The Arbornaut, page 7
The tree extended another fifty feet—I was only ninety feet up!—into the teeming, buzzing hot spot of biodiversity called the upper canopy. I stayed in my aerial perch for at least an hour, which seemed like an eternity, awestruck by all the activities around me. I had ventured into a new world. I could hear the lyrical melodies of crimson rosellas, punctuated by the crack of eastern whipbirds in another treetop, but closer at hand were swarms of buzzing pollinators, colorful beetles crunching with their mouthparts on new leaves, and butterflies flitting in sunspots as they sought flowering-vine nectar for breakfast. I wasn’t an entomologist—and even if I had been, I’d have had no idea what most of the creatures were doing there, since no one had ever been up here before! It was humbling to enter their world and think of how unknown all these creatures were to all of science, and more humbling still to realize my presence did not frighten any of them to fly away. I watched. I held my breath in wonder. I twirled on the rope to see in all directions. How would I ever make any sense of all this? I fumbled for my bulky camera, struggling to remove it from my backpack without dropping it or unclipping any safety gear, and snapped some photos, which I later realized were pathetic attempts to capture this new world. I was tempted to pull out a notebook and scribble some observations but couldn’t do justice to everything around me; all I could do was gaze in awe. Eventually, I descended back down to the dark, relatively quiet and empty understory, giddy with amazement and feeling almost intoxicated.
I had a healthy respect for heights, although not an actual fear, so my climbing was cautious but determined. I was in good physical shape, but thanks to the hardware, I didn’t need to be a superathlete to slither up the rope. In fact, I was not even out of breath after that first climb, because the ascending gadgets, the jumars, had angled teeth that slid up the rope (but not down) and held me safely in place whenever I stopped to rest. I soon learned to pause and enjoy the view, grateful that the equipment buoyed me safely in place. Still, the next day I was nearly bedridden, every leg and arm muscle aching, because I had instinctively tried to hug the tree trunk with both knees and frantically grasp all the branches with my arms, like a monkey. After a few ascents, I forced myself to remember this was not necessary, because the hardware and the harness provided support. Despite my exhaustion, the pure joy of seeing so much life among the canopy foliage electrified every brain cell, and my enthusiasm far exceeded any levelheaded realization of the scientific importance of those first climbs. I was, in a sense, reliving the thrill of discovery from a temperate forest childhood with its tree forts and bird nests, yet the tropical treetops housed at least tenfold more species to observe and appreciate. And instead of birch trees growing 50 feet high, these green giants rose almost 150 feet, which explains why their aerial commotion was completely inaudible as well as invisible from the forest floor. Finding a whole new world in tall tropical trees, I had taken my next step in evolving from a small-town nature nut into one of the world’s first global arbornauts.
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Many months before I ever envisioned making a slingshot or borrowing ropes to climb tall trees, I daydreamed about my naive vision of rain forests: Tall. Green. Dense. Dangerous. Snakes everywhere. Jaguars lurking. Filtered light. Pungent decay. Butterflies flitting. Bird choruses. Back in the 1970s, few aerial images or whole-country surveys even recognized that deforestation was an insidious threat to these precious ecosystems. As a neophyte, I truly had no realistic sense of the height or complexity of this forest system, and Australia was about to swallow me up in her jungles for several decades. Gazing out the airplane window upon the Sydney Harbor Bridge at dawn, I not only envisioned tropical trees but also thought it was one of the most beautiful cityscapes I had ever seen. Clutching my passport, I schlepped my oversized bag of botany books off the plane and gathered up two small suitcases full of Scottish woolens that I hadn’t known would prove useless in the Australian tropics. I was half a world away from any friends or family and embarrassed that I didn’t even know what a rain forest looked like. Could I possibly achieve any success in demystifying forest secrets as a lowly graduate student in Australia? I was met by a fellow American student who ushered me to some temporary housing before he took off to the coral reefs for his own research. I don’t remember much about those first days except that a possum peed from the rafters onto the bed where I was staying. I guess the Australian wildlife were welcoming me!
