17 July 2015
Why is it
that when you have set your alarm for 4:30 you wake up at 1:00, 2:15, and 3:07?
Waking up means fishing for my glasses, squinting at the alarm clock across the
room on the window sill, waiting for my brain to clear enough so that the
numbers stop dancing. Then I groan quietly, take off my glasses, sink back down
on the pillow and find that my cleared brain has decided that it would rather
make lists than slip back into sleep mode. At 4:15 I figure what the hell,
slink into the bathroom for the ablution routine, dress, turn on the coffee
pot, pour some cereal into a bowl, fish for the milk in the fridge, slice up a
banana, sip and chew through twenty minutes of east coast streamed NPR, gather
up my birding equipment and a couple of extra layers of warm things, and go out
to meet Bill in front of Tom’s house.
The three
of us are support staff for a group of researchers who are going way up the
mountain to El Llano Inglés and El Terrero to do science stuff. We’re at 1600
meters here in Santa Cruz, and the Terrero is at close to 3000, meaning just
under a mile gain in altitude. Roberto Sosa hopes to locate the territories
where the brown-throated wren calls at dawn. Science currently calls the
brown-throat a subspecies of the house wren, but Roberto believes it is a
separate species, and hopes to devote the next few years or so to studying it
in depth. Fernando González wants to record the mountaintop morning chorus. And
Alberto Lobato, an undergraduate in Jalapa, wants to check out the territory
for a potential MA project. None of the three is familiar with this mountain,
but the cabildo of the Comisariato de
Bienes Comunes, which administers the reserve as a research resource, has given
them permission to go up. Bill knows the road well. It is important to take two
cars and a couple of extra people because since it has been raining during the
last week, the road (aka the only dirt track in these parts that climbs into
the mountains) is likely to be muddy and slippery. Heavy rain sometimes washes
out sections, or drops trees across the road. Bill has put some heavy rope and
a shovel into his trunk, the idea being that if one car slips into trouble, the
other, plus the beef, can pull it out.
We meet the
scientists at La Mesita, the gateway to the reserve, and even though the sky is
still pitch black Cesme, the new resident watchman has been notified by the cabildo and is there with his clipboard
to record our names and time of entry before lowering the chain across the
road. The serpentine road climbing up through the thorn forest and into the
scrub oaks is fairly dry, but once we reach the pines the effects of the rain
are noticeable.
Bill’s Toyota is the lead car; the Ford wagon with the
scientists trails us by fifty meters or so. Our brights pick out each hairpin
turn, and Bill, his jaw set and both hands glued to the steering wheel,
maintains just enough momentum to get us through the mud without slipping into
a potentially awkward slalom. Sometimes the precipitous drop on our right is as
little as 20 vertical meters. As we round one turn, a speckled brown Mexican whip-poor-will
(a kind of nightjar) rises from the road and flaps laconically off into the
pines. Higher up the road is drier, and it only takes us 45 minutes to reach
the Llano Inglés, a flattish place between two of the rounded summits. The
scientists u
While
Roberto listens for wrens, the rest of us stroll slowly up the road, listening
for calls, peering through our binoculars, and marveling at the magical aura of
this forest at first light. Towering pine trees, their branches cluttered with
clinging epiphytes, their trunks hung with bromeliads, many of them thrusting
out red blooms to attract insects, which in turn attract
flycatchers and
hummingbirds. Among the pines, an occasional a cinnamon-skinned madroño tree catches the horizontal morning
sun. The forest floor is thick with ferns, some so small it would take a
hundred of them to cover a dinner plate, others large enough to hide a
motorcycle; some are feathery, some round-lobed, some spikey.
Now that the rains
have begun, there are wildflowers everywhere, yellow carpets of what look like
but probably are not black-eyed Susans, blue-purple copses of probably not
lupines, tiny red daubs of probably not Indian paintbrushes, and blue spots of
probably not bluebells. Here and there thistles, fiercer
than any I recall from
el Norte, warn off all but the most intrepid tiny insects. The ground is
spongy; the trees drip; in the soft breeze the light dances through the intense
green. There should be gnomes in these woods, or elves.
