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Lessons from the Field

It’s the Journey, Not the Destination

We need field biologists more than ever. We are losing species faster than ever to a range of threats, including habitat loss, invasive species, pathogens, and illegal harvesting. Yet one has to spend only a few minutes with the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List to realize how little we know about the most basic facts for most species on the planet. There are many reasons for this—the overwhelming numbers of species to study, remote and difficult field conditions, and insufficient and dwindling research infrastructure (e.g., limited funding for exploratory research, different priorities in the academic reward system, loss of organismal biology courses in university curricula, reduced numbers of field courses, and funding pressures for field stations).

There are many reasons we should double down on supporting fundamental organismal biology: if we are to manage sensitive species properly, we need to know demographic rates, seasonal cycles, and habitat use; if we are to conserve them, we need to know historic trends, biotic interactions, and distributions. If we are to use them as the basis for ecotourism, inspiration, engineering design and insights, or other goods and services, we need to be able to find and observe them. Although technology is rapidly expanding our ability to observe remotely, field studies are still one of the best ways to gather these kinds of data.

Picking the right place can provide loads of new discoveries, interesting natural history observations, and a lifetime of stories. As a graduate student I was fortunate to have worked at a remote site in the Talamancan Mountains of southern Costa Rica. Later I set up camp at other sites across the mountains of western and central Panama and eventually made it to the mountains of eastern Panama on the Colombian border. I learned a lot from living in those remote sites, lessons that serve as a source of inspiration, laughter, and caution.

One trip in particular stands out for many reasons. It was 1990, and my advisor, Jay Savage, had asked if I wanted to conduct some biotic surveys at Finca Las Alturas, a site in southern Costa Rica where Stanford University would eventually build a field station. I was there to explore the region, develop a list of amphibians and reptiles at the site, and identify candidate sites for amphibian monitoring following the numerous recent reports of the mysterious disappearance of amphibians. In July I was joined at Las Alturas by Craig Guyer and Sharon Hermann, and we decided to push farther into the mountains and spend a few days collecting at a place called Valle de Silencio.

I had heard about this place from Luis Diego Gomez, director of the Organization for Tropical Studies’ Las Cruces Botanical Gardens in San Vito, Costa Rica. Luis Diego was a botanist and explorer who had recently given a presentation on Costa Rican biodiversity and showcased the natural wonders of the Amistad Biosphere Reserve (one part of Parque Internacional la Amistad), a huge binational Peace Park on the Costa Rica–Panama border that protected the oak forests and the watersheds of the Talamancan Mountains. This park was as far from the capitals of San Jose and Panama City as you could get and had not been explored much from either side. Luis Diego was an incredible storyteller, and in his presentation he showcased Amistad as an important site of Costa Rican biodiversity and highlighted extensive tracts of old growth cloud forest, large numbers of interesting and endemic species, and untold numbers of species yet to be discovered. I asked him about his treks into Amistad, and he described a recent trip to Valle de Silencio, a high-elevation bog near the continental divide somewhere near Cerro Frantzius. He described a well-marked trail starting near a park station that covered an elevational transect through primary forest that was a long day hike; the trail sounded relatively easy if somewhat vague on location details. He was effusive in his descriptions of the amazing plants he found, the abundance of caecilians, and the numerous signs of tapir, details that were too much for us to resist. A unique habitat in an unexplored biodiversity hotspot with abundant caecilians? As Craig said, that was like finding gold for herpetologists. We were hooked.

Based on the fragmentary information from Luis Diego, we expected a long day hike, a day or two of collecting and exploring the bog, and then a day hike out. The area was extremely remote, so we were prepared to drink from springs and creeks and to survive on canned food, bread, and crackers, knowing that pizza awaited us at the end. We gathered our camping gear, bought food, and left early one Saturday morning for Agua Caliente, a small town at the end of the road where the ranger station was located. We parked a ways out of town, as we doubted our small Samurai jeep would make it through a giant mud pit where the road into town crossed a small river. Plus, we were worried about how little gas we had as we had been unable to fill the tank that morning. Once in town we used our rudimentary Spanish to ask for information on how to get to the park and the particular trail Luis Diego had described. Luckily, a kind man named Don Julio offered to guide us partway up the mountain and use his horses to carry our heavy backpacks. Hours later he left us and our packs at an abandoned farmhouse at the edge of the park where the trail began. We asked Don Julio how far it was to the bog, and he simply pointed up the trail and said Más allá (farther). We discussed a plan for him to return with the horses on Tuesday (jueves) to guide us. This part of the trail had been more open, hotter, and more rugged than we expected, and it had taken much longer to get this far, so we stopped for the day.

The next day we headed out, hiking for hours along an old trail through a beautiful old growth oak forest, periodically checking under logs and moss for salamanders, lizards, and frogs. We were finding dozens of salamanders with little effort, but we saw no sign of a bog, or caecilians, and we had not crossed any streams, so none of the endemic stream frogs either. We realized that we must be walking along a ridge far above the river, which was not promising for either stream frogs or drinking water but explained the name of the valley. We stopped for the day and could hear a river far down the hillside. Craig set off to get water. When Craig returned he mentioned how far he had to go for water, and we began the mental calculus of all trips—how much food and water did we have and how far did we have to go? We did not have a map, so we did not know exactly where we were. Given our elevation we did not think we were close to Valle de Silencio, and we had only a small amount of food left. It was neither the first nor the last time I would realize that things often take longer than you expect. We were also concerned about getting back in time to meet up with Don Julio at the farmhouse on Tuesday and reluctantly made the decision to turn back the next day. That night we experienced a drenching rainstorm typical of the cloud forest that required emergency digging of a ditch around our old and leaky tent to keep us dry. When we arrived at the farmhouse on Tuesday, Don Julio and his horses were nowhere to be seen. As I replayed our Saturday conversation with Don Julio, I realized we had said jueves (Thursday), but we had meant martes (Tuesday). Don Julio would not be there for another two days.

