To Bolivia and Back
by Terry Dunn
"They fascinate me, these
upland jungles—vast
and dim and cool, stretching unbroken and untrodden for miles
beyond
hundreds of miles, over mountain and gorge alike, in a thick
roof of perennial green. What do they contain? What mysterious
creatures live in them? We don’t know. We see strange
tracks and hear far-away calls, some of which we know, some
of which even the Indians can’t explain."
For an animal lover, nothing compares to searching for an unseen animal in the jungles of the Amazon. For a scientist traveling through an unstudied rainforest, the thrill is heightened by the likelihood of finding a new species.
In the spring of 2002, I followed in some of the footsteps and paddle strokes of the gentleman who so eloquently expressed this passion for rainforest exploration. The quote comes from Gordon MacCreagh, who wrote White Waters and Black, a careful but sardonic record of the personality conflicts, misadventures, and, occasionally, the scientific discoveries of the Mulford Expedition to Bolivia in 1921. He was an assistant on the expedition, but his sentiment was certainly shared by another member of the expedition, William (Bill) Mann, who later became the director of the Smithsonian’s National Zoological Park—a tenure he kept for more than three decades.
The Mulford Expedition (named after one of the expedition’s major sponsors, the H. K. Mulford Company) began with a trudge through the snow and ended in the heat of the Bolivian Amazon. The members chose a route based on the fact that it wasn’t well traveled or well mapped, a philosophy used by field biologists today. As McCreagh put it, “This uncomfortable passion for unknown routes is explained by the simple axiom that where nobody has been before, somebody may find something that nobody else has; and by the corollary that scientists risk their lives and ruin their health for the sole purpose of discovering a new species.” Risk their lives and ruin their health they did.
The expedition started by crossing the high Andes on a mountain trail, passing through the Bolivian Yungas (the jungle-covered eastern slope of the Andes), down the Bopi River by balsa raft, and to the jungle town of Rurrenabaque by way of the Beni River. They searched the Beni savannas for a lake that was rumored to have an outlet to the Beni River. There was no such outlet, so they backtracked to Rurrenabaque. Along the way, five of the eight expedition members departed for reasons that vary from disillusionment to illness. That was in the first year. The remaining members traveled to Manaus in Central Brazil, up the Rio Negro, to the Uaupes River, and finally to the Tiquie River where they were blocked by waterfalls and rapids and had to turn around. After a second full year of wandering, the expedition came apart when the final member was left to recover from poisoning in Manaus.
Intrepid explorers
Despite the fact that the expedition members were experts
in their disciplines, they weren’t necessarily prepared
for the hardships of tropical travel. In addition to Bill
Mann and Gordon MacCreagh, there was the expedition’s
director, H. H. Rusby, an expert on botanical drugs from
Columbia University. His assistant and taxidermist was
George S. McCarty. They were joined by E. N. Pearson, the
expedition’s ichthyologist from the University of
Indiana. The final two members were Orland E. White, a
botanist from the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and F. L. Hoffman,
a statistician studying the health of people living in
the tropics. Among the eight, only three had previously
traveled through a tropical rainforest.
The expedition must have felt like an action movie, complete with narrow escapes, large populations of unsavory insects, unknown Indian tribes, and mysterious illnesses. Stubborn mules slowed the expedition in the mountainous portions of the route. Where the trail met a rough, uninhabited stretch of river, the expedition became stranded for weeks. It was stalled again on the Uaupes River when the Indian guides spotted the footprints of a hostile tribe during a stop on the river’s shore. The guides raced back to the boats with a yell, leaving the expedition members at the mercy of the much-feared tribe. Medical care on the expedition was non-existent. At one point, Mann extracted a tooth from the mouth of Rusby. There was no dental anesthetic and the tooth broke off short at the neck, “leaving the frayed nerve terminals hanging in full view.” Ironically, Rusby, a medical doctor, had been in charge of outfitting the expedition.
