6. Miracle duffel, station history and Bandito, 7/21/07

Friday, July 21, 2006

As the morning began, Marissa had little inclination to go into the forest again in her same clothes. Just after returning from breakfast, we were blessed with the arrival of our fourth duffel bag that had miraculously been flown from Miami to Lima with Avianca, passed through customs, put on a Lan Peru flight to Iquitos, picked up at the airport and put into the care of a boat captain, taken off the boat in Jenaro Herrera by a trustworthy local friend, and finally delivered to us at the station by a IIAP truck. Marissa and I rejoiced at the reunion with our clothes and toiletries. We were all happy to get the food I’d left in our hotel in Iquitos. This box gave us several weeks worth of canned goods, crackers and cookies for lunches in the field and snacks. Even a yogurt drink was still good. Some other fresh food intended for our boat trip hadn’t fared so well; the apples were mushy and the cheese had melted into a blob.

As we proceeded with our work in the copal plantations, we wanted to find out basic information about these and other inventories done at the station. Gustavo loaned Victor one book about the Laurent Plantation (that we called Plantation 1) that was named for one of the Swiss scientists who spearheaded the research efforts here in the 1960’s. It said that the only species of copal planted there was Protium aff. sagotianum. The “aff.” designation stands for “affinum”, a Latin term meaning that the specimen is similar but not identical to the recognized species. In other words, it’s a species that has not yet been well described. The seeds came from an unknown source, but they were presumably collected locally since there are a number of leaf specimens in the herbarium bearing this same tentative identification. This book had a map showing the Piñal Plantation (that we call Plantation 2), but it didn’t mention when it was created or what species was planted there.

In the hope of finding a follow-up volume about the larger Piñal plantation, Victor and I ventured into the library. Its dark and cobwebbed covered stacks, books, map tubes and magazines reminded me of the dank room portrayed in the movie version of Great Expectations where the contents had neither been cleaned nor updated for several decades. One shelf had a label claiming to contain publications resulting from research done at the station, but we found nothing about this plantation. In fact we didn’t find any book more recent than the mid-1980’s anywhere in the stacks. My best find in the library were a dozen novels in English scattered throughout old books on forestry that had probably been left by earlier researchers.

The youngest thing we discovered in the library was a small-medium sized shepherd mix dog curled up in a corner. We soon learned that Bandito belongs to one of the Center guards, but he spends his days (and some nights) wandering around the Center grounds in search of adventure, food and companionship. He has become a good buddy to Nestor, Marissa and me since we affectionately stroke his head and give him hefty leftovers saved from our meals. He squeals with happy yips when he greets us, sleeps under our house or on the porch (we don’t allow him inside because he is constantly scratching), and sometimes accompanies us into the forest.

Victor got two other key resources on inventories from Naillerette and assistant station director Frederico, better known as Fico. In contrast to the moldy library, these IIAP staff people have entered good information in computer spreadsheets on trees monitored in the arboretum and recently surveyed in a dozen areas throughout the IIAP forest. I was very excited to consider the possibility of finding a diversity of copal trees in different forest habitats that had already been located, marked and identified. It turned out that finding well-marked trees in the well-laid trails of the arboretum trees was very workable. It remains to seen if relocating unmarked trees along transect lines from other inventories would be a cost-effective endeavor.