The Song of The Dodo, page 9
“The male is black,” Setz adds, “with an orange face.”
Coloring is far from uniform within Pithecia pithecia, another case of intraspecific variation. Alfred Wallace might have seized on it if he had known. Five hundred miles northeast, up in the forests of Surinam, males of this species show white facial fur, sharply contrasting with the dark body color and giving them their name, white-faced saki. Down here along the Rio Negro, the face of a male can be russet or yellow or (as with Setz’s group) orange. Females are more drab than males, though they have their own range of color variation. The female above us is brownish gray, not quite so dark as the male. Like an agouti, to Setz’s eyes, or a muskrat to mine. Faint streaks of white and yellow highlight the female’s somber fur. Her yellowish crown and her size are distinctive enough for individual identification, at least among this little group. She’s known to the humans who watch her as Wilza Carla. Her namesake is a portly blond actress on Brazilian TV.
“We’ve arrived,” says Setz, meaning that the morning’s first spate of monkey seeking is over. “They’re going to eat.”
Settling in the crown of a tree, they start cracking the seed pods of a liana tangled there in the canopy. They eat the seeds and drop the husks contemptuously toward us. I hear birdsong, the crunch of teeth, the rustle of those falling husks, and no other sounds. It’s still too early for heat-driven insects. Setz is ready with her notebook and her digital watch, her binoculars, her infinite patience and curiosity—all the requisite tools of a behavioral ecologist in the field. I sit on the ground, making myself comfortable except for the crick in my neck from staring upward.
There’s great tranquility to be found beneath the Amazon canopy when you quiet yourself to watch an animal at its business. If the mosquitoes aren’t biting, if the rain happens to have paused, you can dream away hours, you can space-walk the universe. But the tranquility of this particular place, where Eleonore Setz does her watching, is meager and pinched. Dawn has destroyed the illusion of a vast forest. I can see daylight pouring in along the clear-cut edge twenty yards away, and beyond that, blue sky above man-made pasture.
The cutting was done in 1980, at the height of the ranchingincentives policy. Ever since, the sakis in this fragment of forest have been marooned. Their isolation isn’t absolute (an occasional young male from the outer forest may have come in across that clear-cut, and several members of Wilza’s group seem to have left), but it’s isolation enough to define their lives and their future. Ecologically, they are hampered, with only a small area of forest in which to find food. Some of their favorite fruits probably don’t grow here at all. Behaviorally, they have had to compensate, adjusting their diet to what is available. Socially, they have suffered from the absence of others of their species. They don’t have neighbors, they don’t have rivals, they don’t have visitors from whom they might learn things. Genetically, too, they are disadvantaged—condemned to inbreeding and to the potential health problems that inbreeding entails. With all these factors set against them, their overall prospects are gloomy. The species Pithecia pithecia isn’t immediately endangered, but this little population certainly is.
Their habitat fragment is 9.2 hectares in area. That constitutes crucial information.
A hectare is a metric unit that serves as the standard measurement of beleaguered rainforest. All over the world, tropical biologists and conservationists talk in hectares. Me, I pride myself on despising metric-system evangelism as much as the next red-blooded and obdurate American, but the hectare does happen to be handy, and the conversion is simple. One hectare is the area encompassed within a square measuring 100 meters on each side—just enough space for a football game, counting the end zones and benches. One hectare equals 2.47 acres. At 9.2 hectares, less than 25 acres, Setz’s fragment is roughly the size and shape of two par-five golf holes laid side to side with a sinuous water hazard between. The water hazard is that little stream I mentioned. Her Pithecia inhabit a narrow world.
The previous evening, as we talked across a camp table, I asked Setz whether the fragment has a name. Well, not much of a name, she told me. In Portuguese it would be a matinha do igarape do acampamento Colosso. Sounds like plenty of name, I said, what does it mean? Acampamento Colosso was recognizable to me as the field camp where we sat, called Colosso, though it’s just a few thatched roofs furnished with hammocks and a lantern. An igarape, I knew, is a trickle of water. Which gave me “the matinha around the stream at Camp Colosso.” Matinha itself was slightly more difficult to translate.
