Silman was carrying a two-foot-long machete, which he used to hack
away at the undergrowth. Occasionally, he waved it in the air to point out
something interesting: a spray of tiny white orchids with flowers no
bigger than a grain of rice; a plant in the blueberry family with vivid red
berries; a parasitic shrub with bright orange flowers. One of Silman’s
graduate students, William Farfan Rios, handed me a leaf the size of a
dinner plate.
“This is a new species,” he said. Along the trail, Silman and his
students have found thirty species of trees new to science. (Just this grove
of discoveries represents half again as many species as in Canada’s boreal
forest.) And there are another three hundred species that they suspect
may be new, but that have yet to be formally classified. What’s more,
they’ve discovered an entirely new genus.
“That’s not like finding another kind of oak or another kind of
hickory,” Silman observed. “It’s like finding ‘oak’ or ‘hickory.’” Leaves
from trees in the genus had been sent to a specialist at the University of
California-Davis, but, unfortunately, he had died before figuring out
where on the taxonomic tree to stick the new branch.
Although it was winter in the Andes and the height of the dry season,
the trail was muddy and slick. It had worn a deep channel into the
mountainside, so that as we walked along, the ground was at eye level. At
various points, trees had grown across the top and the channel became a
tunnel. The first tunnel we hit was dark and dank and dripping with fine
rootlets. Later tunnels were longer and darker and even in the middle of
the day required a headlamp to navigate. Often I felt as if I’d entered into a
very grim fairy tale.
We passed Plot 1, elevation 11,320 feet, but did not stop there. Plot 2,
elevation 10,500 feet, had been recently scoured by a landslide; this
pleased Silman because he was interested to see what sorts of trees would
recolonize it.
The farther we descended, the denser the forest became. The trees
were not just trees; they were more like botanical gardens, covered with
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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