Bruce Means stood alone, deep in the Pakaraima Mountains
in northwestern Guyana. Scanning the cloud forest with his
headlamp, he peered through his foggy glasses at a sea of
ancient trees cloaked in beards of verdant moss. The humid
air, ripe with the smell of decaying plants and wood, trilled
with a melodious symphony of frogs, drawing him like a siren
song so deep into the jungle that he wondered if he would
ever make it back out.
Grasping a sapling in one hand for balance, Bruce took
a shaky step forward. His legs quivered as they sank into
the boggy leaf litter, and he cursed his 79-year-old body. At
the beginning of this expedition, Bruce had told me that he
planned to start slowly but would grow stronger each day as
he acclimated to life in the bush.
After all, during his career as a conservation biologist, he’d
made 32 previous expeditions to this region. I’d seen a photo
of him in his younger days—a six-foot-four, broad-shouldered
backwoodsman, with his long hair pulled into a ponytail and
a huge snake draped over his neck.
He’d told me stories about riding rickety buses in the 1980s
across the plains of Venezuela’s Gran Sabana and then setting
off into the mountains, where he hunted for new species of
amphibians and reptiles. Once, he’d spent days alone on the
summit of an obscure peak, sometimes naked, living as close
Bruce Means looks
under rocks for frogs
and other species
unknown to science.
During the expedition,
the 79-year-old biol-
ogist explored many
watery habitats. Even
a pond can be a tiny
universe of life, he says,
likely to contain species
that exist nowhere else.ON A PITCH-BLACK FEBRUARY NIGHT,The National
Geographic Society,
committed to illuminat-
ing and protecting the
wonder of our world,
has funded Explorers
Bruce Means and Mark
Synnott’s expeditions
in South America.O