Predators I Have Known (10 page)

I was elated to reacquaint myself with the region surrounding the still unspoiled Cocha Salvador. This time, I had the pleasure of sleeping in a screened-in room with a bed instead of on a sleeping bag in a rotting tent. Meals prepared in a kitchen and served at wooden tables made recollections of eating while standing up in
la casa de los mosquitos
seem like a memory from an ancient fable. The nocturnal horror of the pit toilet was all in the past, and showers were available. All sheer luxury compared to my former visit.

One thing fortunately remained unchanged and untouched, however, and that was the surrounding primeval rain forest.

When I declared that I wished to take solitary walks in the forest, I was met with unease by the concerned lodge staff. With a knowing smile, I explained that I had walked the shores of this lake when there had been no buildings here, and that I knew what I was doing. After eleven more years spent traveling the world, I did know better. If nothing else, I had learned enough not to let myself get overconfident even in seemingly safe surrounds.

For example, the first rule to remember while walking through rain forest and jungle is simple: No matter how attractive something is, no matter how much you may think you know about it be it plant or animal or unidentifiable, assume that everything you encounter can bite, sting, or otherwise hurt you.

With that caution in mind, I took my walks alone, reveling in the sounds and sights of the forest, free from the enervating chatter of visiting housewives and day-tripping tourists. I saw much that I had seen before and plenty that was new. Back at the lodge, I cheerfully discussed my encounters with the staff guides whenever they could spare a little time to sit and chat.

I was especially fond of the conversations I had with an energetic young female guide who I will call Anna. She had committed to the lodge for a year, following which paid sojourn she hoped to return to Lima to further her studies in tropical biology. We were sitting and talking one day when she happened to ask, “Is there anything you’d like to see that you haven’t seen? I mean, besides a jaguar or a harpy eagle or something really difficult?”

I thought a moment. “Yes. I’d like to see an isula ant nest.”

She blanched. I always thought that was purely a literary description of someone’s reaction, but you could see her actually go a little pale. I had expected a response, but not one quite so strong. I hastened to reassure her.

“I’ll be careful, I promise. I know the isula ant. I won’t take any chances.”

She hesitated a moment longer before nodding reluctantly. “OK. As long as you promise. I know you’ve been here before, but as a guest I’m still responsible for you.”

“I won’t do anything stupid.”

She rose from the rattan chair. “I actually know where there’s one not too far from here.”

Those who have never spent time in real rain forest assume that to see exotic and sometimes rare animals one has to spend days or at least hours traveling by canoe and hiking on foot. While this is true of certain specific locales like Langoué Bai in Gabon, in many other instances it’s a misnomer propounded by decades of television nature documentaries in which the suffering of the photographers to get the picture is emphasized in order to add drama to the process. Cutting back and forth from the subject plant or animal to a cameraman or woman sitting motionless in a blind can get pretty boring, and is as devoid of action as it is of the human interest so beloved of sponsors and their ratings monitors. Far more drama is to be had from watching people stumble through raging jungle streams, or rappel down rugged mountainsides, or shimmy up liana-draped trees. All of this does happen, of course, and sometimes it’s unavoidable in the course of conducting real science, but it’s not always the only way to see interesting things.

I remember spending a week in Ecuador’s fabulous Yasuní National Park trying to catch a glimpse of the park’s signature species, the golden-mantled tamarin. Like all small primates, this spectacular small monkey is not easy to see. Both on my own and in the company of the lodge’s guides I spent days searching for them, each time without success.

It was my last morning at the Napo Wildlife Center. The other handful of guests were all birders and were out in the forest busily indulging in the orgy of aves spotting that was their chosen passion. Yasuní is considered one of the best places in the world for birding. Birders are more obsessive about their pastime than a foot fetishist locked overnight in a Manolo Blahnik store. A jaguar could attack an anaconda directly behind them, and they would ignore it in their anxiety to identify the subspecies of parrot feeding on palm nuts that they happened to be observing.

Sitting alone on the open terrace of the lodge’s restaurant, I heard a burst of idiosyncratic chittering. Thinking it was only some common monkeys, I nevertheless roused myself and walked out behind the lodge, following the noise.

Two tall trees behind the lodge were full of golden-mantled tamarins.

So much for slogging through canyons sloppy with mud and swarming with leeches in search of rare animals.

But back to Manú.

Anna and I had not gone a hundred yards from the camp when she turned slightly off the trail. Twenty feet or so back into the bush she stopped, began searching, and finally picked up a suitable fallen branch a yard long and half an inch thick. Studying the forest floor intently, Isaw nothing unusual.

Slowly approaching a slightly built-up area of dirt located between the flaring buttress roots of a mature cecropia, she inserted one end of the stick into a small, dark hole at the top of the gently sloping dirt pile. She then proceeded to jab the stick sharply down into the opening three, four, five times.

A black shape emerged from the hole. Then another, and another.

She threw the stick aside and retreated. Fast. Their energy sapped by the unrelenting heat and humidity, people tend to move slowly in the rain forest. To this day, I don’t believe I’ve seen anyone move as fast in such sweltering surroundings as Anna did at that moment. Halting about ten feet away from the tree, she alternated her attention between the creatures that were now boiling out of the hole and me. I had insisted that I would not do anything stupid, but she was taking no chances.

Emerging angrily from their home were some fifteen to twenty
Paraponera clavata
. When compared to the hordes of army ants easily encountered anywhere in the Amazon, or the driver ants of tropical Africa, that may not sound like much of an eruption. Except the representatives of this genus are the biggest ants in the world.

