Scary spirit of the night: a vampire bat in the Amazon Rain Forest. (Photo courtesy of Juliane (Koepcke) Diller)
“What?” I ask indignantly. “Bats? You can’t be serious!”
I had always wanted to work on mammals or birds, but definitely not on bats, for I found these nocturnal spirits somewhat ugly. What was appealing or interesting about them?
“Don’t underestimate the bats,” my father replied, smiling slightly. “They’re fascinating animals, possibly even the most interesting mammals of all. And in Panguana, there’s an abundance of them.”
I rolled my eyes. I remembered the bats in Panguana all too well. Just thinking of the vampire bats, which drank blood from the cattle at night, made me shudder. One even bit me in my big toe once while I was sleeping, and I didn’t find that funny at all.
“True,” my father conceded, “they definitely aren’t among the cutest animals. But just consider: You would be the first person to write about them in Panguana. And what a fascinating life-form that actually is: They’re mammals and fly; they’re nocturnal and orient themselves by echolocation; and their behavior patterns and ecology are really special. Just think about it.”
I did so. And the longer I thought about it, the more persuasive I found my father’s arguments. In particular, the diversity of their feeding habits and their choice of roosts had not been studied at all in Amazonian Peru, let alone in Panguana. And in comparison to other mammals, they could be caught relatively easily with nets or observed in their roosts.
And so I entered unknown territory and have never regretted it. There were only a few works I could consult for comparison, and they came from remote areas of Peru’s neighboring countries. But who in Germany could adequately advise such a dissertation?
In Munich, there was a professor, a South America specialist, who was recommended to me from all sides: Professor Ernst Josef Fittkau. So I went there and presented my project proposal to him, and he accepted me as a doctoral student. The next years of my life were now predetermined: I would go to Panguana for at least a year and devote myself to the fluttering nocturnal spirits, and would then write my dissertation in Munich.
So it happened that almost nine years after my arrival in Kiel, I pulled up stakes at my aunt’s place, packed my things in boxes and put them in temporary storage. For after my return from Peru, I wanted to move directly to Munich. Sitting in the plane to Lima in August 1981, I felt a great euphoria. I had finished my Abitur and thesis. Now I would write my dissertation, and then I would be free to decide what to make of my life and where to live.
The first weeks in Panguana, I had company. An assistant professor at the university in Kiel, named Michael, was researching leaf-miner flies and had already gone to Peru a month earlier to get to know the country and people. Unfortunately, Michael was one of those people who seem to attract bad luck irresistibly. During his journey through Peru, he was robbed three times, and a bus he was on suffered an axle fracture. While he was spending the night in an Indian hut in the High Andes, he was actually peed on by a rat. On top of that, he got dysentery, which gave him horrible diarrhea, and he lost at least thirty pounds. When I met Michael in Lima, I scarcely recognized him: He was terribly emaciated and had grown a full beard. While I was flying to Yuyapichis on the plane, he had set off from Pucallpa a few days earlier by boat, taking along our luggage and a tank of kerosene for our new refrigerator, during the acquisition of which he had almost driven me crazy. For it had to be sealed absolutely tight, which is an enormous demand in Peru. But with much patience he had actually found the “perfect tank” and was very happy—and I was too, of course.
Before his departure he also bought eight gigantic watermelons. I smiled at that, because I found this rather excessive for the two-day boat trip. There wasn’t unlimited space on those boats. You had to somehow make yourself comfortable on the cargo consisting of cartons, barrels, boxes and possibly various machines too, and that was mostly an uncomfortable undertaking. But it’s true that there was nothing to eat. A day after the departure, Michael’s boat had engine trouble, and he had to spend several days with the other passengers on the bank of the Río Pachitea until the boat could get going again. Then, of course, the melons were right on cue, and his fellow passengers also benefited from Michael’s foresight.