I slept off all my jet lag, and stepped out into the busy city, experiencing a few near-death street crossings until I remembered they drive on the opposite side. To a girl from tiny Elmira, New York, Sydney was like another planet—full of exotic trees (mostly gums), amazing bird songs and traffic noises, great public transportation, lots of parks and beaches, and a huge number of happy-go-lucky, fair-dinkum Australians. After the cold winds and spartan living in Scotland, Sydney was a lush tropical oasis. I arrived at the university the following Monday—November 3, 1978, to be exact—and I went directly to meet my new boss, the head of the school of biological sciences. His office was in the Botany Department, housed in a classic, old-fashioned building of overly worn tiled floors and hallways that reeked of musty chemicals and were lined with old cabinets bursting with many decades of archives stored by professors long dead and gone. At that first meeting, I was immediately introduced to Australia’s academic view of women. “Why is a nice girl like you wasting her time to do a PhD when you will only get married and have kids?” This was my first conversation with the head of the sciences, who was old enough to be my grandfather, and I was too stunned to reply. I was also secretly terrified he might be correct, but bristled at his narrow idea of a woman’s role, all too reminiscent of my time in geology and in forestry school. Within the first day, I also met all the women in biological sciences; easy enough—they could be counted on one hand. There was one lone female assistant professor, two female graduate students, and a bevy of women secretaries and technicians working for approximately two dozen male professors plus their (male) graduate students.
I had come to the University of Sydney because rain forests grew nearby, and because of their generous international scholarships. This translated to three full years of funding toward housing and expenses, along with free tuition. No strings attached. Graduate students were not even required to teach or assist in laboratories. But beneath an outward excitement about encountering a whole new climate zone, continent, bird list, vegetation, and everything else that comes with it, I had gnawing doubts about whether I could achieve this lofty goal of a doctorate degree. I had applied to the Botany Department, proposing to conduct research in tropical and subtropical rain forests, ecosystems I had never seen, halfway around the world from any tree I had ever known. The year was 1978, and although inconceivable, tropical deforestation was not a critical issue as it would become forty years hence. It turns out that rain forest logging was just starting to ramp up in Africa, the Amazon, and Asia during the early 1980s, but aerial surveillance did not exist to monitor it with advanced technologies. And Australia, which had insidiously cut many of her trees already, leaving relatively tiny pockets of extant rain forest, was not even considered by most international rain forest surveillance. That was about to change during the course of my thesis.
Each day, the department hosted morning tea, which allowed the graduate students to mingle with one another, interact with faculty informally, and share information. When I was introduced as a new student who’d just arrived to study Australian rain forests, I sensed an invisible stone wall. No one in this tearoom of almost exclusively male faculty and students expressed a heartfelt welcome. I was on edge and disappointed, but there were a few other American students who later came to my rescue, explaining it was not culturally acceptable to warm to a “blue stocking” (Australian slang for a woman with intellectual pursuits). It soon became obvious I needed not only to achieve scholarly distinction as a tree scientist, but also to prove women deserved a place in this field.
After growing up among trees that lost their leaves every autumn, and then working on deciduous birches in Scotland, it seemed wise to focus on something similar yet different—in this case, tropical leaves. It may sound simple, but I was totally awestruck by the fact that most tropical trees stayed green all year long. As a result, their canopies had no clear sense of a defined seasonality of leaf fall. Did a new bud burst every time a leaf fell? Did each tree exhibit leaf expansion every month of the year? Were there some subtle seasonal pulses, impossible to detect at ground level? I was puzzled by this permanent greenness, and wanted to play leaf detective, comparing tropical canopies to my comfort zone of temperate deciduous foliage. Shifting ecosystems is challenging for any young scientist, but moving halfway around the world to Australia was a whole other kind of terrifying. Even at the best of times, I was pretty tongue-tied, immersed in a new culture and unknown landscape. At least Scotland had familiar species of trees from my childhood. The only thing I knew for sure was that I needed to keep my wits about me because so many creatures in the tropics were venomous.
