Stinging Trees and Wait-a-Whiles by Bill Laurance, Chicago, $25, ISBN
0226468968
In Search of the Golden Frog by Martha Crump, Chicago, $18.90, ISBN
0226121984
AN ordinary day’s fieldwork: “Hiking through the forest I noticed a
distinctive itching in my private parts. I immediately dropped my trousers and
was aghast to find a massive leech attached, half its body inside my urethra. I
howled in horror and yanked the engorged beast out. The only highlight of this
appalling incident was that my private parts were huge for a week, which was
gratifying from a purely egotistical point of view.”
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With stories like this to tell, is it any wonder that rainforest biologists
are often seen as the racing drivers of fieldwork, risking life and limb for
their elusive prizes? Ever since Alfred Wallace’s trip to the tropics a century
and a half ago, natural history narratives from the deep, dark depths of the
jungle have enthralled those who relish a touch of armchair adventure to spice
up their biology. The difficulty now lies in finding an unvisited spot. There’s
hardly a tribe that hasn’t hosted a hardy trekker, and it’s a rare forest that
hasn’t been clocked by David Attenborough, Earthwatch or both.
When all the world’s a TV screen, there has to be a new twist to the
biologist’s tale. So lately we have come to learn a little more of the
personalities behind the sweaty bandanna and ever-cocked collecting net. And
where TV goes, the printed page follows. Readers as well as viewers are keen to
learn about the motivations and domestic arrangements of deep-forest biologists,
while thrilling at tales of their near-death experiences. Up the Zambezi with a
paddle, yes, but take that tape recorder and keep a personal diary as well as a
species count.
Bill Laurance and Martha Crump have a double treat for such armchair
aficionados. Stinging Trees and Wait-a-Whiles is Laurance’s account of
his 18 months looking at the effects of habitat fragmentation on the mammals of
Queensland’s rainforests. Crump’s In Search of the Golden Frog stems
from thirty years studying the reptiles and amphibians of Central and South
America. Both provide just the sort of fly-on-the-field-hut-wall view of life as
a tropical ecologist that we want. Crump explains how to extract a parasitic
maggot from your wrist without risking blood poisoning—you can use raw
meat, Vaseline or a bit of leather—and how to survive close encounters
with snakes. Only here’s another twist: she took her children frog watching, and
it’s her daughter who stepped on a coiled fer-de-lance: happily the snake “must
have been chilly” and failed to bite.
Both writers dish out large helpings of the personalities, irritations,
dangers and satisfactions of the lifestyle. With Brazil’s newly modified
forestry law allowing landowners to increase the tree loss on their land from 50
to 80 per cent, it is worth remembering just how special rainforests are.
Laurance is the more graphic writer of the two—you won’t forget that
leech in a hurry—and horror stories pepper his pages. But any temptation
to indulge in rampant machismo is consistently deflated with a self-deprecating
last line. And the biology is splendid. Who would have thought up anything as
weird as the brown antechinus? Males of the species find mating so stressful
that they die en masse, leaving the antechinus world male-free for months on
end.
While Laurance was chasing animals in Queensland, Crump was pursuing smaller
but more diverse jungle fare in South America. Her speciality is frogs. But, as
she joyfully points out, forms and mating habits in the tropics diverge
exuberantly from the classic temperate model of the thin-skinned lilypad-lurking
green croaker. Crump’s writing, based on diary entries, has great freshness. She
is bursting to pass on every last froggy fragment of enthusiasm and knowledge,
and introduces us to species that whip up foam for nests and others that each
year develop tadpole-friendly pools on their backs for their offspring. A wealth
of wonder-inducing facts about frog skin, frog calls and even frog psychology
will keep you turning the pages.
Crump also throws light on edible insects, sleeping hummingbirds and plant
pollination—and on being a women in a field dominated in the late 1960s by
men.
Both books have plenty of scrapes, near misses and lucky escapes. As well as
leeches, Laurance encounters paralysing ticks and paranoid pot growers and has
his truck sabotaged by disgruntled loggers, while Crump survives body-sucking
mud, vipers and electric eels. Neither of them hams it up: extraordinary
incidents are treated as all part of a day’s work. The books are all the more
impressive for this matter-of-fact attitude. It makes you wonder just how you
might have reacted.
Matching this stoicism is a businesslike approach to the work that both
authors clearly love. Fascinated by the beasts they study, neither veers from
the rational and descriptive. Perhaps this is because they are practising
professional biologists: academics can be singularly pompous about colleagues
who try their hand at popularisation. Both books are filled with charming
vignettes and enough eccentric characters to enliven the dullest dinner
party.
The threat of rainforest destruction is an undercurrent in both books. At the
time Laurance carried out his study, Queensland’s rainforests were on the brink
of receiving World Heritage status, and this brought conservation up against
hard politics. Stinging Trees shows the courage it demanded to be a
“greeny” in a Queensland logging town. No less importantly, it documents the
ecology-shattering effects of forest fragmentation. Remnants are full of
opportunist species, many alien. Quolls, cassowaries and pythons have long
gone.
In Ecuadorian Amazonia, Crump found and studied the most diverse amphibian
community ever found anywhere, containing nearly 100 species living together.
Twenty years later, she returned: the trees were gone and the pools muddied
travesties. Forget the frogs and salamanders.
Old views of rainforest as a wasteland to be tamed still linger in
administrators’ minds, as Brazil showed recently. We need books like Crump’s and
Laurance’s to influence them and their successors—and enthuse a new
generation of biologists to keep working at them till they succumb.