After sliding my climbing clamps up the rope as far as they’d go, I sat back in my harness to take stock of the situation. I’d reached the top of my line, which meant I was now around 150 feet above-ground in the canopy of the greatest rainforest on Earth. This was a big moment for me. It was my first time in the Amazon and everything about the place was overwhelming. I was struggling to get my head around the sheer scale of it. I was also struggling to get a clear view of the jungle. The canopy I was in was so dense, I’d have to climb a bit higher to find a gap in the branches. Transferring onto a shorter rope, I disconnected from the main access line and began making my way up from branch to branch toward the top of the tree, where I hoped to be rewarded with my first canopy-level view of this incredible forest.
The Amazon really is the ultimate rainforest. It represents half of all remaining tropical jungle on our planet, sprawling across nine different countries to cover more than 2.1 million square miles. An area twice the size of the Congo that could swallow the island of Borneo seven times over, and Britain twenty-six times. The huge tree I was now climbing was one of an estimated 400 billion in the Amazon. That’s around fifty trees for every person alive today, or to put it another way, four times as many trees as the total number of humans that have ever lived.
Ten percent of all species on Earth call the Amazon home, including twenty percent of all known bird and fish species. An estimated 2.5 million species of insects live alongside 427 species of mammals, 378 species of reptiles, and more than 400 species of amphibians. All of which is enough to make your head spin.
But animals aside, it is of course the plants that dominate any jungle, and the Amazon has around forty thousand species. To put this in perspective, Borneo has fifteen thousand, while the Congo has ten thousand. Of these forty thousand types of plants, sixteen thousand are native species of tree. By stark comparison, Britain has around forty-five. And that’s on a good day.
The sheer biodiversity of the Amazon is unparalleled, and given that the vast majority of these organisms are to be found living up in the trees, its canopy can be a truly humbling place to explore. But in order to see the big picture it’s sometimes best to start small.
The wonder of any rainforest, let alone the most intricate and diverse one on Earth, can only be truly appreciated by taking a closer look at some of the relationships between its organisms. Which is exactly why I was here, climbing up through these branches. I was in search of some very special flowers. I’d caught a glimpse of one from down on the ground—a creamy-yellow cluster of blooms, held erect like the flowers of a horse chestnut back home. Indeed, the local Spanish name for the species of tree I was climbing was castaña, or chestnut. Its world-famous fruit is known to the rest of us as the Brazil nut.
Brazil nut trees rely completely upon just one type of bee for pollination, and documenting this delicate relationship between flower and insect was the reason that I was here, as part of a film crew. This fascinating story could potentially throw light on some of the ecological complexities that have helped shape the Amazon.
But first I had to find the flowers, and up here in the tree, I was struggling to see any. They seemed to be growing on the very tips of branches, beyond the dense canopy of leaves that hung down around me like a huge shaggy umbrella. I’d have to get a bit higher and walk out along one of the tree’s limbs to get a closer look.
Throwing a bundle of rope over an enormous branch stretching right across the tree above me, I clipped in and swung out to hang in the empty space beneath it. The view out over the forest was still hidden, but I’d just caught a tantalizing glimpse of some yellow petals, so I pressed on. Sunlight dancing on the smaller branches above hinted at a gap. I climbed toward it.
Turning around into the light, I looked out through a window in the leaves. The tree I was climbing stood on the edge of a plateau, and the view over the rainforest that now greeted me was immense, just awesome, in the true sense of the word. It wasn’t just the scale of the forest, or the sight of infinite trees marching to the horizon, that was so breathtaking—it was the sheer diversity of their shape, size, form, and color. My eyes were instantly drawn to a huge emergent in full bloom, half a mile away. Its entire canopy was full of bright-pink blossoms, so that the whole tree shone like a beacon across the otherwise green forest. Way off to my left were two more, just the same. In fact, there were quite a few of the same species dotted through the forest, and it amazed me to think that all these trees were tied together by invisible threads as insects and birds transferred genetic material between them.
Here and there, tall, domed emergents like the tree I was now in rose above all others to bask in the undiluted tropical sunshine. Others were fruiting and had dropped their leaves to reveal thousands of seedpods dangling from bare branches. I recognized these as kapok trees—true New World giants, their enormous spreading limbs reaching up to the sky as if in prayer. Kapoks are favorite nesting sites for harpy eagles, the world’s most secretive and powerful raptor, although my optimistic hope of spotting one in the trees’ open canopies was in vain.