My plan was to build on my Scottish birch research and address parallel questions about tropical trees. How long did leaves live in a tall evergreen rain forest canopy? What enemies threatened such long-lived foliage? Did these leaves suffer from aphid attacks like Scottish birch leaves? Within a month after my November arrival, I tried to make premature choices about which tree species to study and select field sites in different rain forest patches separated by vast distances. It was decidedly overambitious. My thesis advisor, a gentlemanly botanist who emigrated from England to study fire ecology, persuaded me to slow down. (He was not a rain forest expert by any means, but knew a lot about dry forest trees, especially eucalypts, which require fire to regenerate.) I had read a few publications about Australian rain forests, learning there were a whopping twenty-four technical types, all classified according to soil, vegetation, and geography by one of Australia’s two experts. It was impossible to study all twenty-four in three years, but fortunately there were four general types defined by elevation and latitude: tropical, subtropical, warm temperate, and cool temperate. The selection of field sites is critical for research. My advisor offered to provide a vehicle and driver if I would visit a few sites before finalizing any decisions. He assigned a reluctant botany student to help me navigate the logging roads on a pilot expedition to visit those four rain forest types in northern New South Wales and southern Queensland.
I was sleepless in anticipation of getting into the bush, the Australian term for any dense vegetation scrub. Visitors are often surprised to learn Australia is only slightly smaller in land area than the United States, with 2,969,907 as compared to 3,794,100 square miles. Rain forests only exist there along a narrow coastal band of up to fifty miles inland, where prevailing winds from the Pacific Ocean bring the necessary rainfall to Australia’s eastern slopes. The escarpment blocks rain from moving into the continent’s interior, otherwise known as the outback, those many hundreds of thousands of square miles where a few cattle and many kangaroos eke out a life on arid pastures. Australia’s vast interior is dotted with patches of dry forest, composed mainly of the genus Eucalyptus (also known as gum trees). Rain forests occupy only about eight million acres of this vast country, a mere 3 percent of all forested lands but arguably the wettest places; they house 60 percent of the country’s plant species, along with 35 percent of mammals and 60 percent of bird species. At that time in the late 1970s, most small forest stands became slated for logging. The national determination to clear rain forests ultimately impacted my student years as a decade marked by environmental controversy, poaching, and political demonstrations. But to make a long story short, 32 percent of those remaining stands are now conserved as UNESCO World Heritage sites, a source of pride for most Australians. Many former loggers reluctantly transitioned into ecotourism operators but are now millionaires with sustainable incomes.
To make my field research more manageable, I needed to select a subset of important tree species within each forest type for long-term leaf investigation. The decisions about what species, which sites, and how long to measure are the heart and soul of good fieldwork. For any research that relies on repeated observations over several years, it is tough to start all over midstream, so it’s always best to design date collection carefully from the outset. And the rigor of research depends upon designing a good sampling scheme. I decided to compare leaf dynamics of three species of trees at three sites in each of the four major rain forest regions. The regions were: (1) subtropical—warm, wet, and resembles true tropical rain forests but with fewer species due to its location slightly farther away from the equator; (2) warm temperate—warm and wet but located in temperate latitudes, resulting in lower species diversity than the subtropics; (3) cool temperate or montane—moist and located at the tops of ridges, housing lower species diversity; and (4) tropical—the most diverse type, located closest to the equator and at least a two- or three-day drive from Sydney.
