Journey of the Pink Dolphins Read online

  Dave Meyer, one of the top medical malpractice lawyers in Chicago and a skilled naturalist, listened to my story and laughed uncomfortably. “But you don’t believe any of this, do you?”

  Did I?

  “I know Don Ricardo was not lying to me,” I said carefully. “I think that what he is saying, and what the people believe about the dolphins, and the way they see the world, is true—but maybe not in the literal sense that we understand.”

  “But this nonsense about the Encante, and dolphins turning into people,” Jon broke in. “These dolphins are a biological species—they don’t have magical powers!”

  “Don Jorge told me he has seen the dolphins come out of the water,” said Greg Neise. The Fund’s charismatic young president, Greg was the only member of the board who had been here before. Greg had often stayed and traveled with Jorge Soplin, an elderly local expert on uses of the native plants. “He says they come out and stand on their tails and have the most enticing female figures you’ve ever seen. At the Quebrada Blanco, one did it to him, but he turned around and split—he knew it was really a dolphin.”

  “Oh, come on,” said Dave.

  “Well,” said Greg, “strange things happen here.”

  Greg was the only one among us without a college degree; he has learned what he knows by experience. A big, bearded man in his mid-thirties, he tied his long blond hair in a ponytail, and his third finger bore a tattooed cross, a souvenir of a brief association with a Chicago-land gang. Greg taught himself photography and computer design. Income from the latter enabled him to travel widely in the tropics, particularly in Costa Rica and Peru.

  “This happened to me,” Greg continued. “We were walking along the Quebrada Blanco, me and Don Jorge and some others. And we understood what the other was thinking. Without speaking, he directed me through the most difficult landscapes. When one of us saw a group of animals, the other knew it. We had some kind of awareness that we in the city do not have. There was some form of telepathy. And it goes against everything I think and believe. And it happened among people who—why, I didn’t speak a lick of Spanish then and half the words were in Quechua anyway. Yet I knew what they were thinking as if we were talking. And there were no hand signals.”

  Gary Galbreath, a paleontologist who teaches biology at Northwestern University, abhors superstition, and subscribes to the Skeptical Inquirer, a magazine that debunks pseudoscience like ESP. But he is also a diplomat, RCF’s president before Greg. He looked at Greg’s story, as he does most things, from an evolutionary perspective. Perhaps Greg had been reading body language, he offered; as cooperative hunters, our ancestors silently communicated with one another for eons. “I bet we can still respond on a level we don’t normally use,” Gary said.

  Greg continued: “I didn’t even realize this was happening until we got back to Iquitos, and it was suddenly gone. Jim, too, has had this happen with people he didn’t know.” Jim Penn, the field director for the reserve’s agroforestry project, has worked here in the reserve for more than two decades, in the early days living off money he made painting houses in Chicago in the summer. His wife, Doris Catashunga, is Peruvian, and the people who live in the villages that ring the reserve are among his closest friends. Jim, with intense brown eyes the color of the earth and skin that seems perpetually sunburned from his hard work in the field, had joined our small group at the end of the long table. So far, he had listened quietly, but now he spoke: “The thing you’ve got to remember, is these people are as smart as you and I. There are reasons for their beliefs. And if you dismiss what they say, they’ll pick up on it right away.”

  In the morning, we set off for the reserve. In two motorized aluminum canoes, we cruised up the Tahuayo to the seasonal white-water stream called the Quebrada Blanco. Our group numbered fourteen: Besides the RCF board members, Dave had brought his teenage son and nephew; Jon had brought two of his students; and a handful of other RCF members had come along, including wildlife photographer Jim Rowan.

  As the waters narrowed, the forest seemed to quicken: Partially submerged trees trailed curtains of vines. The air, hot as breath, shuddered with the calls of parakeets, the glittering wings of dragonflies. Strangler figs flowed over their hosts like melting candles; ferns uncoiled, curling and twisting like dancers. Trees hung heavy with the nests of ants, wasps, termites, birds.

  “There’s never been a botanist in here,” Greg yelled to me over the noise of the motor. “Who knows how many new species we’re looking at!”

