the fragment, species may or may not be able to recolonize it once a
population has been lost. Researchers at the BDFFP have found, for
example, that some birds, such as white-crowned manakins, will readily
cross road clearings, while others, such as scale-backed antbirds, are
extremely reluctant to do so. In the absence of recolonization, local
extinctions can become regional and then, eventually, global.
SOME ten miles from Reserve 1202 the dirt road peters out, and a
stretch of rainforest that counts by contemporary standards as
undisturbed begins. Researchers at the BDFFP have marked off sections of
this forest to use as control plots, so they can compare what’s happening
in the fragments to what’s going on in the continuous forest. Near the end
of the road, there’s a small camp, known as Camp 41, where they sleep
and eat and try to escape from the rain. I arrived there with Cohn-Haft
one afternoon just as the sky opened up. We jogged through the forest,
but it really didn’t matter; by the time we got to Camp 41, we were
drenched.
Later, after the downpour had stopped and we’d squeezed out our
socks, we headed away from the camp, deeper into the forest. The sky was
still overcast, and in the gray, there was a dark and somber tint to all the
greenery. I thought of the curupira, lurking in the trees on his backward
feet.
E. O. Wilson, who visited the BDFFP twice, wrote after one of his trips,
“The jungle teems, but in a manner mostly beyond the reach of the
human senses.” Cohn-Haft told me much the same thing, if somewhat less
grandiloquently; the rainforest, he said, “looks a lot better on TV.” At first
it seemed to me there was nothing moving anywhere around us, but then
Cohn-Haft began pointing out the signs of insect life and I began to see
lots of activity going on in, to use Wilson’s phrase, the “little world
underneath.” A stick bug hung from a dead leaf, waving its delicate legs. A
spider crouched on a hoop-shaped web. A phallic tube of mud sticking up
from the forest floor turned out to be the home of a cicada larva. What