In Panguana, he once fell down a slope, and another time he got a huge load of bird droppings on his head. That time he had been investigating particularly interesting flies on a large glob, and hadn’t been aware that its source was nearby—to be precise, directly above him. It was a boatbill, a large heron. Luckily, none of this led to anything worse. It was just a funny series of mishaps, and we laughed a lot together. Incidentally, Michael baked excellent bread in a cooking pot in the ashes of our fireplace, and he was, like many others, excited by the immense diversity of species in Panguana, especially among the grass flies he specialized in. Unfortunately, he soon left. And I devoted myself entirely to my bats. That meant that I had to adapt my rhythm to theirs. During the day I looked for sleeping quarters, climbed into hollow trees or under banks, and night after night I went into the forest in order to set up and check my traps in the proper places. On one of those dark nights, I saw an ocelot. People encounter these nocturnal loners extremely rarely, and I consider myself lucky that our paths didn’t cross.
Another time I heard approaching footsteps, indicating that a larger animal was moving toward me. I stayed completely still and waited. Then a tapir suddenly came out of the bushes and stopped directly in front of me. With its snout it sniffed me, apparently just as astonished as I was. It was probably wondering what sort of strange animal I was. For a long time I didn’t dare to move, for I knew that these animals can become unpleasant, especially when they have young. Finally I cleared my throat—and the tapir turned around and disappeared again. And the next night, returning to Panguana from a party in Yuyapichis, I had a still more incredible encounter. I was carrying a carton on my head and feeling my way more than I could see it, for my flashlight battery was almost dead. I deviated a bit from the path in the darkness and ended up at the slope leading down to the river. And there something suddenly growled very deeply and resonantly next to me, like a very large dog and yet somehow different. I shone my flashlight into a small hollow below me, but couldn’t make anything out in the dim light. Then there was that sound again, deep and rolling, so that I thought: I have to get out of here. The next day I found out that it must have been a jaguar, for a torn-open calf was found in that spot. Apparently, I had disturbed it while eating. If my flashlight had been stronger, I might well have shone it directly into its face.
I grew accustomed to being out mainly at night. Before dawn I was again on my feet, for I had to fold up the bat nets before the birds awoke and could get caught in them. The woodcreepers are awake especially early, and I didn’t want the poor animals with their arrow-shaped tongues to get tangled in a net. In those early-morning hours, the ground fog creates a unique atmosphere, for it lies like a white sheet over Moro’s pastures and fields. It can get pretty cold and the moisture can get unpleasant. At 100 percent air humidity, the dew falls like rain on the trees.
I could observe many bats at particular clay licks, or colpas. These are areas at forest springs or on riverbanks that contain especially mineral-rich earth, an important food supplement for numerous birds and mammals. I had found one of these colpas, where bats flocked to drink. I asked Moro to build me a sort of raised platform there so that I could better observe the animals. There were also swarms of mosquitoes, however, and I had to think of my mother, who had such discipline. She managed not to move, even if the sweat was running into her eyes.
On especially dark and soundless nights, I could sometimes hear deep inside the jungle a series of thin, high, almost disembodied whistles, which wafted through the silence as if they were not of this world. They came from the Tunshi, which frightened me as a child in Lima, until Alida came and calmed me down. The fact that I was now hearing those distinctive sounds in the middle of the jungle, all by myself, able to see something only in the beam of my flashlight, was also eerie for me as an adult. No wonder the Tunshi is regarded in Amazonian Peru and in the neighboring countries as a jungle spirit that can be heard only on the darkest, grimmest nights. According to folklore, it is a sad, wandering soul that finds no peace. According to other legends, however, the Tunshi is also a guardian of the forest, for it will do something only to those who harm the forest, chop it down or kill its animals. It can make people deaf or blind and also bring madness or even death. But in reality, it’s a perfectly harmless little cuckoo that can almost never be glimpsed. Still, due to its soundlessness and the especially dark nights when it calls, it always affected me strangely.