It’s the diminutive of mata, meaning forest, Setz said. Small forest. Tiny forest. But that doesn’t capture the nuance. Matinha. It’s familiar, it’s affectionate, it’s condescending, as you might speak of a child, she said, groping.
I said, What about “cute little forest”?
Yes, she said. Yes, that’s the idea.
A matinha do igarape do acampamento Colosso: the cute little forest at the heart of the Amazon. Ecologically, it’s an island. Like Bali, it was once rich in species—at the onset of its insularity—and since then has become impoverished. Jaguars are now absent, peccaries are absent, tapirs are absent. The patch is not only isolated but simplified. Of Pithecia pithecia chrysocephala, the golden-faced saki, only six individuals remain. Their chances of perpetuation are low. Before many years pass they will probably disappear, and still other species will disappear after them. The fragment will grow steadily less Amazonian and more diminutive, more diminished, more leached of its biological richness, without growing smaller. That’s the dire magic we’re calling ecosystem decay.
I asked Setz to repeat the Portuguese phrase. I asked for the spelling. Here, I said, write in my notebook. Foreign languages tend to spill off my brain like rain off a cheap plastic umbrella, but matinha was a word I didn’t want to forget. Setz wrote out the phrase in her neat Portuguese print.
That was last night. Now breakfast is over for the sakis. Having had enough of the liana seeds, they travel on. Their horizontal leaps, their snatched landings, stir the branches. Their big puffy tails provide balance. They cover distance quickly and then every so often they stop, they freeze, becoming invisible among the shadows of the high understory. I sweep my binoculars this way and that, I squint, I wonder where the devil they are. I try hard not to make noise, not to spook them, not to come too near, spacing myself a half-dozen yards behind Setz, who follows them calmly. She isn’t concerned about losing them. Her eyes are keen, and besides, these animals can’t go far.
18
BALI, Lombok, Madagascar, the Guiana district, the matinha on Fazenda Esteio, Alfred Wallace, Sarawak—these elements are not assembled here randomly. There’s a connectedness among them that’s more than casual. They all bear on the elemental yin and yang of island biogeography: the study of evolution and of extinction.
Wallace himself traced that connectedness with the path of his life and his thought. His greatest scientific accomplishment was to discover and elucidate the transcendent significance of insularity. But he was born a century too soon to see how far that insight would lead.
Where it led in his case was to the Malay Archipelago. This was in some measure, as I’ve said, a matter of chance. If the brig Helen hadn’t caught fire, if his Amazon notes and his Amazon specimens had survived, if he had successfully harvested the data from his first expedition, Wallace might have stayed home for the rest of his life, as Darwin did after the Beagle. If certain other things had happened differently, he might have gone back out to the Andes, as he mentioned considering in the sickbed letter. He might have matured into an eminent Victorian naturalist, nothing more, who devoted his years to observing and collecting the flora and fauna of the mainlands. He might have become vastly, conventionally authoritative. Meanwhile he might have missed the profound patterns. He might have overlooked the significance of islands.
He might have, he might have… But history is only what it is.
19
WALLACE NEEDED money and adventure more than he needed rest. He also needed biological data. He was still looking for a solution to that mystery of mysteries, the origin of species. Within the next eighteen months, while in England, he published two books—his Narrative of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro and a lesser volume titled Palm Trees of the Amazon and Their Uses, derived from notes he had salvaged from the Helen—both of which left his obscurity largely unbreached. Then he was ready to go back out collecting. The worst of his bad luck was over, and the good luck began with his choice of a new destination. For scientific reasons, but also because of those market pressures facing a purveyor of natural-history specimens, he chose a world of tropical islands.
