The Rarest of the Rare: Vanishing Animals, Timeless Worlds

by Diane Ackerman

  “Bom dia!” Beate says. “Todo bem?” Good morning? Doing okay?

  “Todo bem,” I answer. Doing okay.

  Because we’re all worried about Jenny and Maria, we head down to their cage below the banana tree. Both of the females are out of the box, but Maria’s fur is all puffed up, and her back is stiffly arched in a catlike show of aggression that’s called an arch walk. Mother sits on a lower branch. Beate shakes her head. This is not good. In the wild, the mother would be dominating the daughter, but here, with no male on hand, the roles have somehow reversed. We wonder what will happen when a male is introduced. Only the breeding female of a family is fertile. Though middle-aged, the mother is still vital, and she would normally drive the daughter out to find her own family. Will she now stop being fertile and live out her days with the group as a dowager while the daughter takes reproductive control? Will they fight savagely enough to kill each other?

  Back at the house, workers have begun arriving. One of them has found a hummingbird stunned on his car hood, and Ben holds its tiny, iridescent-green body, angling its long beak down to a dish of orange juice, which it laps with an even longer tongue. Soon it flies off by itself, and we climb into the van and go to meet the seven young men and women of the reintroduction team. At a crossroads near the main highway, wearing tan uniforms, they wait for us. Because we’re a little late, they’ve used their machetes to carve a bench out of bamboo and vines, and there we find them “kicking stones,” as Ben calls the art of waiting. They smile widely as we approach, and greet Ben and Beate with hugs and handshakes. All of them are in their twenties, fit and athletic, and this is a a full-time, six-days-a-week job for them. They share news about the monkeys, problems with poachers or fazenda owners, and concerns about their salary. Galloping inflation has gutted the Brazilian economy, their pay is in U.S. dollars, and the dollar keeps soaring and diving on their market. Ben assures them that wages will stay safely tied to the inflation rate. In a sense, their village, Silva Jardim, is a company town. The project hires twenty-two of its young people and also purchases a considerable amount of food and other supplies from the village, so it has fueled the local economy. Well paid and skilled, working for a noble cause, the members of the reintroduction team have prestigious jobs, and the town has adopted the project’s Portuguese-speaking gringos.

  When we leave, the team sets off for its day’s work patrolling the many sites, and we drive to a neighboring fazenda, in whose forest a tamarin family from Seattle is living. We’re hoping to trap the mature son, Seattle Six, who has grown too old to continue liv ing at home. Mother has died. Father takes care of the kids, but the son needs to move out and start his own family, and the father needs a new bride. Low clouds hang like smoke in the valleys, and cecropia trees shimmer whitely from the hilltops as we drive down the rutted roads of a dairy farm. When the road runs out at the owner’s palatial house, we leave our truck and begin climbing a steep hill up to the forest.

  “This is the least progressive group,” Ben says sadly as we finally leave the grassy hill behind and find ourselves facing a thick rain forest. Suddenly the air feels cool and wet. “They’re not wild yet. We still give them food every third day.”

  Climbing through the undergrowth and along a stream, we at last find ourselves in monkey heaven—a sunstruck glade of tall trees and sweeping vines. Branches sway overhead, cicadas buzz, mosquitoes whine like dropping bombs, and gemlike hummingbirds swoop among bird-of-paradise flowers. A tree frog clicks slowly, as if someone were winding up a toy. Yet there is an odd sense in which this jungle is almost a desert: there aren’t grasses or herbs in the understory for animals to feed on. In fact, walking through the jungle one rarely sees any animals at all. Some are nocturnal. Many are camouflaged so well that one can pass by them as they lie in plain sight. But most animals mass overhead in the canopies, feeding on the foliage and banking the most valuable commodity of all, an element dangerously rare in such a dense forest, but one without which life can’t survive—sunlight.

