Wednesday, July 19, 2006
The boat trip from Iquitos to Jenaro Herrera can take twelve to fifteen hours depending on the strength of the current and bulk of the cargo. The Sofy is one of four boats that make the trip up and down the Ucayali River from Iquitos to the upriver town of Requena.
I awoke on Wednesday morning to see a repetition of landscapes passing us by – secondary forest with many patches of rice growing at the water’s edge. People plant rice along the river as the water recedes at the end of the rainy season and usually harvest it some months later before the heavy rains start to swell the river again. As we pulled into one town, it wasn’t hard to see how these boats are the arteries of these communities. When the boat touches the mud bank at the base of a community, there is a quick exodus of people returning home with crates, cans, jugs and bundles containing the full assortment of goods the families need or can buy in the big city. On the trip downriver, they bring local produce of rice, buffalo milk cheese, bananas, aguajé palm and other fruits to sell downriver.
While watching these comings and goings, I spoke with a school teacher from Requena. I was surprised to learn that even though it is farther upriver, Requena is the seat of the regional political district with three times Jenaro Herrera's population This teacher was quite passionate about informing his students about the natural world that they lived in the middle of and how important it was to take care of its resources.
Around 7:30 am, a crewmember brought us plates with cheese sandwiches and a thin banana milk drink for each of us. An hour or so later, our boat docked at the foot of Jenaro Herrera. I wish I had been able to take pictures of the busy scene with people and goods rapidly exiting from and getting on the boat. I was happy Cesar had arranged for a trusted fellow from town to take charge of getting our bags up the steep bank to the plateau of town. We then loaded all of our gear and most of our people into the back cab of a Nissan pick-up truck and drove the several kilometers on the mud rutted road to the research station.
The Center of Investigation of Jenaro Herrera has a main campus that seems to cover at least 50 acres with twenty or so houses spread out among the grass covered clearing. We were led to house number 9 that had a large but defunct parabolic antenna mounted in front. There was one large room in the front surrounded by mesh screened walls. This would be our main place to store our gear and gather after the day’s work. Nestor took a room next to the kitchen that was equipped with a refrigerator that worked for five hours during the evening when diesel generated power was available. There was also a stove that could be used if we bought a gas canister for it (which we didn’t).
Marissa and I took separate rooms down the other hallway next to the bathroom whose main features were a cold-water shower, a clean toilet without a seat, sturdy shelves for our toothpaste and shampoo. There were perennial small puddles around the shower and toilet due to various leaks that required care and a flashlight to navigate to keep one’s socks dry during nighttime visits.
After settling in a bit, we had a meeting with the station's director Gustavo, our team and a few other staff in the meeting room house that is sometimes used for classes. I gave a brief presentation on the goals of the copal project and some of things we hoped to do during our month long stay here and beyond.
Gustavo began our meeting with an overview of the station. It was founded in 1965 in a joint Peruvian and Swiss government project to research ways to develop the Peruvian Amazon. One focus was introducing cattle ranching, the other to investigate which of a hundred some species of trees provided the greatest potential for timber production. Given our usual easy mode of interaction, this gathering had a rather strangely formal quality to it, but this was obviously the sort of meeting that is expected at the beginning of a project. One important item I learned in Gustavo’s intro was that there were two sections of one species of copal (Protium aff. sagotianum) in the plantations created in the 1970's. I was immediately excited that these areas would provide an ideal way to get observations quickly underway and learn about resin production potential in a more controlled setting than natural forests can provide.
We next headed off on a brief walk around the nearby forest guided by Julio – one of the regular materos (woodsman) who works at the station on various forestry projects. The tour started at the nursery. It had hundreds if not thousands of seedlings of twenty or so tree species planted in the vicinity. The original intent was to learn which species had the best timber production potential. More recent efforts focus on growing aguajé palm and other trees that yield locally important non-timber products.
The aguajé fruit is about the size of an oblong golf ball covered by hundreds of tiny dark red scales; its orange pasty flesh surrounds one large seed. The fruit is omnipresent in the region, but it is actually becoming somewhat scarce because harvesters have been chopping trees down rather than climbing them to collect the fruit panicles. The negative impact of this practice on the population has been predictable. One approach that IIAP is taking to address this problem is to try to breed a shorter tree. The institute reasons that people would not fell the trees if they could harvest the fruits by merely reaching up.
