Journey of the Pink Dolphins

  MORE PRAISE FOR Journey of the Pink Dolphins

  “I started to read this book at six in the morning and did not move out of my chair for the rest of the day. I did not lose a day; I gained a whole world. I invite you to share this extraordinary tale of magic beings who touch us in ways we can only begin to imagine.”

  —JEFFREY MOUSSAIEFF MASSON, author of

  The Emperor’s Embrace and When Elephants Weep

  “Living on the edge of her senses, writing down what she knows to be true, Montgomery is a modern miracle: bawdy, brave, inventive, prophetic, hell-bent on loving this planet . . . . She numbs us with the searing beauty of the Amazon world and then numbs us again with proof of our own greed.”

  —BETH KEPHART, Book magazine

  “The dolphins look you right in the eye, as does the author. Her dealings with all the denizens of the rain forest . . . are searching and personal.”

  —The New Yorker

  “Surely one of the most brilliant books of our time . . . . Montgomery weaves zoology with myth, natural history with poetry, anthropology with the supernatural, and the result is perfection, a picture not only of animal life but also of human life in the Amazon Basin. Montgomery has found a new and very perceptive way to present the natural world.”

  —ELIZABETH MARSHALL THOMAS

  “Here is Montgomery at her best, beckoning us to follow her in search of one of our planet’s most mysterious creatures, and introducing us to a wonderful cast of characters along the way. . . . No one is better than Sy at making you fall in love with nature all over again!”

  —MARK PLOTKIN, ethnobotanist and author

  of Tales of a Shaman’s Apprentice

  “It’s a breathtaking book. This account of a naturalist’s experiences in the Amazon turns its own pages, drawing the reader deep into the world of pink river dolphins. . . . Exhilarating, vivid, and often horrifying, this is a serious report on the real and mythical life of an enchanting Amazon species and the sumptuous flooded rain forest.”

  —KATY PAYNE, discoverer of the songs of

  humpbacked whales and author of Silent Thunder

  “Sy Montgomery brings an adventurer’s daring, an artist’s sensibilities, and an ethicist’s wisdom to field biology. She also, luckily for us, writes beautifully.”

  —SUE HUBBELL, author of A Country Year, Broadsides

  from the Other Orders, and Waiting for Aphrodite

  “[Sy Montgomery] recounts her adventure and observations with the lyricism and penetrating insights of a poet as well as the logic and factual accuracy of a scientist. . . . Mesmerizing accounts of her daring feats are linked to hard-hitting disclosures of the cruel human history of this bewildering and beautiful realm, but Montgomery’s most impressive accomplishment is her illumination of the overlay of story and science.”

  —Booklist, starred review

  “Combining a journalist’s cool objectivity with a dolphin lover’s almost mythical ecological consciousness, Montgomery luxuriates in the myths and legends. . . but also aptly reports the scientific facts. . . . Her rhapsodic book winsomely blends travel reportage, adventure and natural history.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “She weaves natural history, anthropology, myth and the supernatural in a riveting and often horrifying tale of plants, animals and humans whose lives are inexplicably tied to the river basin. . . . All told, it’s a very lyrical and literary paddle.”

  —SUSAN DWORSKI, Escape

  “Part natural-history exploration, part travel memoir, the book looks to biologists, shamans and local storytellers to reveal a relationship between the dolphin and the river people that is sensuous and powerful. . . . There is Montgomery herself, a writer at the peak of her craft, who places no limits on her quest to fathom the magic and the science of this luminous river.”

  —STEPHEN J. LYONS, New Age

  “Lyrical, erudite, and entertaining. . . . As if these creatures weren’t wonderful enough to read about, there are also intrepid lady explorers and scientists; handsome, knowing boatmen; . . . jungle ritual; and even [an] aqua- terrorist.”

  —JUDITH STONE, Mirabella

  “Montgomery is a fine writer, at her best in describing the almost overwhelming beauty and variety of this richest of earth’s habitats. . . . [This book] will and should be widely read and argued over.”