Most of what I learned about bats was through personal experience on countless nights. To begin with, I learned that though there are especially ugly species with senile grimaces and protruding eyes or, among the vampires, with tiny eyes and sharp fangs, there are also strikingly pretty ones, with colorfully marked fox faces or interesting fur coloring. As a small child I already approached all kinds of animals and wanted to touch them, whether they were small or large, dangerous or safe, pretty or ugly. I once pet a black jaguar through the bars in a zoo. My mother was terribly frightened when she noticed that.
In the case of the bats, the wonderfully soft fur was a completely new and pleasant experience for me. I liked to pet them, which the little guys, of course, couldn’t stand. In the beginning they were constantly biting me, but I learned how to let the animals out of the special bird and bat nets, which were known as Japan nets, without making the acquaintance of their powerful fangs all too often. Large nocturnal wasps got caught in the nets too, whose stings were incredibly painful, and sometimes birds of prey that wanted to eat the bats. Once a tapir even marched literally through the net, without regard to losses. There wasn’t much left of my Japan net after that. Incidentally, with their sharp fangs and powerful jaws, bats penetrate even the thickest gloves. And once they’ve sunk their teeth in, that’s when they really hold on tight and bite down even more forcefully. So I learned how I had to hold them so that they couldn’t get me: I put my middle finger on their back and pressed the two wings back with index finger and thumb. Since bats have a rather thick neck musculature, they cannot turn their heads far enough to snap behind them.
Once, I was bitten by a vampire bat. I learned some things from that, such as the fact that Dracula is always portrayed falsely: It is their incisors, and not the canines, that are so razor-sharp that they pierce the skin without causing pain. The secret is that their saliva contains a painkilling substance, as well as another one that prevents blood clotting, so that the blood flows heavily and can be licked off by them, without the victim waking up. There are three vampire bat species. One is the “common vampire bat,” which feeds on the blood of various mammals. The two others, however, drink only the blood of birds. These species also invade chicken coops and bite the fowl in the soft skin at the start of the thigh plumage above the legs, which are horny. Unlike their colleagues that don’t drink blood, vampires stalk their prey by walking on the ground. That works because they can fold their wing skin in such a way that the arm bones are like sticks. Then they walk, as it were, on the base of their palms, where the thumb sticks out. I have never been able to observe this, for vampires are very shy and only active in the darkest hours of the night, but there are excellent films about it.
It didn’t take long before I was completely fascinated with the bats that I had originally found so repulsive. And my fascination persists to this day. There are so many aspects of these secret nocturnal animals that are extremely exciting. For example, the vampires are especially social animals. They live in close-knit family groups, engage in mutual grooming and have nursery roosts in which the mothers look after the young of other vampire females when these go foraging. But dealing with them is not without its dangers, for vampire bats transmit rabies and other viruses. For that reason I had myself vaccinated against rabies in Germany beforehand. The third booster dose I had to give myself in the behind. It’s a strange feeling when you have to give yourself an injection. But after the doctor explained it to me, it was quite easy.
The calls of bats are largely in the ultrasonic region and are inaudible to our ears. With a special device, the “bat detector,” you can record them and learn to tell them apart. But these animals also have communication calls that are audible to us, and over time I got to know this spectrum quite well. It was a really special experience to hear the calls of the large leaf-nosed bats on the flowers of the balsa trees near the river during the dry season and to observe them eating the pollen from the gigantic cream-colored calyces. Other bats flocked around the large fig trees, of which there were several species in Panguana. Along with cecropia fruits, the figs of these trees, unpalatable for people, are an important source of nutrition for many fruit-eating bat species. I was really impressed by the social behavior of a bat species whose males maintain the mood of their harems with songs, dances and scent signals, which they emit from pockets in the skin on the arm bone. What lengths they will go to for the lovely female!
Ultimately I counted fifty-two different bat species. Today we know that there is a total of at least fifty-three. That is quite a lot for the area of Panguana, which was then less than one square mile, if you consider that there are only twenty-seven species in all of Europe.
Later my bat detector was stolen directly from my suitcase at the Lima airport, when I was standing in line to fly back to Germany. The suitcase was too full and slightly open on one side – that had been enough for the thief. Undoubtedly, he wasn’t too pleased with the device, for it produced only static, and he surely had no use for bat calls. So it was tough luck for both of us, the thief and me.