  Everywhere you look in the jungle there are plants and animals desperate for a place in the sun, a piece of light: light, which is the golden rule of our planet; light, which raises the smallest leaf into a spiraling dance; light, which takes a black grotto or lay-by and dazzles it into a mossy green celebration. Light is the seductress of the forest, and one rarely finds gaudy flowers or many animals at lower levels. Instead, the enormous, dense canopies overhead contain the richest array of plant and animal life. Up high, the rain forest is a lush green jazz of flirting and mating, dueling and dancing, backstabbing and chicanery, con men and gold diggers, vamps and dandies. In the steamy tropical canopies, open blossoms drip with nectar, and epauletted bats puff up tufts of white fur on their shoulders as if they were inflating military insignia, to persuade females that they have more to give, that they are better endowed than the next bat, that they are larger than life. Birds do war dances and stripteases in reverse. The delirium of the jungle, drunk on sunlight and sex, is perpetually ashake with courting, mating, dueling, birthing, and mating again. Death happens often, but disappears quickly under the rain and hungry teeth, whereas the bluffing and strutting, cowering and crouching, bobbing and wooing, gathering and building, moaning and advertising continue day and night. Above us, an all-but-invisible pandemonium is under way. And yet what startles us is a sound completely out of place—undeniably the distant mooing of a cow.

  “This is real-world conservation,” Ben says, laughing, “beside a highway, on a hill past someone’s cattle pasture. There’s this romantic image people have of working in pristine environments. If the monkeys lived in a pristine environment, they wouldn’t be in this mess.”

  He and Nelson set up a few traps for the monkeys, baiting them with bananas. Although we’re hiding in the foliage, the monkeys have almost certainly been aware of us from the moment we entered the forest. Lichen-covered trees are spotted green, brown, and black, just as we are. Our camouflage pants blend with the greenery and dappled light. It’s what we’ve adopted to look like trees, and it works. Small butterflies flit among the ferns, and then a giant blue one, with wings as large as two playing cards, kites by at eye level, stealing a gasp from all of us, and vanishes. In temperate forests, trees have leaves of various shapes, but rain-forest leaves look much alike. They are smooth and have tips from which water can drip. As raindrops fall with large resonant plops onto the broad leaves, the air feels heavy and damp, like wet sheets, but weightless.

  “Seattle Six is number one,” Ben advises us, and he hands round a guide to the whole family’s tail markings.

  Suddenly golden monkeys appear overhead, making chucking sounds and leaping from branch to branch. What a thrill to see them high and in the wild, where they belong, silhouetted by huge ferns, swinging through rays of sunlight. Instinctively, I wrap my hand around a slender tree trunk. Imagine sliding through the canopies with such grace, with such ease. At last we see Seattle Six, whom we’ve now begun to refer to as the Groom, his thick fluffy fur a dark chestnut gold, not the pale blond of zoo tamarins. One by one the monkeys inspect the cages and get caught—all except the Groom, who at one point reaches in carefully over the tripwire and snatches a banana.

  “He’s a smart little bugger,” Ben says. “We’re going to have all on catching him.” Hours later, after we’ve tried rebaiting the traps, rearranging the tripwires, laying a trail of banana crumbs, we are starting to despair. Leaving Nelson in the glade, Ben, Alfie, Joleen, and I return to the pasture.

  “Okay, cricket hunt!” Ben says. It’s a desperate measure, but we’re running out of ideas. So the four of us creep through the tall grass in search of crickets. While we’re cricket hunting, we watch a cowboy on horseback pursuing three cows that have drifted into the forest. Ben jogs in and chases the cattle out; the cowboy thanks him and trots the cows downhill. Most Brazilians picture the jungle as a primitive, irrational kingdom full of specters and goblins. It is the id-like center of their country. Civiliza
tion and progress lie in the chrome meccas of the cities, in plowed land, in the future, not in the pagan and inexplicable past. They respect those who work in the forest, but think they’re maluca (crazy) ever to sleep there.

  “Got one!” Joleen yells, holding up a fat cricket. Ben pulls a piece of wire from his pocket and makes a noose around the middle of the insect. Alfie and I catch more crickets, and soon Ben has a kicking stringful, which he carries back to the glade. Tamarins can never resist a juicy squirming cricket. At last the Groom risks the trap and is caught. We carry him out of the forest, tramp back down the hill, and place him in the back of the truck, then head back to camp.

  Before dinner, we process the Groom. In the wild, tamarins develop a luminous glow to their fur. He has sweet-potato-colored legs, bright yellow atop his forehead, a reddish beard and arms, and a chest and belly the tawny gold of an autumn cornfield. A thick mane framing his face makes him look like an Aztec sun god. Holding him in my hands, I feel his strange fur—soft, but also tense, like spun glass. Occasionally his eyes open; they are dark doubloons. Who could invent a creature as startling as this? Do they dream? Will images be weaving through his mind like shadows among the trees? When he wakes, he shakes his head and stumbles for a few tipsy moments. We carry him down to the Brookfield family’s cage and open the door, which is laced together with three small lengths of wire.

