The first night on the trail, one of Silman’s students, Rudi Cruz,
insisted that we all go out looking for Rhinella manu. He had seen several of
the toads during a previous visit to the spot, and he felt sure we could find
them again if we tried. I’d recently read a paper on the spread of the
chytrid fungus to Peru—according to the authors, it had already arrived in
Manú—but I decided not to mention this. Perhaps Rhinella manu was still
out there, in which case I certainly wanted to see it.
We strapped on headlamps and set out down the trail, like a line of
coal miners filing down a shaft. The forest at night had become an
impenetrable tangle of black. Cruz led the way, shining his lamp along the
tree trunks and peering into the bromeliads. The rest of us followed suit.
This went on for maybe an hour and turned up only a few brownish frogs
from the genus Pristimantis. After a while, people started getting bored
and drifting back to camp. Cruz refused to give up. Perhaps thinking that
the problem was the rest of us, he headed up the trail in the opposite
direction. “Did you find anything?” someone would periodically call out to
him through the darkness.
“Nada,” came the repeated response.
The next day, after more arcane discussions about tree
measurements, we packed up to continue down the ridge. On a trip to
fetch water, Silman had found a spray of white berries interspersed with
what looked like bright purple streamers. He’d identified the arrangement
as the inflorescence of a tree in the Brassicaceae, or mustard, family, but
he had never seen anything quite like it before, which made him think, he
told me, that it might represent yet another new species. It was pressed in
newspaper for transport down the mountain. The idea that I might have
been present at the discovery of a species, even though I’d had absolutely
nothing to do with it, filled me with an odd sort of pride.
BACK on the trail, Silman hacked away with his machete, pausing every
now and then to point out a new botanical oddity, like a shrub that steals
water from its neighbors by sticking out needlelike roots. Silman talks