Some tribes use the fluffy “silk cotton” from kapok seeds as wadding for their blowpipe darts, and I was struck by the thought that the forest I was now looking over was also reputed to be home to an unknown number of uncontacted indigenous groups. More than any other, this fact about the Amazon continues to astonish me and goes some way toward indicating what a vast tract of impenetrable wilderness it truly is. I wondered whether right now, somewhere deep within this landscape, there might be a group of people living wild and free as they had done for thousands of years.
To cap it all, floating way beyond everything else, like another world, was a long line of snow-clad mountains on the horizon: the high Andes. The mere sight of those crystalline peaks was enough to dispel any last memory of the suffocating humidity lurking on the jungle floor 170 feet below me.
I was enjoying a harpy’s view of the Amazon in all its glory. For a tree climber, it didn’t get much better. But just as exciting, barely ten feet away in front of me was one of the flowers I had come all this way from England to find. It was one of several on the outside of the tree’s canopy, where it was sunniest.
The first thing to know about Brazil nut, or castaña, trees is that they are staggeringly beautiful, often standing as forest emergents, head and shoulders above the Amazon’s other trees. They can grow to be two hundred feet tall and in my mind are one of only a few New World tropical trees to rival the natural grace and form of the dipterocarps in Borneo. Their trunks are tall and straight, their timber strong, and their canopies broad and spreading. In fact, they are pretty much the perfect tree from a climber’s point of view, and the one I was in was a classic example of how lovely they could become with age. This tree could easily be six or seven centuries old: pre-Columbian, in fact.
The forest below me was sweltering at thirty-five degrees Celsius, but up here I was sheltered from the sun by the castaña’s canopy of long green leaves. Hidden among this dense foliage were dozens of large, round seedpods, each containing up to thirty of the tree’s familiar nuts. Each pod was the size of a grapefruit, rock-hard, and weighed around two kilos. They hung like enormous cannonball baubles, swaying in the breeze from the ends of last season’s flower spikes. They were still a couple of months away from being ripe enough to fall, but even so, I was glad to be wearing my climbing helmet. Although how much help it would be in the event of a direct hit was a moot point. Despite this latent threat, it was still a huge pleasure to be here, up in the branches of one of the world’s most impressive rainforest trees.
But in many respects it was the castaña’s pale, waxy flowers that held the most intrigue. For if ever there was an apt metaphor to illustrate the exquisite ecology of rainforests, it is the extraordinary story of their relationship with a bee, an orchid, and a large ground-dwelling rodent. But to tell this story properly, we first had to film the bee pollinating a flower.
Despite the clear afternoon sky, a hollow peal of thunder warned of rain on its way. The flowers weren’t going anywhere, and in the absence of any foraging insects I decided to come back early the following morning to try to catch a glimpse of pollination in progress. It felt good to have finally found the flowers. So taking one last look at them and the alluring view beyond, I dropped back down into the stifling gloom of the forest understory and headed back to camp to share the good news with the rest of the team.
Seeing those mountains had reminded me of the incredible journey to get here. We had flown east across the Andes from Lima, touching down for a while in Cusco, where the air was so thin, I felt my heart race. My first view of the Peruvian Amazon had been from the plane’s window as we dropped down over the foothills. Even from twenty thousand feet, the forest had stretched away to the horizon in every direction. The next time we landed was in the sweltering heat of the tropical lowlands at the jungle river port of Puerto Maldonado, where the air was so thick, it felt like oxygen soup. From Puerto Maldonado we had traveled by boat up the Madre de Dios River for five hours before finally arriving here at Los Amigos Biological Station. Around the station lay 360,000 acres of protected old-growth Amazonian forest, which in turn was but part of a 20-million-acre block of jungle that had been protected in this remote corner of southeast Peru.
It was October, the end of the dry season, and despite the fact that this was meant to be the height of the flowering period, the castaña tree I’d just climbed was the first we’d found in bloom. Mirko, a local biologist, and I had been wandering through the jungle in search of a suitable candidate for the past week. Castañas grow in groves, and we must have looked, in mounting frustration, at well over a hundred trees. Some had green unopened buds, while others had clearly finished flowering many days before. The plan was for me to rig a system of ropes to hoist cameraman Kevin into position alongside David, an ecologist from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, who would help interpret the biology for the viewer at home.
