REGUA

9/9/17

Imagine walking down a wooded path, darkly shaded by trees drenched in vines, bromeliads and moss. All around you, unfamiliar trills and whistles echo from unseen birds, hidden in shadows and behind curtains of foliage. A clear-winged butterfly sails by on panes of delicate stained glass. The air smells wet, maybe even a little musty. 

As you round a bend in the dim trail, you come upon what sounds like a 4^th of July block party hosted by miniature Star Wars LARPers, complete with firecrackers and light-saber battles. This exuberant chorus of snaps, pops, and wah-wah-wah-whirrs emanates from a gang of testosterone-driven White-bearded Manakins, billiard-sized birds who puff out their long snowy-feathered beards and snap their wings as they skip along the forest floor in a dance competition that has been going on for millennia.

Now imagine if 20 years ago, this wood was an open field grazed by zebu cattle, their heavy shoulder humps and long neck skin waddling as they trundled along well worn paths. This is not an imaginary place. And it did not happen without hard work and unpopular dedication.

Today, the Reserva Ecológica de Guapiaçu, or REGUA for short, snakes through bucolic farmland and scales the sheer faces of the intimidating, jungle-draped, ancient granite mountains called Serra dos Orgaos, that loom 40 miles northeast of Brazil's urban epicenter, Rio de Janeiro.  Covering over 10,000 hectares and still growing with the help of organizations such as Rainforest Trust and World Land Trust, this privately managed, community-centric reserve evolved from much humbler beginnings.

Nicholas Locke will greet you with a hearty laugh and smack on the back. Always dressed in preppy Englishman plaid button-downs, with a sweater draped over his shoulders and a small wool herders cap perched atop short salt-and-peppered hair, he skips from Portuguese to English without hesitation, seamlessly breaking his discussion with Brazilian researchers to welcome international visitors to his woodland empire. From there, the lovely Raquel Locke will take over with a warm smile and grace we haven't seen since classic Hollywood actresses. Hailing from Buenos Aires, Raquel adds Argentinian Castellano to her fluent repertoire, but her genuine enthusiasm shines through in all three languages (plus some French, seriously??). 

Over the last quarter-century, this power couple has transformed a humble agricultural dynasty into a conservation engine for an ecosystem that needs it more, perhaps, than any other on Earth. Stay tuned as I continue to learn about the power of tree planting, land acquisition, and unbridled passion to rebuild biodiversity from the ground up.

Voldenor Trail 9/11

TRAVEL JOURNAL

9/11/2017

Today is the 16^th anniversary of the terrorist attack we all know as Nine-Eleven. I was in high school when it happened, and I remember many of my friends going white with fear as we gazed at the televised images of the Pentagon burning. Their dads or moms or uncles worked there, and they had no idea if they were still alive. I was 16 years old then, sort of wondering, sort of not, whether the world was really ending. Twice a lifetime later, with a tad deeper understanding of ecology and global environmental issues, I still can't seem to shake that feeling. But I have found a decent coping strategy: birdwatching. The tunnel vision that a pair of decent binoculars affords helps to block out the underlying dread for humanity's future, even if for a moment. Plus it has proved to be a useful skill much appreciated by conservation biologists, and currently, conservation-supporting tourists. This nine-eleven of twenty-seventeen, I am on the other hemisphere, walking up a dirt road in the mountains of Brazil with one of the world's most respected experts in conservation biology. And we're both geeking out about a hummingbird.

No bigger than my thumb, the Frilled Coquette sports a neon red mohawk and zebra-striped cheek feathers that flare out in the sun, looking almost like gills of a fish. He stretches his wings and zooms off with purpose: to sip nectar from “his” flowers, then return to the perch and wait for the flowers to refill. A creature so strange it seems nearly impossible that evolution produced it, and we all gaze at him through binoculars and cameras and gasp when he spreads his tiny red tail. We meaning me; Bobby; a lovely clinical scientist named Annie from England; Clinton Jenkins, a research professor with Instituto de Pesquisas Ecologicas outside of Sao Paulo; and Stuart Pimm.

If you are involved in conservation biology, you probably don't need an introduction for Stuart. For the rest of us, he has wire-rimmed aviator glasses, gray hair beneath his mesh army bucket hat, his pants tucked into his socks, and that sparkly enthusiastic intelligence that gets students to sit up in their chairs and become some of the world's most important professional scientists. He is the Doris Duke Chair of Conservation Ecology in the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University, decorated by awards, published 250+ peer-reviewed scientific articles, and a bunch of popular science books that I will promptly look for on Kindle or wait begrudgingly until April to find in the States. His prolific work spans a breadth of fields, from saving species, to training scientists in Africa and China to be better conservationists, to developing technology that seeks out biodiversity hotspots using satellite imagery. And he's the nicest freakin guy I've met in a while, so absolutely lovely and inspiring that it almost makes me want to go to grad school.

He and Clinton, his former academic advisee and good friend, are visiting REGUA to catch up with Nicholas and another colleague, Maria Alice do Santos Alves from the State University of Rio, but they wanted to get out and see some birds. Bobby and I are “guiding” this walk, although the guidance is mutual; as we point out species, Stuart relays interesting news about recent genetic findings or recounts his adventures such as being helicoptered to the top of the mountains in search of the rare Gray-Winged Cotinga, and the helicopter never coming back (his field journal published by National Geographic here). Or boating deep up the Amazon river to visit a student mapping territories of endemic spinetails. Or trekking deep into the rainforest of Peru to meet a group of Guarani being studied by a former student, where she is helping to facilitate the passing of deep ethnobotanical knowledge from the elder population to their grandchildren before it is lost to globalization. Stuart is one of those completely unpretentious, giddy professors who can't help but take advantage of every 'teaching moment' that arises. 

Last night, Bobby and I were asked to put on a presentation about the Hooded Grebe Project, a conservation effort in Patagonia for which we have volunteered two seasons and plan to return again this coming year. The Hooded Grebe is a critically endangered bird with numerous threats to its existence, and the Project has been tackling them one by one. After our presentation, which closed with Bobby's premier footage of a grebe pair performing their exotic and elaborate mating dance, Stuart expressed his enthusiasm in a succinct and effective way: "We cannot let that go extinct!"

I feel incredibly lucky and grateful for the opportunity to spend even a short time with such amazing scientists and conservationists like Stuart and Clinton. It makes me, and even 16-year-old me, hopeful for the future of the planet that such hard-working, passionate people exist on it. And inspires me to work harder to find my own ways to contribute.

Here's a few photos from our hike:

Bobby photographing the extremely venomous Bothrops jararaca

that we just almost stepped on

Cresent-chested Puffbird

Scary horsefly, just cz the photo turned out so good

 Frilled Coquete. Unfortunately this photo didn't turn out so good.