  —BILL MCKIBBEN, The Boston Globe

  “This book will claim you. . . . Heady stuff. . . . Her vivid descriptions of the Amazonian forest . . . make this a recommended choice for all natural library collections.”

  —Library Journal

  “Montgomery recounts in vivid and imaginative prose the fascinating story of her quest to track and study these enigmatic creatures along thousands of miles of the Amazon River. One woman’s magical search into a watery world of wonder and mystery.”

  —JUNE SAWYERS, Chicago Tribune

  OTHER BOOKS BY SY MONTGOMERY

  Walking with the Great Apes:

  Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, Birute Galdikas

  The Curious Naturalist: Nature’s Everyday Mysteries

  The Wild Out Your Window

  Spell of the the Tiger: The Man-Eaters of Sundarbans

  Search for the Golden Moon Bear:

  Science and Adventure in Pursuit of a New Species

  The Good Good Pig: The Extraordinary

  Life of Christopher Hogwood

  FOR CHILDREN

  The Snake Scientist

  The Man-Eaters of Sundarbans

  Encantado: Pink Dolphin of the Amazon

  Search for the Golden Moon Bear:

  Science and Adventure in the Asian Tropics

  The Tarantula Scientist

  Quest for the Tree Kangaroo

  JOURNEY OF

  THE PINK

  DOLPHINS

  AN AMAZON QUEST

  SY MONTGOMERY

  CHELSEA GREEN PUBLISHING

  WHITE RIVER JUNCTION, VERMONT

  Copyright © 2000, 2008 by Sy Montgomery

  Introduction copyright © 2008 by Sy Montgomery

  Maps copyright © 2000 by Libby Hubbell

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. To request permission to reproduce from this book, contact Chelsea Green Publishing.

  Designed by Peter Holm, Sterling Hill Productions

  Originally published by Touchstone (Simon & Schuster), 2001.

  This edition published by Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 08 09 10 11 12

  “Tell Me a Story” by Robert Penn Warren copyright © 1998 by the Estate of Robert Penn Warren. Reprinted by permission of the William Morris Agency, LLC, on behalf of the Author.

  Our Commitment to Green Publishing

  Chelsea Green sees publishing as a tool for cultural change and ecological stewardship. We strive to align our book manufacturing practices with our editorial mission and to reduce the impact of our business enterprise in the environment. We print our books and catalogs on chlorine-free recycled paper, using soy-based inks whenever possible. This book may cost slightly more because we use recycled paper, and we hope you’ll agree that it’s worth it. Chelsea Green is a member of the Green Press Initiative (www.greenpressinitiative.org), a nonprofit coalition of publishers, manufacturers, and authors working to protect the world’s endangered forests and conserve natural resources. Journey of the Pink Dolphins was printed on 55-lb. Natures Natural, an FSC-certified, 30-percent postconsumer-waste recycled paper supplied by Thomson-Shore.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Simon & Schuster edition as follows: Montgomery, Sy.

/>   Journey of the pink dolphins: an Amazon quest / Sy Montgomery.

  p. cm.