After Michael’s departure I soon had company again. Manfred, an Austrian doctoral student who had found out about Panguana from my father, was studying aspects of the reproductive biology of the frog species at the large forest pond on which Andreas had already worked, and stayed for a whole year. I got along well with him too. We shared the house—it was a new one by then, for my parents’ house had unfortunately collapsed, as had our former work hut and the original kitchen hut. The new house had no walls, and we slept on the floor on mattresses with mosquito nets, each in one of the corners facing the forest, so that we didn’t get wet even during storms, which mostly come from the river-facing side. I made myself comfortable all the way in the back, screened by two bookshelves. Later I moved into the attic of our palm-branch-thatched house, where it was especially cozy when it rained and I could fall asleep wonderfully to the regular rushing sound directly above me. Most of the time I came out of the forest after midnight or around two in the morning, bathed in the river and then went to bed, but never without first reading something by candlelight.
Manfred, too, was out in the dark, for most of the frogs at the pond are nocturnal as well. But Manfred and I went our separate ways in accordance with our work. During the day we reviewed what we had observed and collected at night, kept diaries and compiled data. I caught bats, which I carefully placed individually in cloth bags and mostly released where I had captured them. I also collected their excrement, to determine their diet, as well as the louse flies from their fur. For bat louse flies are special parasites, which I wanted to take into account in my dissertation as well.
Cooking was also among our daily tasks. I always had to start on that in the morning, for it took a long time on the log fire before everything was ready. In the evening we contributed the leftovers from our lunch to the shared dinner in a cozy circle at the home of Moro’s mother Doña Lida, a strong-willed, capable and warm woman who to this day remains an institution in the Módena family. She supported us energetically, welcomed me with open arms and took care of the people in Panguana when we weren’t there. She and Panguana are inseparably bound to each other, and I fondly call her my “aunt” to this day. At that time she was living with parts of Moro’s family close to our station house, while Moro still dwelled on the Ponderosa on the other side of the Yuyapichis.
At that time I found Panguana particularly beautiful, more beautiful than ever. There were many animals, bats too, that can be seen only rarely nowadays. I loved the moonlit nights filled with an extraordinary, ivory-colored light, and the glorious starry sky, which can be admired in all its magnificence only in areas where there is no electric light. Especially impressive in Panguana still today is the bright, broad band of the Milky Way, which we often cannot even vaguely discern in Germany due to the illumination of cities.
Soon I moved on those bright moonlit nights as confidently as during the day. And once that was almost my undoing. I was returning home from one of my expeditions and turned off the flashlight when I emerged from the forest, so bright did I find the moonlight. Suddenly something reared up before me. It was a lance-headed viper, so close that it could have bitten me. I froze, and that was instinctively exactly the right reaction during such a confrontation. You have to stand completely still, and then the snake won’t perceive any movement. I had been careless. We actually knew that it was there, for lance-headed vipers are faithful to one place, and I hadn’t thought of that due to the moonlight. Now it was angry. Once I pulled myself together, I retreated slowly and deliberately. Then it disappeared without a sound into the forest.
That was, incidentally, not my first encounter with a lance-headed viper. In 1969, when I was living with my parents in the jungle, it had already almost happened. Back then, I wanted to catch a frog for my terrarium. On my knees I was following it slowly around a small understory palm when I suddenly saw a movement out of the corner of my eye—it was a lance-headed viper, about six inches away from my nose. It was already darting its tongue aggressively and could almost have bitten me in the face. That could have had a deadly outcome.
Of course, life in Panguana—and this was true back then, still more than today—is a life with great restrictions. We did our laundry by hand in the river, which was rather difficult, especially during the rainy season. Then everything stayed damp and clammy, the laundry began to get moldy, and Manfred and I got fungal infections between our toes, because we almost always had to wear rubber boots in the completely sodden and flooded forest. The Yuyapichis was often swollen and became cold and muddy. Then the daily bath was often hard or sometimes impossible. And lo and behold, things worked out nonetheless.