Known in Peru as isula ants, some specimens of
Paraponera
are reputed to grow as long as two inches. Their hefty, ruthlessly efficient bodies look like they have been welded together out of shards of reddish black steel. Their jaws alone are longer than many species of ant. Solitary hunters, they haul everything from other ants to grasshoppers and even frogs and salamanders back to their nest, which unlike that of many ants is not dominated by a queen. The isula ant is the Spartan of the ant world, irresistible in single combat, a Hymenopteran Praetorian guard. The mastodon ant.

In other parts of South America, the isula ant is known as the bullet ant, because if you are stung by one it supposedly feels as if you’ve been shot. Elsewhere it is often called the twenty-four-hour ant, because the excruciating pain of its sting can last for a full day and nothing can mitigate the suffering.

Moving closer, I took care while aiming my camera. Every couple of minutes, a concerned Anna would say something like, “That’s close enough,” or “Be careful,” or most tellingly, “Watch your feet.” She didn’t have to warn me. Thanks to a single encounter with the tangarana ant, I had learned my lesson eleven years earlier. The tangarana ant that had stung me so forcefully had been about the size of an isula ant compound eye.

Spreading out, the agitated ants began to search for the source of whatever had disturbed their nest. In their determination and purpose, they were fascinating to watch. On their bodies, details of ant anatomy that usually have to be studied under a magnifying glass or microscope were easily visible to the naked eye. Powerful jaws long enough to be measured with a ruler opened and snapped shut expectantly.

I know what you’re thinking. This is the part where I feel a stabbing pain in my leg or arm. This is the section where I lie in bed writhing in agony for the next twenty-four hours, decrying my rashness at getting so close to such a small but deadly carnivore, lamenting my inability to see the attack coming.

Sorry.

Glancing down and away from the camera, I noticed a single isula ant actively exploring the ground near my left boot. Another was nearby. I could have raised my foot and crushed each of them into the ground. Revenge for the tangarana ant attack of more than a decade ago. Revenge in Nature, however, has neither place nor meaning. It is purely a human conceit, and one to which I was not about to succumb.

I switched off the camera and stepped back. Still watching me closely, Anna was visibly relieved and more than happy to leave the vicinity of the nest to the patrolling ants. There are times and places in which I will take chances or push the envelope a little, but as I assured Anna, I do not do anything overtly dumb.

My incredibly understanding wife, of course, would sigh knowingly and beg to differ.

Bismarck Sea, September 1997

I’M OFTEN ASKED WHICH OF
all the places I have visited is my favorite. The question is impossible to answer because one inevitably ends up trying to compare apples to oranges. Actually, apples are more comparable to oranges than Italy is to Indonesia, or Brussels to Burkina Faso. I can contrast Rome with Madrid, or Yekaterinburg with Chicago, but not Peru with Prague.

Every place I have ever been has something to recommend it; every person I have ever met something to commend them. Or as my wife succinctly puts it, “You have no taste: You like everyplace and everybody.” To this assertion, I must plead mostly guilty.

While it is impossible to offer an all-inclusive answer to the query, it is possible to break down encounters into categories. For walking, my favorites would be Manhattan and London. For history, Prague and Rome. For sheer surprise, Istanbul. For animal life, South Africa. For Nature in the raw, Namibia, Gabon, and Peru. The most beautiful natural places I have seen on Earth are the immeasurably vast Grand Canyon of Arizona, the Tolkienesque Lofoten Islands of Norway, Venezuela’s otherworldly Canaima National Park, the untouched underwater marvels of West Papua, and my number-one choice, the incomparable Iguazú Falls on the border between Argentina and Brazil.

But for an all-around, utterly fascinating, highly diverse step back in time, the prize goes hands-down to Papua New Guinea.

This is a land replete with spectacular sights both above and below the water. Vibrant with amazing human cultures that have survived largely unchanged for thousands of years, swarming with remarkable animals, it can boast whole regions that have yet to be touched by Western civilization. There is simply no place like it left on Earth.

Among its unrivaled attractions, up in the Bismarck Sea north of the large, lush island of New Hanover, there used to be a place of magic called Silvertip Reef.

Sharks, I try to explain to the querulous who know them only from what they have seen in film and on television, are no different from dogs. Leave a shark alone, and it will behave very much like any neighborhood pooch. Encountering a stranger, it sizes them up, tries to take a sniff or two, attempts to ascertain if you qualify as either a danger (swim away!) or potential food (sniff harder), and eventually reaches a decision based on these observations. Dump a tub of blood and fish guts into the water in close proximity to curious sharks, and you sometimes are rewarded with what has melodramatically been labeled a “feeding frenzy.”

Now try this. Go to your local butcher. Buy twenty pounds of raw hamburger, complete with juices. Find an alley. Look for a pack of dogs. Toss the hamburger into their midst. You’ll get the same reaction impatient photographers do when slopping chum to sharks, only with a frenzy of legs instead of fins.

Regrettably, because of the way they look and are perceived to behave, certain creatures have always had a bad press. Sharks unquestionably. Among other similarly cuteness-impaired species can also be counted spiders, snakes, and rats. If not for spiders, we would be drowning in insects. If not for snakes, the planet’s pesky rodent population would be far more difficult to deal with. As for rats, they are intelligent, family-oriented, and make excellent pets. I’m sure if you asked them, not one would speak up to declare proudly, “Hey, we
like
being infested with fleas that carry bubonic plague! Chipmunks do, too, and
they
aren’t subject to universal condemnation!”

That’s because unlike run-of-the-mill rodents, chipmunks are perceived by humans to be . . . cute. Even though they’re just rats with racing stripes.