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-60358-175-2

  1. Inia geoffrensis—Amazon River Region.

  2. Amazon River Region—Description and travel. I. Title.

  QL737.C436 M66 2000

  599.53’8—dc21 99-045840

  Chelsea Green Publishing Company

  Post Office Box 428

  White River Junction, VT 05001

  (802) 295-6300

  www.chelseagreen.com

  In memory of my father,

  Brigadier General A. J. Montgomery

  CONTENTS

  Map: The Author’s Travels

  Through the Amazon

  Introduction to the New Edition

  PART ONE

  A Woman Rain

  Map: Meeting of the Waters

  Manaus: The Curtain Rises

  The Meeting of the Waters

  Unfathomable Fragments

  PART TWO

  Desire

  Map: Iquitos

  Iquitos

  Life in the Rain Forest

  Death in the Rain Forest

  PART THREE

  Breath

  Vine of the Soul

  Map: Tamshiyacu-Tahuayo Community Reserve

  A Fortress of Orchards

  Time Travel

  PART FOUR

  Drowning

  Map: Mamirauá Reserve

  Mamirauá: Calf of the Manatee

  The Waters Open

  PART FIVE

  The Moon’s Tears

  Map: Tapajós and Arapiuns Rivers

  Burning

  Dance of the Dolphin

  Selected Bibliography

  To Conserve the Pink River Dolphin and

  Its Habitat and to Visit the Dolphins’ World

  Acknowledgments

  The author’s travels through the Amazon

  Introduction to the New Edition

  Though my work is usually classified as science writing, this book, like all my books, is a love story. This is surely the most passionate one I have written yet.

  I fell in love with the Amazon long before I set foot in South America. As a child I used to dream of its vast, unexplored jungles, pulsing with unknown lives. My father, a world traveler and Army General, told me tales of its cunning, stealthy jaguars, its flocks of noisy parrots, fish who could eat you, snakes who would swallow you whole. To a little girl enchanted with the wild world and enthralled with animal powers, the Amazon was thrilling beyond measure. Here, electric eels stretched as long as limousines, and shining blue butterflies floated through hot air on wings bigger than birds’.

  Neither my father nor I knew about pink dolphins back then. Few others did, either. Although the locals knew them of course, and scientists had recorded the species, pink dolphins seemed as impossible as pink elephants. Who could have imagined such a thing? But I feel certain that as a child I would have had no trouble believing that if a pink dolphin could exist, it would live in the Amazon. Its wonders had captured my young soul.

  A quarter century later, eight years after my father had died, I made my first trip to the Amazon rain forest. I could not resist the draw of a species of a mischievous, rose-colored, river-dwelling whale living in the world’s greatest jungle.

  Attempting to answer some of the many scientific questions about these strange dolphins drove the quest that became the narrative of this book. At first, I sought to follow them in the literal sense that one might track an animal from point A to point B. But the dolphins proved both more elusive and more revelatory than I could have imagined. They guided me to a much deeper mystery: they guided me to the wet, beating heart of the world of my dreams.

  They did so in maddening, fragmentary glimpses. Because they do not leap out of the water like marine dolphins, the pink dolphins were, more often than not, invisible beneath the Amazon’s dark waters. Yet, even unseen, they lured me. They teased, taunted, frustrated, and seduced me.

  Of course, I couldn’t help but fall helplessly, hopelessly in love with them. I knew I would; all the legends said so. Local stories testify to the seductive, transformative powers of the pink dolphin. What follows is the story of my seduction. I think they will seduce you, too.

  But please be prepared: love’s twin is fear—fear that the beloved will be hurt or taken away. This book is about that, too, for the Amazon and its pink dolphins today face threats even greater than those I saw when I first ventured there in the last years of the 20th century.

  In the eight years since this book was first published, a number of world events have made the conservation emergency in the Amazon heartbreakingly urgent. One-fifth of the entire Amazon has now been destroyed.

  In Brazil, within whose borders most of the Amazon resides, between May 2000 and August 2005, a record 50,950 square miles of forest was felled—an area larger than Greece. A shrinking Amazon, converted increasingly to the demands of agribusiness, is dramatically speeding dangerous global climate change.

  The results of climate change are already shockingly clear in Brazil itself. A strange hurricane—the only one ever reported in the South Atlantic—ravaged the east coast of Brazil in March 2004. An unprecedented drought in 2005 shriveled crops, halted travel and spread fire and disease. In 2007, another drought followed on its heels. Dying fish lay gasping in drying pools that once were lakes; people choked on smoke from fires; hospitals filled with patients suffering from cholera, malaria, and other diseases which spread when drinking water becomes scarce, dirty, and stagnant.