Eighty years later, the medical care, transportation, and the maps have improved, but getting around in the Bolivian Amazon is still challenging. My traveling companions and I spent some time in the forests along the Beni and Tuichi Rivers, as well as the savanna (pampas) of the Beni. We reached Rurrenabaque by airplane, the savanna by jeep, and the rainforests by motorized dugout canoe. The jeep ride entailed five hours of pounding on a deeply rutted dirt road to reach the pampas camp. On the return trip, our jeep got a flat tire. We were lucky. Other vehicles simply drove into a muddy rut where they would be trapped until the soil dried.
Navigating the smoother, deeper sections of the Beni and Tuichi Rivers by motorized dugout canoe was not unlike river travel in North America, except for the mammoth logs that floated along with us. Making our way through the trickier shallows was decidedly low-tech. A long stick is poked into the rapids to determine the best route or to make quick steering adjustments. The same technique was used when the Mulford Expedition passed through the rapids along the Bopi and Beni Rivers, but unlike the dependable muscle power used to propel their balsa rafts, our motor power failed going both upriver and down.
The “Bug-Hunter”
Mann never would have been on the Mulford Expedition had
his boyhood dream come true. As a child, he ran away from
his home in Helena, Montana, to join the circus, but John
Ringling sent him away to further his education. He wound
up with a Ph.D. in entomology from Harvard and a job with
the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Before the Mulford
Expedition, he was a member of the Stanford Expedition
to South America in 1911 and did field work in Haiti, Cuba,
and Mexico. In 1926, he married Lucile Quarry, who overcame
her fear of snakes to join him on collecting trips around
the world while he was director of the National Zoo. Of
her husband she later wrote, “Bill is really an entomologist
gone wrong. Long before he had the right to carry in his
pocket the key to the tiger cage, he had spent years collecting
and studying insects, especially ants…. I have seen
him bend over a nest where hundreds of ants were running
around in wildest confusion, and make a sudden pounce on
one tiny, almost microscopic beetle that would be in their
midst.”
MacCreagh would also describe Mann’s passion for insects, nicknaming him the “bug-hunter.” When he brought samples of an ant he discovered to the bug-hunter, “Mann would name fifty ants that are cousins and nephews and poor relations of this family, and give a short history of each. But these ants are new. Neither you, my friends, nor I can quite understand the thrill attached to a new ant. But there is apparently a whole lot; also much honor. So the bug-hunter is going to name it after me.”
Had his interests been strictly of the six-legged variety, Mann may never have come in contact with the National Zoo. However, he studied and collected all kinds of animals, and during his tenure at the Zoo—1925 to 1956—he was know for his showmanship and for acquiring so many new animals that the Zoo became quite crowded. From the Mulford Expedition, he collected 135 live animals, many of which were delivered to the National Zoo.
Ironically, the director of the Mulford Expedition did not want any living creatures to be collected on the trip. Traveling with live animals through river rapids and unknown camps was not what Rusby had in mind when he organized the trip. But, it was not long before he changed his position. According to Mann, “...when a baby paroquet of delicate green hue and a confiding disposition perched on his finger, his outlook toward live things changed, and from then on we had carte blanche to collect anything possible.”
A Floating Menagerie Surprisingly, collecting live animals in Bolivia in 1921 didn’t require traps or nets, but trade. Many rainforest animals are kept as pets or captured for food by local Indians, and even beloved pets can be bought for the right price. Finding settlements or meeting people on the rivers and trails became the most fruitful way to build their animal collection.
In Huachi, the first “specimen of importance” was obtained. In exchange for a handful of salt, Mann got a mealy parrot (Amazona farinosa) from a group of Indians who had walked twelve days through the rainforest. These large, green birds are still common enough to almost guarantee a sighting on any trip to a Central or South American rainforest. But, despite their extensive range, they do not favor deforested landscapes.