Islands in general were repositories for the rare and the peculiar, he knew, and this particular set of islands especially so. “During my constant attendance at the meetings of the Zoological and Entomological Societies, and visits to the insect and bird departments of the British Museum,” he wrote later, “I had obtained sufficient information to satisfy me that the very finest field for an exploring and collecting naturalist was to be found in the great Malayan Archipelago.” Through a benevolent elder at the Royal Geographical Society, he was granted free passage by the Peninsular and Oriental steamship company. He sailed via Gibraltar to Alexandria, traveled overland from there to Suez, and then boarded another ship. By April of 1854 he was in Singapore.
Singapore suited him as a base for six months of collecting on mainland Malaysia. The mainland was rich in species, though not so rich in the sort of bold patterns and geographical barriers that he needed. In November he moved over to Sarawak, on the northwestern coast of Borneo. For the next seven years he would wander among islands.
In reaction against his earlier carelessness and against Darwin’s Galápagos blunder, he made a resolution. “From my first arrival in the East I had determined to keep a complete set of certain groups from every island or distinct locality which I visited for my own study on my return home, as I felt sure they would afford me very valuable materials for working out the geographical distribution of animals in the archipelago, and also throw light on various other problems.” Foremost among the other problems was evolution. He was smarter and more wary now, so besides tagging his specimens by locality he also shipped them off regularly in batches, rather than letting them pile up. He didn’t foresee that the big problem would be solved—solved twice, in fact, once by him and once by Mr. Darwin—before he ever returned home.
Sarawak was fruitful. Wallace did well in beetles, butterflies, and birds. He shot (with the callousness of a professional hunter, which he was) several orangutans, and adopted (for the short time it survived) an orphaned orangutan infant. He saw a so-called flying frog. He spent time among the Dyak people of the interior. He also wrote and mailed off his paper on the “law” of closely allied species. He interrupted his fieldwork long enough to spend Christmas as the guest of Sir James Brooke, rajah of Sarawak, who was glad for some good conversation with a clever young Englishman. After more than a year, this part of Borneo must have felt almost like home. But home was a luxury for later. So Wallace left, looping back briefly to Singapore and then traveling east, as boat traffic allowed, toward the remote and little-known eastern end of the archipelago.
He sailed down to Bali, then across to Lombok, where he made his observation of the surprisingly drastic difference between the bird faunas of those two adjacent islands. From there, up to the trading port of Macassar on the island of Celebes.
He spent three months on Celebes, collecting as best he could despite sickness, rainy weather, the paucity of good forest immediately surrounding Macassar, and other logistical difficulties. The sickness may have been malaria again, though he blamed it on tainted water. The birds, the mammals, the insects of Celebes were distinct from what he had seen in Sarawak, and an animal called the babirusa impressed him especially. Babyrousa babyrussa is an endemic wild pig whose upper canine teeth (in the male) grow long and curled, pushing out through the flesh of the snout and arching back over the forehead like a pair of horns. Although it faintly reminded Wallace of an African warthog, he admitted that “the Babirusa stands completely isolated, having no resemblance to the pigs of any other part of the world.” How did it eat? he wanted to know. How did it use those monstrous, inconvenient-looking tusks? What factors of growth or behavior explained this anatomical modification? Wallace was not one to accept a swoopy-toothed Celebesian pig as the whim of God. He also collected two species of hornbill peculiar to the island, and a handsome cuckoo, and three specimens of birdwing butterfly. The birdwings were magnificent creatures, seven inches across, their big black wings decorated with patches and streaks of white and satiny yellow. “I trembled with excitement as I took the first out of my net and found it to be in perfect condition,” he wrote later. He matched his three specimens against the species Ornithoptera remus in a faunal treatise he carried, but the match was imperfect. Possibly they were a distinct Celebesian variety of remus, he suspected. Aside from these items and a few others, Celebes disappointed him.