  Brazil is now the world’s fourth-largest producer of the principal greenhouse gases responsible for global climate change, and three quarters of these result from burning and cutting trees. Ironically, much of the Amazon is now felled to grow crops to produce biofu-els— ostensibly a tool to combat global warming. And of course when more trees are killed, the Amazon’s healing, greenhouse gas– absorbing powers are increasingly crippled.

  Peru suffers as well. Like Brazil’s, Peru’s government now hands out timber and oil concessions like after dinner mints. The global gas crisis is driving a lust for oil that rivals gold fever. Oil fetches such a high price that no area is now immune to oil exploration and extraction. Though local people sometimes welcome the jobs oil brings, its sorrows are far greater: pollution, excessive hunting, cultural loss, sexually transmitted diseases. Several conservation organizations worked hard to help Peruvian officials draft restrictions for timber and oil concessions. But these restrictions exist on paper only. The oil and timber companies do not manage the concession areas, and do not even restrict their activities to the areas assigned. The Peruvian government offers no enforcement of its regulations.

  But there is still hope. Brazilian politicians, long convinced that conservation projects are really ill-disguised Western plots to invade and conquer the Amazon and steal its wealth, are finally considering the possibility of slowing the rate at which they are killing its rain forest. Evidence of human-caused climate change within Brazil is now so compelling that even the President is alarmed: if “the Amazon rain machine” is disrupted, Brazil’s southern breadbasket is doomed. Environmentalists here and in Brazil are hopeful that conservation policy will change as a result of this threat.

  Peru’s policies, though not policed, are far saner. At least protected areas do exist, and even being protected only on paper is apparently better than no protection at all. According to a study by the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology published in 2007, Peru’s protected areas are 18 times more effective at reducing deforestation than unprotected areas. The report credits Peru’s system of protected areas for making deforestation rates in Peru among the lowest in tropical countries. (Still, that study, based on satellite surveys, found that between 1999 and 2005, forest was being destroyed at a rate of 249 square miles per year, with another yearly 244 square miles of forest disturbed, while not destroyed, each year.)

  In 2007, the Tamshiyac
u-Tahuayo community reserve in Peru, where much of the narrative in this book takes place, was significantly enlarged, due in large measure to Rainforest Conservation Fund’s many years of work with the local communities. So strongly do I support this work that I joined RCF’s board of directors; when my mother died, I donated the proceeds from the sale of the contents of the house to the organization. You will find RCF’s address and that of other important players in Amazon conservation in the back of this book.

  All is not lost. Not yet. I love the dolphins and the Amazon too much to give up. The pink dolphins give me great hope. After all, like all whales, these lithe cetaceans were once lumbering land animals. The locals say they still sometimes come back to land. The stories tell us that pink dolphins can even assume the shape of humans if they want to. Pink dolphins are proof that wondrous transformation is possible—even, perhaps, for us.

  SY MONTGOMERY

  April 26, 2008

  Hancock, NH

  PART ONE

  A WOMAN RAIN

  The days are full of water. The wet season has drowned the village soccer fields and banana groves and manioc gardens, even flooded some of the less carefully placed stilt houses along the river. Young saplings are submerged completely, and fish fly like birds through their branches. Huge muscular trees stand like people up to their torsos in water; epiphytic orchids and the tree-hollow nests of parrots and bamboo rats are at eye level when you stand in your canoe. On the wide branches, tank bromeliads, plants related to pineapples with spiked, succulent leaves, are themselves tiny lakes. The leaves mesh to form an overflowing bowl. Some five hundred different species—centipedes, scorpions, tree frogs, ants, spiders, mosquitoes, salamanders, lizards—have been recorded living in a bromeliad’s bowl, a miniworld of rainwater.

  Every day there is an extravagant, transforming rain. Sometimes a storm cracks the sky with lightning, crashes branches, rips animals from the trees, and then is gone. This is a man rain, Moises says. But a rain that pours itself out for hours, sobbing and heaving—that, he explains, is a woman rain, “because a woman can cry all day.”