Also in Huachi, the expedition members obtained a baby tapir, which they named Billy. He traveled with the expedition for a number of months and apparently had a personality that was simultaneously obnoxious and hysterically funny. He particularly liked to chew on boot laces, whether or not they were attached to busy feet. He successfully traveled by raft down rapids, but it was calm-water travel by launch that led to his demise. The boat’s engine whistle panicked the tapir and, after several days of blowing, he stopped eating. In an attempt to cure Billy, the expedition’s cook gave him an unknown pill and he was dead the next morning. It is not surprising that the sharp, unfamiliar sound of an engine whistle was so startling to a tapir. Despite the fact that these animals are the largest in the Amazon, they are reclusive, nocturnal, and surprisingly difficult to spot. Walking in the rainforests along the Tuichi River, we saw tapir tracks everyday, but somehow these large, lumbering animals eluded us.
Rurrenabaque was the site of the expedition’s longest stop and the collection point for many specimens. Today it functions as a staging ground for eco-travelers in search of wildlife and adventure. It is a spectacular sight to enter Rurrenabaque by boat from upriver. As MacCreagh observed, “The hills ended abruptly... then through a narrow gorge with precipitous sides, as though a giant door… there in front of us lay the endless plains which stretch away eastward into Brazil and southward into Argentina. Behind us a cliff wall, like our own Hudson River Palisades, at the very feet of which nestled the fifty or so wattle-and-daub houses of the town on Rurrenabaque.” The narrow gorge is now the grand entrance to Madidi National Park. Rurrenabaque is larger today, but the housing has probably not changed dramatically since the Mulford Expedition.
As Mann observed, Rurrenabaque is at the intersection of three major ecosystems—the mountains, the rainforests, and the pampas. The result of this blending is a remarkably high diversity of wildlife, as revealed in the variety of animals collected during their long stay there. In Rurrenabaque, the hot trade item was medical supplies. Upon arrival, the expedition members were quickly overwhelmed with requests for various pills and medical procedures. In response, they bartered quinine pills or iodine for one parakeet, parrot, or small monkey; larger, rarer animals were required for taking care of a laceration. Before long, the expedition members hosted to a courtyard full of animals.
At Rurrenabaque they collected greater rheas, the South American equivalent of an ostrich. Rheas are scruffy, flightless birds that live on the pampas. Despite the fact that they are large- bodied and stand up to five feet tall, they can be difficult to spot. The pampas grasses are also tall, leaving only the rhea’s thin neck and head exposed like a camouflaged hand puppet above a toy stage.
Rheas and African ostriches are believed to have descended from a common ancestor when the two continents were connected as part of Gondwanaland. Rheas also have some unconventional behaviors as well. The male copulates with several females, builds a nest, and convinces all his mates to lay the eggs in the group nest. He then incubates the eggs and raises the chicks.
MacCreagh made a prophetic observation about the rhea’s habitat in 1921. He wrote, "Some say that when communications open up, the Bolivian pampas will be a rich cattle country.” Whether 80 years would be considered far in the future is debatable, but the future in the pampas has arrived. The road from Rurrenabaque to the heart of the pampas has several rustic cell phone towers and the land is riddled with cattle ranches.
One type of bird that Bill Mann coveted was the flower-headed caique also called the yellow-thighed caique. These colorful birds were apparently valued by the locals as pets and they were not easily persuaded to give them away. In Riberalta, they found a women who owned four as pets. She was willing to trade the birds for money to buy a new dress, but her husband forbid it. One day, she sent word that she could trade the birds while her husband was out. The husband arrived just as Mann was leaving with the birds and a “shrill-pitched argument” broke out between husband and wife. Regardless, Mann considered the birds worth the price of a family dispute.
While much of the savanna is now being used to graze cattle, settlers have largely bypassed the nearby rainforests. It is likely that I was treated to some of the same sounds and sights the expedition members experienced. Every morning, red howler monkeys made deep, guttural howls and, at sundown, hoatzins (a bizarre bird whose young have clawed wings), squawked in loud bunches along the waterside. The raucous chatter of macaws and parrots periodically penetrated the constant drill of cicadas. A jewel-like dung beetle, in particular, captured my attention. Its beautiful exterior seemed inconsistent with the job it performs in the rainforest animals. We also saw capybaras, a bright green parrot snake, toucans, and delicate butterflies.