We thought we’d found a suitable tree a few days ago. A huge thing, larger even than the one I’d just climbed. It had looked perfect from the ground, its upper canopy dripping with flowers. So I had fired my line up into its immense branches and begun my ascent, only to encounter a hidden bees’ nest halfway up the trunk. Thankfully they weren’t honeybees, only a local stingless variety, but they had powerful pincerlike jaws, and my initial relief at not getting stung turned to panic as a couple thousand swarmed to bite me relentlessly.
They latched painfully onto my lips, nose, and eyelids, and squirmed around, secreting a strange sticky resin all over my skin. I was swamped as they wriggled down my back, into my ears, and through my hair. By the time I felt them buzzing up my legs, I’d had enough and quickly abseiled back down to the ground. They followed me down to smother Mirko as well, and the air turned blue with earthy Spanish curses.
Less of a laughing matter had been the inch-and-a-half-long bullet ant that crawled down my face while I was halfway up another castaña. It had stung me twice on the left cheek while I dangled a hundred feet aboveground. The pain had been immediate and extremely intense, like a cigar stubbed out on my skin, turning the whole left side of my face numb and making my lips tingle. The headache that followed could have felled a rhino, and I was left with a black eye for two days. Bullet ants carry the most potent toxin of any insect, ranked top of the Schmidt sting pain index. Even stronger than the mind-numbing sting delivered by tarantula hawk wasps—which I can personally vouch for, having been stung on the forehead by one in Sumatra. Bullet ants look like menacing black hornets without wings, and the one that got me then ran down the front of my shirt before I managed to flick it off, again toward Mirko, who hurled abuse at me and threatened to cut my rope.
To rub salt into the wounds, what I had originally thought were fresh flowers up in the tree had turned out to be old and wilted—we’d missed them by a few days.
And therein lay the issue: castaña flowers are so short-lived, it makes finding one in full bloom very tricky. Several times we encountered large areas of leaf litter smothered in their fallen petals. We’d knelt to watch steady streams of leaf-cutter ants carry the confetti off to their nest. Nothing was wasted in the rainforest, but as fascinating as this was, it wasn’t the story we were after, so the search continued.
Then the day before yesterday we’d finally stumbled across our tree. Having climbed up to check the flowers and marvel at the view, I’d just arrived back at camp when the peals of thunder delivered on their promise, and the heavens opened. The sky had turned black, and the pounding rain settled in for the night. My last thought as I fell asleep that evening was whether such delicate flowers could possibly survive such an onslaught.
For two solid days that storm thumped and flashed away in the clouds directly above Los Amigos. We were coming out of the dry season, and this was the first big rain to hit the area in weeks. It seemed to be making up for lost time, and as each violent squall swept in to hammer the forest even harder than the last, my hope of finding any flowers still intact up in the castaña dwindled more and more. At this rate, we’d be lucky if there were any left to film in the entire forest.
The rain eventually stopped at 3 a.m. two days later. By 4:30 I was heading out of camp with my climbing gear. I was on my own and wanted to take full advantage of the ceasefire to get up into the tree for a proper look at what remained of the flowers. I was soon sweating through the humid darkness of the forest and had to hold my headlamp in my hand to avoid the clouds of tiny biting flies attracted to its light. At one point I noticed an orange glow weaving along the path toward me. I stood still and watched entranced as a beetle flew past my face with what I can describe only as green headlights on its thorax and red taillights behind on its abdomen. I’d never seen anything like it before—like a tiny spacecraft.
Arriving at the bottom of the castaña, I hauled the climbing ropes I had left there around in a loop, examining them to make sure they hadn’t been nibbled by rodents or ants, then pulled on my harness. The sky was growing light, but it was still half an hour or so until sunrise, by which time I hoped to be up in position, keeping an eye open for insects visiting the flowers. David had described what to look out for—a species of orchid bee—and providing I saw some buzzing around, I could rig the ropes to get him and Kevin up here to film pollination tomorrow. Mind you, at this stage I was more concerned with whether I’d find any flowers left at all. There were an alarming number of bruised petals strewn across the leaf litter at the foot of the tree.
Thankfully the flowers in the tree were largely intact. It was nothing short of a miracle that so many had survived, though quite a few looked worse for wear and there were plenty of empty pedicles where entire flower spikes had been ripped off by the wind. Carrying on toward the first flower I’d seen, near the top of the tree, I arrived in the upper canopy just in time to watch the sunrise over the Amazon.