In Yuyapichis, Manfred and I were soon acquainted with everyone and felt at home. In the jungle, birthdays are lavishly celebrated, and we attended most of them. In Yuyapichis and the neighboring villages there would be a pachamanca, which is always a festive occasion. The word “pachamanca” comes from Quechua and means “earthen pot meal.” You dig a hole, cover the ground with stones heated over the fire, pile on them various types of marinated meat, herbs and vegetables, with banana leaves between them, and then close the pit again. Depending on the size of the pachamanca, it then takes one or two hours before the whole thing is done and opened with the participation of everyone present. Moro was a great pachamanquero and had mastered cooking in the earthen hole perfectly. Thus he was always being asked to prepare a pachamanca at large festivities. When my birthday was approaching, we decided to celebrate it in the village of Yanayaquillo with Moro’s parents-in-law. Moro and his two families prepared a raucous party for me with a gigantic pachamanca and dancing until five in the morning, to which people came not only from Yuyapichis and Yanayaquillo, but also from the whole surrounding area, emptying over one hundred crates of beer. One of the pilots from the bush airline stopped by, too, and replenished the beer supply. Since the birthday girl or boy is traditionally responsible for food and drink, this tore a deep hole in my student funds, but that didn’t bother me. Everyone was happy, especially me.
Since that time the Módenas have treated me as a member of the family. From all of them I learned a great deal about the inhabitants of the jungle and how they live. I was already familiar with the rain forest and had, after all, held out for eleven days in it on my own, and yet only now did my knowledge deepen. I learned how to cook Peruvian cuisine in the native fashion with the products of the forest and fields. That was not only extremely exciting, but also practical and cheaper than bringing things from Pucallpa all the time. Of course, that was still necessary too, now and then, and I enjoyed the required trips to the city. In those days Pucallpa was not yet the roaring inferno that it is today, for there weren’t any motocars. On the other hand, the roads had not been asphalted yet either, and in the rainy season they became so muddy that you were constantly slipping and your shoes became a couple pounds heavier due to lumps of mud sticking to them. Here I stayed with Moro’s oldest sister, Luz, whose husband worked at the petroleum company Petroperú and had a beautiful house, which even had air-conditioning. On later occasions friends of my parents took me in. They were the Escalante sisters, whose brother is a cloth merchant and used to own an airplane for flights in the jungle. To this day I visit the sisters when I come to Pucallpa.
Most of the time I went by myself to Pucallpa and a few times to Lima. My friend Edith got married and, obviously, I couldn’t miss that. To extend my stay in Peru after six months, I even had to travel to Tumbes on the Ecuadorian border. Here I briefly crossed the border and then came right back—for I needed only the entry stamp on my passport. But I was always glad to return to the jungle.
Considering how difficult it is still today to reach Panguana, it is easy to imagine the patience and adventurousness it required in those days to travel from there to Pucallpa or even Lima. At that time there was a great number of small airlines, some private, which offered connecting flights in the jungle, often under the most adventurous circumstances. Today I am full of amazement about how undauntedly I boarded these rattletraps after my crash experience. I was seemingly fearless. There was a fifty-minute flight, with a single-engine Cessna, between Pucallpa and the village of Yuyapichis; without batting an eyelash, I got on it.
I still remember well a return flight that was so bumpy that the pilot was constantly crossing himself. He had not yet landed in Yuyapichis and asked his small crew—that is, us—whether we really had to land there or might not rather land in Puerto Inca. There was a real runway there; whereas in Yuyapichis, he had to land on a pasture. It had happened before that a Cessna collided while landing with a cow or a horse that had not gotten out of the way in time. As a result the pilot was sweating blood. But we all insisted on Yuyapichis, for no one wanted to spend an eternity in Puerto Inca, waiting for a lift. During the entire flight a woman was clinging with both hands to my pants, and a little girl was continually vomiting on the floor. When the airplane was finally on solid ground, and only just came to a stop at the end of the pasture, the pilot was such a nervous wreck that he threw us out right where we were and said he was not going another inch—all he wanted was to go home. I couldn’t help laughing, even though I was the one who would have had the most reason to be afraid.