Back to the Future
In 1990, a team of scientists working with Conservation International
tried to get a handle on what animals and plants inhabit
the lowland and montane forests of the area. As part of
their Rapid Assessment Program, the scientists tried to
document all the species they could locate within a span
of several weeks. What they found was astounding. In two
weeks, they identified 403 bird species, nine of which
had never been recorded in Bolivia. (The scientists believe
that there may be as many as 1,100 bird species in the
area.) There were 45 species of mammals, including the
little big-eared bat and a spiny tree rat, which had never
been found in Bolivia before. The abundance of amphibian
and reptile species is equal to other parts of the world
considered to have a “megadiversity” of these
animal groups. The plant life was equally rich. In just
one-tenth of a hectare, 204 species of plants were identified,
many more than in comparable moist forests elsewhere. The
final report concluded that this area of Bolivia is one
of the most biologically diverse in the world.
The results of the Rapid Assessment convinced the Bolivian government to establish Madidi National Park in 1995. The park is home to 85 percent of the bird species in Bolivia (11 percent of all the bird species in the world), 75 percent of Bolivian mammal species, and 40 percent of Bolivian reptile species. Endangered jaguars, giant otters, spectacled bears, and black caiman all roam within its forests. But, Madidi is not only important because of the rich biodiversity it protects within its borders, but because it is now part of a series of protected areas that stretch across international lines and an eclectic variety of habitats. According to David Ricalde, an independent conservation consultant with 15 years of experience in Peru’s and Bolivia’s rainforests, “We helped create a sort of a large and unique biological corridor that today includes the Manu, Tambopata, Bahuaja Sonene, Madidi, Ulla Ulla, and Pilon Lajas protected areas. In other words, there is no other more complete array of protected ecosystems like this long bi-national corridor on Earth.”
Madidi, like other protected areas in the Amazon, will survive only if the people who live in and around the park have an incentive to keep it protected. Even before the park enveloped their community, the residents of San Jose de Uchupiamonas were searching for ways to keep their inhabitants from leaving for better opportunities elsewhere. Their idea was to establish an ecolodge that would draw tourists interested in viewing Madidi’s abundant wildlife. With the help of Conservation International and the International Development Bank, Chalalan Lodge was opened in 1999 along the shores of a sapphire lagoon in the middle of the rainforest. Half of the profits from the lodge are shared with the San Jose community while the other half goes toward operating expenses. Chalalan seems to be serving its purpose. The lodge has a steady stream of wildlife-seeking visitors and the inflow of money means the San Jose community now has a school and a hospital. People who left the community are now returning to reap the benefits of ecotourism.
Despite Chalalan’s apparent success, all is not perfect in the rainforests that border the Beni River. A proposed dam across the Beni at the entrance of Madidi National Park would flood Chalalan Lodge and surrounding rainforests. The proposal seems to be on hold for now, but there are road projects in the works and two companies hold concessions to search for and extract hydrocarbons within the park’s boundaries. Development pressures will likely be an ongoing issue. Large, untouched expanses of land in the tropics rarely escape the notice of settlers and developers. Bill Mann and the other members of the Mulford Expedition knew that leaving the well-traveled world and entering the unknown was not only a great adventure, but the best way to discover new species, new medicines, and new routes. Even 80 years later, some of the areas they traveled are still relatively unstudied by scientists. It’s entirely possible that a leisurely hike along a jungle path can reveal a new species or two. It’s this potential that makes some of us, whether we are scientists or simply animal lovers, leave our comfortable lives to follow “strange tracks” and “far-away calls.”
—Terry Dunn is a freelance writer, environmental educator, and artist living in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
ZooGoer 31(5) 2002. Copyright 2002 Friends of the National Zoo. All rights reserved.