From the
Llano Inglés we drive a kilometer on a rutted track to El Terrero, a clearing
where a small hut can shelter researchers in nasty weather. We hoped to drive a
kilometer further to some cabins but a fallen tree has blocked the road, so we
walk and gawk and talk and reap the harvest of flowers and ferns and birds,
including a black thrush and a cordillera flycatcher. Above us flocks of
grey-barred wrens chatter in the treetops. Their Spanish name is matraca, which is a kind of noise-maker
using a ratchet and a striker. Equally noisy are the Steller’s jays, and among
them is a smaller blue and white ... dwarf jay! This is a really rare bird, and
Bill is the only one of us who has ever actually seen one previously! Alberto,
the undergraduate, dances for joy; he had a bet with an ornithologist friend
who is now in the States as to which would be the first to see the chara enana. Even Tom, who is not
afflicted with birdism, is impressed. And while we are high-fiving all around
we see a second one! In the understory ruddy-capped nightingale thrushes and
collared-brush-finches flash their colors. Bright scarlet red warblers with
saucy white cheeks pose obligingly on the lower branches of the pines. In a
tiny meadow a cinnamon-bellied flower-piercer flits from blossom to blossom,
competing with the humming-birds, both blue-throated and white-eared. For me
and for young Alberto it is a memorable day: seven species that we have never
seen before anywhere and can add to our respective life lists. (If you are
interested, you can find pictures of all these flitters on the internet – I’m
afraid they were moving too fast, or were too far away, or the light was too
poor for me to record them adequately.)
About 1:30,
exhausted from all the hiking at altitude, we leave Fernando and Alberto behind
to record and explore, and Bill drives the rest of us head down the mountain.
Back in
Santa Cruz, Linda and Lauro are working out where to site the latest
wheelbarrow-ful of plants that Linda has brought back from the San Lorenzo
nursery. Yesterday we chose a tree for the west wall, between the ruins of el tanque and the carport. It’s a pata de vaca, a “cow foot” tree, that
allegedly will fill out to offer shade and once a year brighten the west wall
with flowers. With pick and shovel and a long bladed iron bar Lauro has excavated
a hole nearly a meter deep into the hard packed dirt along the west fence. He
had to work though the compacted upper layer (which is where we first piled
sand and gravel for the Casa’s concrete foundation), a layer of rocky subsoil,
and then a layer of calcium-rich breccia. When the tree comes from the nursery,
Lauro will half fill the hole with a mixture of humus and compost, and then
plant the tree on top of that. It was supposed to come last night, but .... who
knows? Maybe it will come later this afternoon. It is nearly 3:00, so Lauro
breaks and goes home for lunch. Linda and I eat our sandwiches on the porch and
I wonder if the hole is wide enough for the root ball. So after lunch I walk
out to take a look at it.
We must
have the dumbest lizards in Mesoamérica, because at the bottom of the hole,
trying desperately to get out, is a spotted lizard, maybe 35 cm long. He dashes
madly around the bottom of the hole and periodically flings himself against the
side. But since he can only jump to about halfway up, he falls back down and
resumes his dash and fling. No, wait . . .
There are two lizards in the hole, the second one slightly smaller than the
first. No, there are three! The third one has just come out of the shadow.
Perhaps motivated by the dasher-flinger, the other two decide to join him in
the frenzy. The large and middle-size lizards circle clockwise, the smallest
one counterclockwise, which means that they collide against each other twice
per circuit as they scramble to find the perfect launch site. Now they are detouring
a tiny bit to avoid the toad that is clinging motionless to the bottom of the
hole’s wall just inside the shadow—which is why I didn’t see him at first.
So, how to
get them out? We find a board, put it into the hole so that it forms a ramp,
and then step back out of sight so that we won’t spook the poor dumb things.
Three minutes. Five. Eight. Nothing climbs up the ramp. We take another look.
The toad hasn’t moved but the lizards are still circling, slowly, now swerving
and ducking to get under the ramp, and still hurling themselves against the
wall, though now they only make it a quarter of the way up. Three dumb lizards,
falling in a hole; not a brain among ‘em, bless my soul.
“¿Pinzas?”
Lauro asks
me if I have any tweezers, any long grippers to pick the lizards up with.
Happens
that I do, and I run inside to get the kitchen tongs. Lauro stretches out on
his stomach, reaches down into the hole, and gently picks out one, two, three
lizards, and lastly a still-immobile toad, placing each one on the ground next
to the hole.
I have to
say one thing in their favor: as three of them scamper and one hops off, none of them is dumb enough to fall back in.
David (and Linda)