Another time I flew on a Spanish plane, an Aviocar, a very strange, broad propeller plane in which about twenty people fit. Inside we sat on wooden benches with our backs to the outer wall. In the center aisle were pigs, which immediately got sick, even before the flight really got under way. The passengers threw bundles of living chickens bound together at the legs onto the open overhead compartments. There were no seat belts, of course. During the flight a sort of airplane conductor went around, collected the fare and, as in a streetcar, pressed a stub into our hands. Next to me sat a woman who told me: “You know, I prefer flying to taking a boat. Because I can’t swim.” I thought that was a really funny thing to say, because she couldn’t fly either, after all, if something were to go wrong. It was better not to tell her what had happened to me.
Why all that amused me at the time more than it frightened me, while today flying is never so easy for me—I have no idea. Maybe in your twenties you’re simply more carefree than in later years. In any case, during this so intensive time in the Peruvian jungle, I adjusted completely to life there. Though I already had learned the Spanish language as a child, I perfected it only now and even dreamed in Spanish. My love of Peru and the rain forest, which had always existed, now grew deeper and fuller. In the past I had always been in Panguana only with my parents. Our small family formed a perfect unit. Though our contact with our neighbors was extremely friendly, it remained sporadic. And I had been only fourteen years old back then and had seen my environment with the eyes of an adolescent.
As far as our cuisine was concerned, it was quite simple and far from as varied as what I now learned from Doña Lida. When it came time for the slaughter, Manfred and I were always present and helped the neighbors, and I learned fast how to carve the animals and make use of them and which delicacies could be conjured in the Peruvian fashion from different parts of pigs and calves, as well as chickens, ducks and the fish of the river. There was also a lot of game and native fruits from palms and various forest trees. Now and then Doña Lida even prepared for us the great bullfrogs, turtles and beetle grubs in the style of the natives. Here I learned how to cook or smoke caiman tails, armadillos and possums, and I was astonished that ultimately even marsupials can actually be eaten, even though they stink so terrible. From her and Moro, I also learned about what natural medicines the jungle provides, which tree saps could be used for what. There are lianas, for example, that you cut when you have a toothache, for they contain clove oil, a bloodred resin that heals wounds and much more. In this way I became familiar with the customs of the country and tried everything that I would never have eaten otherwise. Of course, today I would strictly refuse to eat many of those meals for nature conservation reasons, but at that time everything was fascinating for me. I wanted to live just as the neighbors did, and often I was simply curious.
Moro’s mother trained me not only in the cuisine of the Indians, but also in that of the people of German origin from the mountain forests of Pozuzo, where she was from. There was, for example, a strudel made of bananas and raisins, a sopa de knédales, a Knödel—or dumpling—soup, with manioc, corn and all sorts of other ingredients. But such meals were only prepared when Moro’s sisters came to visit from Lima. Then Doña Lida cooked still more elaborately than usual. Of course, very special occasions were Christmas and Easter and also the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, San Juán, on June 24, for the solstice has its own tradition in the jungle. Then every self-respecting housewife prepares juanes—small pouches of banana leaves with a mixture of turmeric rice, with braised pieces of chicken, black olives and hard-boiled eggs. This is a typical jungle meal that is not even known on the coast. In Germany, I later had to readjust to the electric stove, for I found cooking on the woodstove or on an open flame much simpler.
