described them as ‘simian-like cats similar to small lions,’ and that’s how they got their name. Although they’re tiny animals, they have a striking aspect to them: they really do look like mini-lions. And baby golden lion tamarins are the most appealing creatures you can imagine. They have this innocent look on their faces—a Where am I? sort of look. Let me tell you, when a tiny golden thing about the size of your fist sits there looking so lost, it brings out your parenting instincts fast.” Large nuclear families of these monkeys once roamed through the canopies, eating fruits and insects, sleeping in night nests, raising their young. Now only about four hundred survive in the wild. “That’s really scary,” Mittermeier said. “You can find that many cats or dogs in a city block in Manhattan. But that’s the world’s population of this unique animal.” A global effort is under way to save them, in part because they are what’s called a flagship species. Like the panda or koala, golden lion tamarins live in an endangered ecosystem. Not only they but their entire world may go extinct.

  The Mata Atlantica is a narrow strip of rain forest that stretches for a thousand miles along the northeast coast of Brazil; because it is separated from the Amazon by a mountain range, its plants and animals are unique. But, as in the Amazon region, its trees have fallen to bulldozers and farmers. Only islands of vegetation remain, broken up by roads, dams, towns, and large farms (fazendas). From historic accounts of the area, we know that only 2 percent of the original forest remains. The hard truth is that it hasn’t disappeared because of malice or catastrophe—people simply wished to improve their lives. In North America, we destroyed our own frontiers and wildernesses in a similar way. Progress is a hungry giant. What many people don’t realize is that in the rain forest, most of the nutrients are in the trees, not the soil, and there are no extras, no backups. As soon as something dies, it returns immediately into the living system by rotting. It doesn’t linger in the soil, or become the soil, as in temperate regions. Either the rains wash it away, or mycorrhizal fungi convert it at once and it returns to the trees. The living tumult of insects helps, too. But there is no use trying to farm the land, or graze cattle on it. Because the richness lives only in the trees, if the trees vanish, the whole ecosystem will collapse.

  I hear them before I see them: short warbling birdsong followed by a whole note played on a flute, then spasmodic chuckings, a sudden trill, another long call. Parrots? Thrushes? What is a flock of birds doing at the Rio de Janeiro airport’s cargo terminal? As five tan “Veri-kennel Convertible Pet Apartments” are unloaded at my feet, each one perforated with small breathing holes, I realize that the holes have turned the boxes into wind instruments. A jungle of tuneful clamor pours from them. Squatting, I peek into the straw-clotted shadows of one box at vague flashes of color and jostling fur. Again the birdsong, louder this time and more urgent. Inside, a family of golden lion tamarins,
sent from the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., huddles together and calls to their neighbors in the other boxes. Even their murmurs chime.

  “They’re safe and sound,” Ben Beck says with relief. A solid man in his fifties, with salt-and-pepper hair, a meticulously trimmed beard, and a quiet take-charge way about him, Ben heads the Golden Lion Tamarin Reintroduction Project. Now that so few of these monkeys remain, the National Zoo breeds them in captivity and walks them by hand back out into the forest. Twice a year, Beck flies to Brazil with complete GLT families, or with a spouse for a Brazilian GLT that’s come of age. Our group on this trip also includes his wife, Beate, a petite, tawny-haired woman with a light German accent, who has worked with monkeys for many years; Joleen, a thirty-one-year-old primate keeper from the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago (which has sent one of the family groups); Howard, a tall, bearded photographer from Brookfield Zoo; and Alfie, a primatologist based at the National Zoo who specializes in fossils and teeth. We are met by some of the Brazilians who live and work at the field station: Fernando, who manages the project locally; Andrea, who directs its daily work, feeding the monkeys, sending out the teams of observers; and Denise, a combination of educator and diplomat, who teaches schoolchildren about tamarins, acts as a liaison with local farmers, and helps the government find and repatriate stolen monkeys. So beautiful are the tamarins, which sell illegally for as much as twenty thousand dollars, that hunters will often risk a two-year prison sentence to steal one. One key to the Tamarin project is how well it fits into the daily life of its neighbors. Twenty-two of the project’s employees come from nearby towns, which makes the program important for the local economy. Near the main highway, an education building with attached museum shows films and offers books and pamphlets, posters and T-shirts. Locals may fear the deep forest, but they take pride in living beside a natural wonder. Of course, a golden monkey, beautiful and fascinating in its own right, helps to personalize the plight of the rain forest. For many people, there is something too out-of-control, too gushing, about nature, something that frightens by sheer excess. Their second fear (dying is their first) is that they might somehow become as plural as all they survey. When they imagine the dense green lungs of the jungle, they feel suffocated and panicky. They need a gentle familiar, a spirit guide, a focus for their concern. In this rain forest, one finds many endangered birds, insects, frogs, snakes, and plants, but they’re not as cute and cuddly as a shimmering golden monkey— especially one that is monogamous, family-loving, and easy to identify with. The golden lion tamarin wears a human face.