The Madre de Dios River lay far below, and as the thick mist lifted to reveal the jungle, everything seemed to sparkle in air washed clean by the storm. Several pairs of blue-and-yellow macaws flew past, squawking to each other, and down in the forest I heard the squirrel-like chattering of a group of saki monkeys as they moved through the canopy in search of breakfast.
It wasn’t long before a small metallic-green bee arrived on the scene and landed on the yellow petals of a flower a few feet away. It was clearly an orchid bee, although it didn’t look like the species David had described. It was certainly in search of nectar, though, so I watched closely as it tried to squirm its way in through the flower’s petals. The flower wasn’t about to give up its precious cargo to any old bee, however, and unable to shoulder its way through into the nectary, the bee eventually gave up and flew off to try its luck elsewhere. No rare insight into the workings of the Amazon just yet, then. Still, since bees are a million times more sensitive to scent than we are, I hoped it wouldn’t be long before the rightful pollinator arrived. So I made myself comfy on my branch and took another long look out over the jungle. Far away the snowy slopes of the Andes glowed soft pink in the first rays of the new day.
Half an hour later my attention was drawn back to the same flower as a large-bodied yellow bee I hadn’t seen before came in to land. It was twice the size of the previous metallic-green one and seemed to fit David’s description perfectly. It certainly knew exactly what to do and quickly set about gaining access to the flower’s hidden treasure. There was no messing around as it forced its head and thorax through a tiny gap, shoving the encircling petals aside. Its strong hind legs, laden with sacks of orange pollen, scrabbled and pushed to drive the insect deep inside. The petals rolled back to close behind the bee and hide it from view, although I still heard it buzzing inside. It reemerged a few seconds later, covered in the castaña’s precious pollen and all the better for an energy-rich drink of nectar. It paused just long enough to run its forelegs over its antennae before powering away across the canopy in search of another meal. I’d just witnessed one of the jungle’s most unassuming yet profound interactions. High time for breakfast, so I abseiled back down to the ground and headed back to camp, where I would collect the rest of my rigging gear with a view to getting Kevin and David up there to film the following morning.
Over the next two days we successfully filmed Dave hanging in the castaña’s canopy next to the bees. It was a good start, but what about the orchid and the rodent, the other two organisms involved in the castaña’s life cycle?
Well, the orchid bees pollinating the flowers were one of only a few species strong enough to get through the flower’s defenses. Even the males of these species are too puny to gain entry, so all castaña pollination has to be done by females. But the male orchid bee still has a role to play, since in order to attract females to mate, it has to cover itself in perfume from a special orchid growing elsewhere in the canopy. What does this have to do with the castaña? Well, no orchids, no mating. No mating, no female bees to pollinate the tree, so no Brazil nuts. Ultimately, in order to reproduce, the castaña relies entirely upon the female orchid bee’s choice of perfume, as does an international trade in harvested Brazil nuts worth nearly £40 million a year.
So where does the rodent come in? To tell this second half of the story, we would need to come back to Peru in a couple of months’ time, when the castaña’s cannonball pods were ripe enough to drop to the jungle floor.
Arriving back in Puerto Maldonado was a shock to the system. I thought it was oppressive last time, but it was now January, the height of the wet season, with humidity averaging 90 percent and temperatures simmering around thirty-two degrees Celsius. Nice if you’re on a beach, but tough if you’re climbing trees. We’d left England in a blizzard, and the memory of watching a car spin slowly off the M4, narrowly missing an articulated truck in the middle of a whiteout, seemed like a distant dream as I lay sweating on my hotel bed, cursing the ceiling fan for turning so slowly. Outside, the streets were steaming. The rain had just stopped, and water was evaporating in the heat of the sun. My room began to shake, and poking my head out through the bars of my first-story window, I watched an enormous logging truck lurch up the street in a cloud of diesel fumes. Fat sections of freshly felled old-growth mahogany lay chained to its trailer, while long strips of bark trailed in the mud behind the enormous wheels. A sobering reminder of the environmental pressures this part of the world was under.
Puerto Maldonado is—or was—the archetypal jungle frontier town. Founded during the heady days of the rubber boom, it was a melting pot of ranchers, miners, loggers, drug-traffickers, and prostitutes. Nowadays the area around it is practically logged out, but illegal gold-mining is still a major issue, nothing short of an environmental disaster, as gallons of liquid mercury are poured into the Madre de Dios every day. Ironically, ecotourism is big business today. But thirteen years ago you could still pay for a drink with gold dust and watch tankers pour neat oil onto the dirt streets to keep the dust down. I couldn’t wait to get out of town and back into the trees.