  Bits of wire are the real currency of the camp, and many people carry them tucked into a pocket or waistband. Wire secures the comidoros, the water dishes, and the bananas hanging in the cages; it’s essential for building the comidoros; it latches the doors to the cages; it holds a bit of screen over the nest-box entrance to seal the monkeys in for travel; it holds freshly noosed crickets; it will fasten almost anything to anything else.

  “I thought it was silver duct tape men couldn’t live without,” I say, as Ben drops an extra bit of wire into his pocket. Suddenly his face takes on a primal fire and he makes an ancient-ancestor hooting sound.

  “Silver duct tape!” he says.

  Beate and I laugh, in part because we are both obsessed with Ziploc bags—precious indeed in an insect-drenched environment—and we have each brought along dozens of them. The men need to hinge and join things; we need to keep things protected and intact.

  “It’s really annoying when gender differences are as clear as this, isn’t it?” she says, running a hand through her short, strawberry-blond hair.

  As the Groom enters the cage and settles on a branch, the Brookfield monkeys one by one peek out of their nest box and begin to chatter; then the female trots over to him and sits close. They feed together on bits of apple and banana. So far, so good. If they both sleep in the nest box tonight, it’s a match.

  Back at the house, two hard-drinking cocktail hours begin, featuring local concoctions, followed by dinner at the long table, which everyone shares, digging into pots of black beans and rice, fried squash, fresh French bread, and a mixed grill of sausage, chicken, and beef. When talk turns to open-air grills and barbecues, Ben sets down his fork and tells of his deep regard for wood.

  “In the fireplace inside my house in Maryland I burn red oak, occasionally some white oak or birch for smell, and black locust if I can get it. That’s prime firewood, for heat and ambience. I don’t cook there. Now, in the barbecue grill I use oak and beech, depending upon the meat and whether I want a real smoky, slow-cooked flavor or a fast, searing, hot effect. In the outside fireplace, on the back porch, I sometimes keep a big pot boiling and make things like beans or chili over an open fire, and for that I use only red oak.”

  “What is it about wood that you find so exciting?” I ask.

  “It’s something deep within me, from my soul, something primeval. I like having exactly the right wood cut in exactly the correct lengths, thicknesses, and states of dryness for the task at hand. And I love splitting wood. The nicest way is to go outside on a very cold winter day, when the water inside the wood has frozen and expanded, and when you hit the log with an ax or maul, it splits cleaner and the air resounds with the sound of the wood and you quickly work up a sweat. You can take off your shirt and soon the steam’s rising off your body. It’s six o’clock in the morning and dawn is just coming up. People get pissed off at me because it wakes everybody up. But that’s heaven. That’s bliss.” Smiling at the thought of such peace, he returns to his food, buttering a thick knob of French bread.

  Soon dessert and coffee appear, and people relax in armchairs or stroll out to the porch. Joleen has brought along a Portuguese-English phrase book, and, taking one of the handsome young Brazilian men aside, regales him with its risqué phrases and obscenities. “Sperm!” she says to him in Portuguese. Then, “Enlarged scrotum!” and “I’m sexually excited.”

  “Going to be an interesting couple of weeks,” Ben says.

  As darkness falls, bats pour like smoke from below the porch eaves. A thriving bat colony lives in the crawl space under the roof, and their droppings have attracted a sea of mealworms, which Fernando sometimes uses to feed monkeys that seem ill or need extra protein. Both the bats and the mealworms are welcome guests. Kitchen scraps go to feed the chickens, whose eggs we eat. Most things in camp are recycled. With a whoosh of car lights, Roberta arrives in her VW bug and joins us as dinner is finishing. This is early for her. Usually she shows up late at night, to chat and drink beer and then crawl into her top bunk fully dressed. At dawn she sets out for the day’s work, taking with her the leftovers from the camp’s dinner, which she will eat the next day, alone at the abandoned train station she’s converted into a lab. There is something not quite earthlike about her. After two years in Brazil (almost all of that time in the wild), she talks and gestures like a Brazilian, punctuating her animated conversations with the Brazilian hand snap—five or six in quick succession. Sometimes she will begin a sentence normally but, by the end of it, slip straight into the Twilight Zone.