After a quick rest we lifted our packs and hiked back to Agua Caliente across the many streams and deforested hillsides between the park and town. It took us much longer than we expected, but we arrived at the ranger station that afternoon hot, hungry, and tired. We found Don Julio and explained we wouldn’t need his help on jueves but arranged to have him haul our packs out to our jeep on his horses. Before we left, we asked around town if anybody might have some extra gas and were able to purchase a few gallons of gas from a guy with a rusty 50-gallon drum in his backyard. We were exhausted, and hiking through the deforested areas in the blazing tropical sun made the hike to the jeep pretty miserable. Luckily, we were able to get the jeep started and drove it across the small river and back into town to get the gas, but now we were worried about the rainclouds spilling down from the mountains. The guy quickly siphoned a few gallons of rusty gas using his mouth and a rubber hose out of the 50-gallon drum as the rain drops started; we drove out of town in sheets of torrential rain. The jeep made it halfway across the mud pit before it got stuck. We knew we were running out of time, with every minute of rain converting the sticky mud into an inescapable trap, reducing our chances of getting home that night. We got out and pushed the jeep as hard as we could, getting sprayed by clumps of mud as the little jeep spun its wheels. Finally it gained purchase, and we drove up onto firm ground. We drove to town, where we sat in our stinky, mud-splattered clothes and ate the best pizzas we’d ever had.

Today anybody can take a guided ecotour along that trail, crossing the continental divide and lodging in refugios, and several collecting expeditions have been staged by scientists from the Universidad de Costa Rica throughout the Talamancan Mountains. None of us ever made it to Valle de Silencio, but I’ve often thought about that crazy trip. As it came during my very first field season, this trip made a lasting impression on me, and I learned many important and enduring lessons.

Communication: I think of this trip every time I plan any event in Spanish and do an immediate check on both sides of the conversation. I double check all my requests for information and directions, rephrasing my questions in different ways to see if I get the same answer. If possible, I ask multiple people the same questions and triangulate on the true answer. Regardless of how good my planning might be, it is always best to assume that it will take much longer than I expect, and I always double time and distance estimates and adjust my food, water, gas, and other logistics accordingly. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. At the time neither Craig nor I questioned Luis Diego’s description, but we have laughed for years about mystical places where caecilians are dripping from the trees and tapirs are prancing in the forest.

The path less traveled: If you want to see new things and experience new adventures, get off the beaten path. When you do, you might not know exactly where you are going, but be safe and able to retrace your path. I can think of many times when I would rent a four-wheel-drive truck and drive up the dirt roads into the mountains as far as I could safely go, searching for new field sites and access points. What I learned was that the sites with good roads and easy access generally led to deforested slopes and human habitations. With bad, muddy, or difficult roads you risked getting stuck or lost and they could only get you so far, but they almost always offered promising glimpses of good habitat at the end of the road.

Safety first: Safety starts with having situational awareness of potentially dangerous people and dangerous conditions. Working in the rainforest will always be risky because of the variety of biological and environmental dangers, such as treefalls, predatory animals, venomous reptiles, biting insects, and dangerous microbes. Be sure you have a full tank of gas and a full water bottle before you leave, pay attention to where you walk, and carry flagging tape to mark new trails. I’ve walked by many large pit vipers that I never saw until the last minute, and I’ve been stalked many times by big cats. Luckily the snakes never moved, and none of the cats ever approached, even when I was living in a pasture where a jaguar was killing the young calves. I was terrified at the time, but I believe that, in general, greater danger is found in two-legged beasts than those with four or none. All my close encounters with dangerous people have been in cities, or beach towns where tourists are targets for robberies, not in the rainforest. The strategy for a woman traveling alone in remote places is not the same as it would be for Indiana Jones; for us, survival depends on fading into the background, not making eye contact, and not being noticed.

It’s the journey, not the destination: My notes from the summer of 1990 are missing, and I have had to recreate what happened from my unreliable memory, comparing notes with Craig, and the official notes in the collection record. I don’t remember when or where we stopped each day, why we did not push forward, or why we didn’t have enough food. What I do remember is how I felt: the fun we had, the exhilarating sense of adventure, the hilarious realization of how we screwed up, the teamwork to extract ourselves, and how awesome that pizza tasted. As a field ecologist, I have lived at many sites for months or years at a time or returned annually over many years. I have seen how different species changed activity and abundance over time and the immutability and the adaptability of nature. I also saw how as the areas were developed, the roads improved, human populations expanded, and access increased. I came to know the people who lived and worked nearby, and I understood somewhat better their lives in these small towns and appreciated our similarities and differences. Although I never made it to our destination on that trip, my journey as a field ecologist has been incredible!

Dedicated to Jay Savage, Luis Diego Gomez, and all the other tropical explorers who came before and to all the explorers who will come after.