Kevin was heading back to film at Los Amigos with producer Rupert, while Mirko and I traveled up the Madre de Dios in the opposite direction. Our destination: Lago Valencia, an oxbow lake on the Bolivian border. Mirko had assured me there were hundreds of castaña trees in the pristine forest surrounding the lake, so I planned to rig a cable-cam in the canopy of the biggest we could find and film the seedpods hanging there, waiting to drop.
Our boat’s twelve-horsepower engine propelled us barely faster than the river current, and Mirko and I broiled in the heat as we slid slowly past the floating shanties of gold miners anchored midchannel. Each makeshift hut had its own diesel-driven conveyor belt spewing sludge and mercury back into the Madre de Dios once the precious dust had been sifted out.
Five hours later, the pilot turned the prow into a small side channel, and we left the main river behind. The jungle closed in above us, and I watched the reflections ripple on the underside of leaves as we crept slowly forward up the creek. Kingfishers played leapfrog with our boat, flying ahead, only to double back through the forest as we passed. We eventually arrived at a ramshackle police checkpoint. A small cement hut in a swamp, with three shirtless coppers sweating on the porch: the Bolivian border patrol. They waved us on casually, and a few minutes later we emerged into the open lake beyond. The swirls and currents of the main river were now replaced with textured stippling, like fingerprints on the water, giving the lake a haunting serenity. Fifty families lived on its shores in the eaves of the forest. For half the year they fished for arapaima, huge air-breathing fish weighing up to two hundred kilos, and for the other half they worked as castañeros, harvesting wild Brazil nuts. Looking at the forest, I could already see the characteristic high-domed canopies of tall castaña trees, and I couldn’t wait to get a closer look at them.
Our first day was spent trekking through the thick jungle, visiting as many different groves as we could. Huge piles of empty pods lay rotting at the base of many of the trees, the spoils of last year’s harvest. Each one had been chopped open by machete, and the discarded husks had now filled with water to form hundreds of little pools perfect for mosquito larvae.
Although we visited dozens of trees, we didn’t find anything suitable for filming. Six hours of walking, a twenty-five-kilo rucksack, sweat bees, murderous mosquitoes, and a climb into the canopy combined to leave me wrung out and fried. By the time we arrived back at camp on the lakeshore, I was exhausted. Thankfully we were greeted with a huge jug of fruit juice by Ketty, the daughter of the fishing family we were staying with. It really hit the spot, but I still went to bed with blurred vision, the candle by my bed wobbling in a double halo of yellow and green.
I was exhausted and fell into a feverish sleep, my head full of turbulent dreams. Early the following morning I sat by a tree on the lakeside with a cup of coffee, watching thin wisps of mist rise from the mirrored water. Mirko strolled down to join me and mentioned he’d heard me turning in my sleep all night long. I described my nightmares, and it turned out he and Ketty had both had similar ones involving desperate chases through tangled forest. He then told me about a double murder committed right here forty-five years ago. Two people had been robbed and killed for their gold. He also told me how Lago Valencia got its name. Twenty-five years ago a man called Valencia killed his wife with a machete in Puerto Maldonado, and making his escape up the Madre de Dios, stumbled across this hidden oxbow lake, where he hid until his wife’s family found him and killed him. According to Mirko, the area had a bad reputation for haunting nightmares and was infamous for its heavy atmosphere. It certainly had a dark history, but then most places do if you look back far enough.
The rest of that day went downhill from there, really. I just couldn’t understand it. There were so many castaña trees, we should have been spoiled for choice. But most of them had already dropped their pods, and by midmorning I’d had enough of traipsing aimlessly around, so I rigged and climbed another tree in search of a decent view out over the canopy. Reaching the top, I could see at least a dozen or so other castañas around me, and although some of them still had a few ripe pods dangling high up in their crowns, for the most part they looked pretty barren. What we really needed was a canopy full of them, or the camera wouldn’t pick them out from a distance. I took a compass bearing on what looked to be the best option, a massive tree with a smattering of pods a quarter of a mile away, then abseiled back down to the ground to go look for it.