Julio led us beyond the nursery to a well-worn path into the forest. We passed by a couple of different common timber species on a half-hour loop through the forest with brief stops at the Laurent plantation that included a small section devoted to copal trees and a larger one at the El Piñal plantation. Julio wasn’t sure what species was in these plantations but assured us that there was a book in the library that would contain this information.
We returned to our house for a quick break and then set out again with a field notebook and a few other pieces of gear to begin our copal survey in the El Piñal plantation that we dubbed Plantation 2. Confident of finding our way back without our guide, we went back down the path we had returned on and made it about half a mile into the forest before acknowledging we had gone too far. We backtracked and located our missed turn down a side trail that was just past a little sawmill. This operation was processing tornillo tree logs that were cut in a thinning operation. The rough sawn boards were used for construction projects at the station and sold locally. The overall project is measuring the plantation yield of this important commercial species.
We soon found our way back to the copal section of this plantation. When the plantation was established around 1972, the land was presumably cleared to make way for evenly spaced plantings of copal trees. The area now looked more like a typical secondary forest with a mixture of seedlings, saplings and medium-sized trunks of various species. With Nestor at the lead we began marking and measuring the diameter of every copal tree we could identify and photographing and tagging every resin lump.
I started out trying to have two teams of three people doing the same tasks, but we consolidated to one team when trying to coordinate two parallel efforts yielded more confusion than efficiency. Marissa became our main data recorder for the afternoon. Our prolific team ended up gathering information on 54 trees in one afternoon - a clear advantage of working in a plantation. One good day of searching natural forest for copal (“breu” in Brazil) trees with my Tembé colleagues produced data on ten to fifteen trees.
As we wove through the plantation, it became apparent that only some copal trees had resin lumps on them. From the viewpoint of finding a dependable source of resin, this was disappointing. From an ecologist’s standpoint, it posed the obvious question of understanding why the colonization rate was so low. Was it because whatever species of Protium was in this plantation was not very attractive to the resin weevils, or were other factors about this local environment responsible? I greatly appreciated having Cesar along with us for this first visit since he showed his keen eye of a curious naturalist. He looked at every tree closely from ground level, examined sections of bark obscured behind vines, and scanned the trunk to its top. This allowed him to start noticing some less obvious resin lumps that others missed.
Cesar made one particularly key observation. While many trees had knarly growths of bark resulting from unknown stresses, Cesar picked out a distinct pattern among one type of these irregularities in the trunk’s normally smooth contour. Some were raised mounds of wood that had not resulted from random machete cuts or disease. The remnants of resin and occasional bore holes showed that weevils had attacked the tree at that spot and at least started to form a resin lump.
This observation led to wonder if at least this copal species was not a major resin producer, perhaps because it resists some weevil attacks by forming wound wood at the site of a feeding larva. I had seen this sort of wooden lump before in Peru and Brazil, but this was the first time it occurred to me that some Protium trees at least respond very actively to these attacks. When wound wood forms, it tends to be much denser than other parts of the tree. Since the resin weevils take more than a year to develop, it’s not hard to envision how this seemingly slow strategy could effectively block the regular intrusion of a weevil larva into the living tissue of the tree. The larva would die when it lost access to the nutritious inner bark for food, and the halt of resin flow left it vulnerable.
We returned to the Center in late afternoon, dropped off our gear, and strolled up the road to have our very late lunch/early dinner. There is a large building at the station that is used as a dining room for large gatherings on campus, but resident and visiting researchers usually eat in the dining room of Dona Susanna’s house. It would cost us 15 soles (just over $4.50) per person per day to have three meals a day with her. It seemed like a good deal.
We chatted back at our house after dinner for a while, but we were all tired from a long journey and hard day’s work. After a refreshing cold shower, I went to bed. It had a thick foam mattress, pillow, one sheet and a thin bed spread. I got to sleep quickly, but unfortunately woke up after midnight very early feeling cold. Because it can be so hot during the day time in the tropics, it's easy to forget that the temperature can drop dramatically at night.
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