To prepare for the field, I spent a week in the botany library reading everything about Australian rain forests. Unfortunately, only a handful of scientists had ever studied this ecosystem. One botanist had created the technical soil-based classification of twenty-four rain forest types, and another made a guide to seedlings and their taxonomy. A third wrote several tree identification guides, and a fourth ecologist was based in California but traveled yearly to Australia to monitor rain forest and coral reef species diversity. It did not take long to read all their publications and realize my research was going to be relatively lonely. The existing literature confirmed that most tropical biologists were working in Panama and Costa Rica, which made sense—those countries were short flights from American universities and had major field stations with comfortable amenities like air-conditioning and dining rooms. Australia was either too far or too unknown to attract the same level of scientific curiosity from well-funded US or European universities. That worried me a great deal. Having no cadre of fellow students, no library of extensive research findings, and relatively little funding for rain forest research meant I was truly on my own. It was also increasingly apparent that I needed to account for the risks of conducting field research in forests that were rapidly being cut down.
Although I am fairly frugal with my travel wardrobes, I spent hours packing for this first rain forest expedition. Those well-worn Wellington boots from Scotland came in handy, as did several pairs of khaki pants, multiple long-sleeve shirts, rain ponchos, flashlights, and camping gear. No one advised me about what to take, but I had enough field experience from Scotland to figure it out, mostly. Even though Australia was stinking hot, I packed long-sleeve shirts to minimize bug bites. I bought several field notebooks and extra Kodak slide film. I still had my tiny kerosene cookstove, which almost fit into a jacket pocket and had literally saved my life by providing hot soup during many frigid outings in the Scottish Highlands. So I did the same thing for the Australian bush, packing a supply of dried soups, spaghetti noodles, oatmeal, and other easy camping meals. Australians take a “smoko” in both morning and afternoon, which originated as a cigarette break but in more modern times consists of tea and sweets. So I made a point to buy different Australian cookies to keep the driver energized. From a year in Scotland, I was adept at driving on the left side of the road, but in Australia it was still very much a man’s place behind the wheel. We drove out of the urban congestion of Sydney, and then headed north all day before turning off on a logging road. My driver and fellow student claimed he had the map in his head, so I really had no way of keeping track of where we were heading, just “to the bush.”
In late afternoon, somewhere between Sydney and Brisbane, the vegetation changed suddenly from the silvery blue-gray of gum trees to lush emerald green. We turned onto a very remote logging road with massive trees greater than four feet in diameter, soaring over a hundred feet high, and dense, deep-green foliage on either side. I gasped for joy, and had to pinch myself, because this was the real deal. The trees were not only tall, but shaped like lollipops, with a dense clump of foliage at the very top and festoons of vines and epiphytes draping down the trunks. This funny shape made sense, given the extreme competition for light in such highly dense and diverse forests. Tropical trees were in a constant race, and taller trees won out because their crowns received direct sunlight. I strained to make out the shape of a leaf, but they were too far above our heads. The joy was short-lived, however. My driver careened around the next curve and plunged the front of the jeep into a mucky stretch of slurry mud so deep that the front wheels sank out of sight. He cursed and tried to accelerate, but our tires spun deeper into the brown slick. On the first afternoon, I learned a lot of Aussie expletives, until my driver insisted I walk farther into the subtropical scrub so he could swear more freely in my absence. This was 1979, years before cell phones and GPS devices accompanied every expedition.
On first view of the rain forests, I was gobsmacked (and also frightened) by their height and inaccessibility. In Australia, the canopy extended from fifty to two hundred feet, impossible to calculate looking upward from ground level except when a road was cut through the jungle, exposing the height of trees in cross section. The abundance of greenery defied all expectations—if there is a place where oxygen is most abundant and pure, the rain forest’s upper reaches would surely win, hands down. I looked up—green. I looked on either side of the trail—green. I looked down—brown, due to the decaying remains of (green) leaves on the forest floor. In short, this surround-foliage world fulfilled my wildest dreams about studying leaves, but several logistic constraints became immediately evident. First, how in the heck could I reach the leaves when the canopy was so high overhead? And second, could I navigate through these tall, dense stands of trees that looked alike and seemed to have almost no trails? I also saw plenty of hillsides just recently logged and located adjacent to gorgeous primary (meaning original) stands that would probably be next. I was infuriated, but also inspired to get to work. I would soon learn that Australian rain forests were disappearing more quickly than their secrets were discovered.