Mirko and I bushwhacked our way toward where it should have been, according to my bearing, but two hours later we realized we’d missed it. The forest was so dense and tangled, it was barely possible to see fifty feet in any direction, so even an error of a few degrees would take us right past a two-hundred-foot-tall tree without even knowing it. It was all getting ridiculous, and more than a little exasperating. So by the time we stumbled across a narrow trail winding through the trees, I was ready for a rest and dropped my rucksack to lie down. Mirko leaned up against the base of a tree nearby, lost deep in thought while idly flicking at a twig with his machete.
A few minutes later I heard the sound of a man coming toward us at great speed, carrying a heavy load. Mirko stood up to face down the path, and a moment later a castañero, one of the local nut harvesters, appeared around the bend. His red shirt was soaked with sweat, and on his back was an enormous black sack of Brazil nuts. A woven belt was wrapped around the load and strapped across his forehead, and his hands were clasped behind his neck to provide extra support. He leaned forward as he half-walked, half-ran along the trail, ducking under vines and dodging roots at great speed. That bag must have weighed as much as me. This was back-breaking work, and I got to my feet out of sheer respect for the man. Looking up at us, he slowed to a halt and slid the sack down to the ground with a thump. Mirko and he knew each other, and sitting down on top of his hefty load, the castañero lit a cigarette and smiled at us both through a mouth full of gold teeth. He was in his forties, I’d guess. Hard as nails, but as friendly as they came.
They chatted away in Spanish for a while before the man unpicked a corner of the bag and drew out a couple of freshly harvested nuts, handing one to Mirko and the other to me. I drew my knife, only to be told to use my teeth. There’s a reason why Brazil nuts are the last to be eaten at Christmas, and the thought of trying to break into one with nothing but my molars didn’t really appeal. But when I gave it a go, I was astonished by how soft its shell was. It came away like orange peel, and the nut inside bore no resemblance whatsoever to the concrete-hard imports we buy in shops back home. It had the milky texture of fresh coconut, breaking easily into soft flakes that tasted divine. Easily the best Brazil nut I’d ever tasted. Turns out that in order to comply with international trade regulations, all Brazil nuts are dried out thoroughly before leaving the country to eliminate the risk of mold. Sounds sensible, but it’s a shame nonetheless, because the nut I’d just eaten was simply delicious, and I wish more people back home had the chance to try them in their natural state, full of sunshine.
Before moving on, the castañero suggested we check out the grove farther down the trail. He’d spent the day there, but there were still plenty more pods swinging in the breeze twenty stories up, ready to come down. We thanked him and helped him lift his heavy load. Taking a deep breath, he slid the strap down over his forehead, leaned forward, and took off down the path toward the shores of the lake at a steady trot. We’d run out of time to visit his grove that afternoon, but decided to head there immediately after sunrise the following morning.
The pod hanging in front of me was the size of a large grapefruit, chocolate brown and weighing at least two kilos. It swayed gently on its stalk as I gave it a tap with my knuckle—hard as iron. I gave it a tentative pull and was happy to feel it still firmly attached to the branch. For such large pods—or cocos, as they were called locally—they had been surprisingly hard to spot from the ground. I’d caught sight of a few, but the canopy of a castaña is so dense, its dark-green leaves so large and shaggy, I’d had to climb the 170 feet up into the top of this giant just to be sure we’d found our tree at last. And in the same way that I’d struggled to get a clear view of flowers back in Los Amigos the previous year, I’d spent the past hour clambering around these enormous branches, trying to get a handle on how many cocos were hanging here for us to film. Since the seedpods develop from pollinated flowers and those flowers grow only on the branches’ extremities, it followed that this was where the vast majority of the cocos would be found. Looking around me now, I saw the silhouettes of dozens more dangling against the bright-white sky. Hundreds more were nestling in the thick foliage of other trees nearby. For some reason, this grove of giants was a couple of weeks behind the other trees closer to the lakeshore. There were even a few wilted flower spikes still hanging on up here. These trees never stopped amazing me. The pods around me now had taken at least a year to grow and ripen. That’s a big investment of time and energy for any tree. And to think that this tree accomplished such a feat year in, year out, was nothing short of remarkable.