I still remember well how my dissertation adviser, Professor Fittkau, visited me in Panguana, accompanied by two German colleagues. That was very exciting for me, of course, but also enormously important. I had realized, meanwhile, that with the manifold material I had gathered, I could not only fill a dissertation, but also spend my whole life. He not only helped me sensibly narrow down my topic, but he also made himself tremendously useful getting fires started, for the wood was sometimes damp and hard to get burning. Here Professor Fittkau turned out to be a person with extraordinary endurance. Standing in the middle of the acrid smoke, he fanned the smoldering embers with the lid of a pot without complaint until finally a decent fire emerged. He also impressed me by going into the forest without hesitation in the pouring rain to search in the streams for the midge larvae he was working on. To get hold of a tree cactus—he collected and grew cacti at home—he didn’t shy away from climbing around on dangerously rotten branches over streams and ponds. That was something he had in common with my parents: When he wanted to achieve something, there was no going back. On such trips he was game for anything.
Alongside his teaching, Ernst Josef Fittkau was also director of the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology in Munich. And so it happened that a small team of researchers from there visited us in our seclusion a few months later. Apart from that, and from the surprise ambush by a group of English journalists who simply showed up, stayed with us for a week and annoyed me with their questions, it was very quiet all year. And I enjoyed the contact with the locals—Moro’s family most of all, of course. Over time I even took on the singsong of the jungle Spanish, without realizing it. On the coast I was teased for it and sometimes called “charapita,” an affectionate colloquial term for little indigenous Amazonian girls.
I wouldn’t have wanted to miss any of these experiences. Sometimes I even think with a certain wistfulness of those months, which count among the most wonderful of my life to this day.
And my awe of the rain forest habitat truly developed only then, during my studies for my dissertation. Previously I had found all that interesting, new and beautiful, but now I realized that I had still lacked a deeper access to this world. As an adolescent I had marveled at everything with great pleasure, and yet in those days I was a mere observer and “appendage” of my parents. I accompanied them all the time, but remained passive myself. Only during my dissertation work did I put all my soul and energy into the exploration of nature around Panguana. Here I found time to reflect on the rain forest and its structure. And gradually I had the peculiar feeling that the green cosmos was only now truly allowing me to penetrate its secrets. And it really is a phenomenon: For at first glance you think you cannot see anything at all in this forest—many people experience that when they first set foot in the jungle. All around you are countless thriving green plants, nothing more, for the numerous animals have adapted perfectly to their surroundings. There are fingernail-sized frogs sitting on a leaf from which their coloring scarcely differs, and you can stare at this leaf for a long time without noticing them at all. Many grasshoppers, bugs or spiders seem to virtually merge with the bark of a tree or with the branches. Snakes lying motionlessly in tree branches can easily be mistaken for a twig or “disappear” perfectly in the leaves on the ground. Anyone who is unfamiliar with the jungle simply doesn’t see such subtleties. But once you get into this world, it is like gradually learning a whole new way of seeing. It is as if a veil has been lifted from your eyes, and you realize that you are surrounded by multitudinous life. This abundance can definitely be overpowering, in the truest sense of the word.
Today I know that my parents, too, especially my mother, felt this intensely. For now I, too, took in the forest with all my senses, the endless diversity of the vegetation and wildlife and their adaptations, nature’s incredible play of colors, which often lies in tiny details and nuances, the sounds that sometimes enveloped me like a cloak and that always give me pleasure to this day, the smells, the green and yellow twilight, the warm dampness of the forest. And then I feel as if I were plunging into the energy of a powerful, all-embracing living thing, so intimate by now, and yet always unfamiliar in new ways. And it is precisely this constant rediscovery that we scientists find so extremely fascinating about the tropical rain forest habitat—and this is especially true in Panguana, which we have been exploring for forty years and still do not fully grasp.
It is this secret soul of the jungle, the same forest that helped me return to human life after my accident, which only now, during my one-and-a-half-year research project, reveals itself to me. Only then did I truly understand the life task I decided to take on in the distraught and so boundlessly lonely rainy jungle nights after my crash. Back then, I had resolved that if I could keep my life, I would devote it to a meaningful cause, a task serving nature and humanity. Now, having returned to the station as an adult and fulfilling a research assignment of my own, which I assigned to myself without my parents, everything was suddenly completely clear: My task has a name. And it is Panguana.