  “I really love it here,” she says, all atwitch, taking a swig of beer, “but what’s starting to get to me is the glasses.” We consider the small tumblers. “They’re jelly jars, you know, jelly came in them. I’m sick of drinking out of jelly jars, you know where jelly was, jelly jars.” Howie’s, Alfie’s, and my eyes find one another. “And of course, the mosquitoes,” she continues. “You get into bed and they’re there, they follow you, they wait, they’re huge and bloodthirsty and there’s no way ever to protect yourself from them when they decide to come after you.” Yet I’ve noticed that she leaves the bedroom door open at night with the overhead light on, inviting mosquitoes in.

  She is ambivalent about going home—her life, family, work, culture, now are Brazilian. But she must return to her American university to finish a Ph.D. The camp is fond of her and doesn’t worry about her excessively if she’s late or missing for a meal, since her unpredictability is predictable. And, in any case, she has become the forest. Soft and curvy when she first arrived, she now looks muscular, lithe and treelike. Her long hair hangs straight down her back, and her bangs are chopped short in an Indian style. Her skin has gone beyond tan to cured mahogany.

  In this sort of business something always gets left behind, sometimes one’s country or family. After deep immersion, some people cross the line and become so used to being independent and in the wild that they never do return, but wander, taking low-paying jobs in various projects, perhaps marrying a local. Roberta is right at that point. For two years solid she has been collecting data, vast amounts of it, about the vegetation in this forest. And now she must return to the States and make sense of it all, synthesize it, write up a dissertation, apply for jobs, return to an alien and formal world. There was a brief moment during the seventies when people with field experience could find jobs in the conservation movement. But now those who do not return to academe may find themselves suddenly in their forties, drifting, without a job at a college or a corporation, their lives all experience, no security. Suddenly weary of accumulating life, they have no way of re-entering normal
society. An ecologist with invaluable time in the field, Roberta must return to a college degree and a job while she still can. One day, she will probably send graduate students of her own to Brazil.

  “How was Christmas?” I ask.

  “Oh, I made this great crèche—entirely out of beetles, you know, those beautiful green and blue and black beetles, all different colors and sizes. Whenever I’d find one during the year, I saved it for the crèche—the Mary beetle, the Joseph beetle, the Wise Men beetles, the sheep beetles. Ben found the Baby Jesus beetle for me—a small, really spectacular beetle. They have to be dead, of course. I’ve been thinking a crèche of flies would work well, too. But the beetles, man, they made a really cool crèche.”

  “Roberta needs to go home,” Fernando says, grinning.

  Sunday morning. The rain, falling thick and loud on the wide banana palm leaves, makes a thin gray screen. The screened windows create their own visual fog, so, looking out, we see two rains, one silent, both steady. At the porch worktable, we chop up bananas, apples, pineapples, peaches, and Monkey Diet; then we carry the food to each monkey cage. The monkeys eat slowly because of the rain, and we wait for them to finish. Today is release day. At the house, the others are up and busy, eating breakfast, packing a lunch. Since we may be out for many hours, we drink too much coffee, eat too many fried sugared bananas. Despite the rain, the air feels electric with excitement as we seal the monkeys into their nest boxes and carry them into the van with us.

  Half an hour later, we turn off the main highway and enter “Dois Coqueiros,” the Fazenda of Two Palms, with its picturesque pair of houses set against sprawling farmlands and forested hills. We drive along the muddy road until the road runs out, and then climb on foot through high forest, past a jungle waterfall, to a fig tree that has a yellow ribbon tied around its trunk. There we angle up a steeper hill to a tree with a red ribbon. Luis has already chosen this site as a fine home for the monkeys, with fruit trees all around and a nice array of branches and vines. When Ben sets down the blue-and-white nest box at the base of the tree, I see a small gold face peering out from behind the screened-over door. I think it is Jenny, the mother, who is so eager for freedom, although I can’t be sure without seeing the tail markings. I wish there were some way to reassure and quiet her. She doesn’t know that we’re here to help her, and that all the turmoil and confusion of the past few days will soon be over.