The diversity of insects and birds seemed meager compared with what he’d seen on Borneo and mainland Malaysia. He found no barbets, no trogons, no broadbills, no shrikes. “Whole families and genera are altogether absent,” he complained in a letter to Samuel Stevens, “and there is nothing to supply their place.” Celebes, standing alone near the midpoint of the archipelago, was interesting but not very productive. And now the weather had begun to change.
The steady, strong eastern winds, which blew warm and dry onto Macassar during October and November, were giving way to variable breezes that signaled a shift of seasons, and storm clouds were sliding in from the west. It was the approach of the western monsoon—serious rain, hysterical rain, Wallace was warned. Collecting would soon be impossible. This was December 1856. The rains began. The dried-out rice paddies, which spread for miles across the flat coastal plain surrounding Macassar, filled again with water. The outskirts of town became impassable except by boat, or by tightroping along the muddy banks between paddies. Wallace could expect about five months of this weather if he hung around here in southern Celebes, he was told. So he moved again. Better to travel out ahead of the western monsoon and escape its reach, he figured, than to spend all those months hunkering indoors. He took space on a prau that was sailing east to the Aru Islands.
Wallace had heard tales about Aru. It was a tiny cluster of islands lying a thousand miles eastward, minuscule in area but famous to the seafaring native people of Celebes, the Bugis, for its precious biological commodities. Those commodities included pearl shell and dried sea cucumber as well as bird of paradise skins and other rare items, and a voyage out to Aru could be the central event of a Buginese trader’s lifetime, like a Moslem’s long pilgrimage to Mecca. The merchants of Macassar, both the Buginese and the immigrant Chinese, dealt in a wide variety of natural products from throughout the Malay region—rattan from Borneo, sandalwood and beeswax from Flores and Timor, sea cucumber from the Gulf of Carpentaria, cajuputi oil from Bouru, as well as staples such as rice and coffee. “More important than all these however,” Wallace would write years after his trip, “is the trade to Aru, a group of islands situated on the south-west coast of New Guinea, and of which almost the whole produce comes to Macassar in native vessels.” Aru, for the Buginese, was at the farthest extreme of imaginable travel.
He added: “These islands are quite out of the track of all European trade, and are inhabited only by black mop-headed savages, who yet contribute to the luxurious tastes of the most civilized races. Pearls, mother-of-pearl, and tortoise-shell, find their way to Europe, while edible birds’ nests and ‘tripang’ or sea-slug are obtained by shiploads for the gastronomic enjoyment of the Chinese.” Wallace, more so than most other Victorian travelers, was capable of empathy toward native peoples in the lands that he visited—even toward these folk he called “mop-headed savages”—but he wasn’t faultless on that count, and his language reflected his times. The “mop-headed savages” were actually Papuans who had colonized Aru from the coast of New Guinea, a hundred miles away; savage or not, they added something to the aura. Throughout the eastern end of the big archipelago, from Celebes to the progressively more remote islands—Gilolo, Bouru, Timor, Seram, Banda, and Ké—the native peoples were distinctly Malayan, not Papuan. That is, they were brown-skinned, with thin features and straight hair. The presence of Papuans on Aru represented another signal, along with the gaudy bird skins and the nacreous shells, that this little set of islands was extraordinary.
December or January, at the start of the western monsoon, was the right season for riding the winds to Aru. July or August was the season for riding the winds back. At other times the route was impossible instead of just dangerous, since Buginese praus were no good at tacking upwind. “The trade to these islands has existed from very early times,” Wallace added, “and it is from them that Birds of Paradise, of the two kinds known to Linnaeus, were first brought.” The two kinds in question were Cicinnurus regius, a small scarlet species commonly called the king bird of paradise, and the greater bird of paradise, now known (with a slight correction of Linnaeus’s original spelling) as Paradisaea apoda. Wallace was a trader himself, of course, and the commercial man as well as the naturalist in him was keen on getting a shot at those species. Among the well-heeled English collectors to whom Samuel Stevens sold Wallace’s yield, a fine specimen of P. apoda was probably worth as much as any bird or insect on the planet.