It felt great to be back up in the canopy after so many days trudging around, searching on the forest floor. Mirko and I had left camp just after dawn that morning, barely saying a word to each other about our hopes for what we might find, just in case we jinxed it. But arriving at the castañero’s grove an hour later, we’d both grinned with relief, dumped the rucksacks, and set about peering up through the dense understory to get a handle on which of the colossal trees we should attempt to climb first. Two huge piles of freshly opened pods showed where our friend had spent yesterday, extracting the nuts, which were arranged in the pod like the segments of an orange. Castañeros don’t climb up to pick the pods; they simply collect those that have fallen. And since it was a still day, with barely a breeze ruffling the leaves high above us, I figured it would be safe enough to climb up beneath the others that were up there. Even so, I’d make sure to keep close to the trunk, away from the edge of the canopy where the pods were hanging. People—with or without helmets—are killed by them every year. Rock-hard pods weighing two kilos, falling 150 feet, take no prisoners.
So, having struck castaña gold, Mirko and I set about rigging the cable-cam for a tracking shot through the grove at canopy level. These days a camera shot like this would be done via remote-controlled drone, but back then—in the days of film—we didn’t have drones, and the camera alone weighed five kilos, so things were a little different. By late afternoon, I was drenched with sweat and knackered. But both trees at either end of the cable run had been rigged, and the steel cable had been hoisted up into position 150 feet above the ground between them.
Just as I was putting the finishing touches to the rigging, a weather front swept in. The sky had been growing dark to the east, and as I prepared to head down, a strong wind blew through the grove. Nothing too violent, just a cushion of air displaced by the heavy rain on its heels. But it was enough to start dislodging pods. The first one came down with a dull thud that echoed through the trees, followed by a yell of warning from Mirko. It had missed him by several meters, but he ran in toward the shelter of the castaña’s trunk below me and shouted for me to hurry up and get down—we had to get out of there quickly. The thuds grew more regular as the wind stiffened, and a pod came down to hit a branch ten feet away before ricocheting out through the side of the canopy toward the ground a hundred feet below. I yelled a warning to Mirko and dropped faster down the rope.
By the time I reached the floor, the canopy above us was swaying all over the place and we could hear rain coming. I got in as close to the tree trunk as I could, but as I bent over my rucksack to flake the rope in for the night, there was a rush of air, and a pod the size and weight of a cannonball hit the ground barely three feet away. It came down with so much force, it actually blew leaves aside before embedding itself in the soil so that only its top half was visible. That was enough for both of us; still in my harness, I legged it down the trail behind Mirko as fast as I could, cringing at the sound of more pods smashing into the ground behind us.
The rain set in for the night, but stopped just after dawn. The sun came out and the jungle began to steam. On our way back to film at the grove, we almost stepped on a beautiful feather lying softly on top of the leaf litter in the middle of the trail. Mirko stooped to pick it up before presenting it to me with a smile: “For you: pluma de águila arpía.” A feather from the breast of a harpy eagle. What a gift. It was beautiful. Ivory fading to gray, with charcoal bands. “She has been here this morning,” he said, looking around as if expecting to see her on a branch right above us, “probably hunting agouti.”
Agoutis were the missing link in our castaña story. Gentle, timid rodents, a little like large brown guinea pigs. The best view of one I’d had was the poor unfortunate creature covered in mosquitoes in Costa Rica. But this humble creature is one of only a few mammals in the entire Amazon with teeth sharp enough to chisel through the coco’s shell and extract the Brazil nuts. What’s more, being rodents hardwired to squirrel things away for a rainy day, they carry off and bury any nuts they don’t eat. And in good rodent fashion, they often forget exactly where they’ve stashed them (or indeed get nailed by a harpy) before they can return to dig them up. Either way, the next generation of castaña trees germinates, and around we go.
As if to prove the point, Mirko found a freshly opened coco at the base of our tree. One of the pods that had fallen the previous day. It was now nothing more than a hollow shell with a freshly chiseled hole in its side, through which the agouti had extracted each individual nut. The animal had clearly had a busy evening, and somewhere nearby a couple of dozen nuts were buried in the leaf litter, destined to be either eaten at a later date, or abandoned and allowed to germinate. The last amazing fact about the castaña tree is that once a nut does germinate, it can remain as a seedling for years, if not decades, just waiting for an all-important light gap to appear in the canopy above. In this way, a foot-tall castaña sapling could easily be thirty years old. Just biding its time for a place in the sun.
Our last day of filming went well. Mirko and I got the shots we needed, and combined with the bulk of the sequence shot by Kevin and Rupert, the castaña’s fascinating story had been told. And what a story it is: the jungle giant that relies for its very survival on a bee’s taste in orchid perfume and a rodent’s forgetfulness. For me, everything about these magnificent trees seems to embody the very heart and soul of the Amazon, the greatest, most complex rainforest on Earth.