  Actually, the leading expert on Latin American botany, Al Gentry, had come here, shortly before he was killed in a 1993 plane crash in Ecuador. He’d told Greg the place was very odd. He’d seen plants here that were not known in Peru. Ornithologist Ted Parker had the same reaction: “These birds shouldn’t be here,” he’d told Greg. Some of the species he saw were known only from Brazil. More than seven hundred species of birds have been recorded in the reserve—so far.

  Greg and I had talked about this over the phone in the States, before we had met. “It’s a really strange area,” he’d told me. “Rivers flow in opposite directions, even though the land is flat as a pancake. I’ve seen the water in the river go up and down thirty-six feet in twenty-four hours. Tree ferns are growing in the understory, which you don’t find in lowland rain forest. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s like something from the Cenozoic.”

  Unlike most of the Amazon, the Tamshiyacu-Tahuayo area has been a rain forest since before the river itself was born. Based on fossil evidence, paleogeographers believe that during the last 50,000 years, the Amazon basin became cooler and drier at least four times, and most of its rain forests changed to savannas. Fewer than a dozen small patches in the entire Amazon basin—comprising perhaps 15 percent of its size today—remained wet and warm enough to preserve the ancient lineages that thrived in the lush, steamy world of the Eocene, the dawn epoch of the Cenozoic. This was one of them.

  “Where is the reserve? Are we in the reserve?” I kept yelling over the motor. Greg laughed. “Someone else who came here said, ‘ I went to your reserve and I didn’t see any conservation work going on—it was just pure forest.’ And I said, ‘ Exactly!’”

  There are larger reserves in Peru—Pacaya-Samiria, on the western side of Loreto province, covers 5 million acres, five times the size of Tamshiyacu- Tahuayo—but none is more pristine. Because of its beauty and diversity (including a population of more than 700 pink dolphins, studied by the chair of the Cetacean Specialist Group of the World Conservation Union, Stephen Leatherwood, until his death from cancer in 1997) Pacaya-Samiria has been designated as a protected area since the 1940s. But in Peru, as in much of the Third World, merely establishing a reserve does not guarantee its protection; regulations do not ensure that the government enacting them will either enforce or even obey its own laws.

  Much of the land is protected on paper only: During the 1970s, oil companies drilled no fewer than seven wells inside its borders, and one of them is still pumping. In 1991, only an intense campaign by American environmentalists, including the Nature Conservancy, kept the Peruvian government from granting Texas Crude a license to further explore and extract oil from the reserve. The Peruvian Fisheries Ministry has, in fact, granted commercial fishing companies licenses to seine the rivers inside the reserve with their giant gill nets, drowning pink river dolphins, tucuxis, manatees, and giant river otters. Despite the law and twenty park guards to enforce it, some 10,000 people, many of them with cattle, are living inside that reserve, besides the 60,000 in villages surrounding it. And the waters are silting with runoff from the 180,000 acres of rain forest that were illegally cut to the west in the Huallaga River basin to grow coca for cocaine.

  But the Tamshiyacu-Tahuayo reserve has no such scars. There is no commercial logging; no oil drilling; no cattle grazing inside its borders. No sign announces the boundaries of the reserve, either. No forest guard stood watch as we entered—only a pygmy marmoset, clinging with orange hands to a spine-c
overed chambira palm. Its black-ringed, tawny tail hung down like a lizard’s.

  Moises and Mario pulled the canoe near shore and we waded through the mud. A narrow path, cut by Mario, led into a twilight world: though the sun had been bright on the river, here in the forest the light was a soft, dim green. Crickets sang as though it were evening, or right before dawn.

  We walked slowly, not in apprehension but amazement. Everywhere we encountered creatures none of the biologists had seen before: climbing ferns spiked with four-inch thorns; a low-growing herb with ginkgolike leaves, fringed with brown spores—which Moises told us, incredibly, was a palm. Jon and Joy stood transfixed by a delicate white fungus growing on a fallen machi-mango fruit. “George Lucas wouldn’t have had to use his imagination,” said Jon. “He could have just come here. Imagine this thing the size of Jabba the Hutt!”

  With Moises’ and Mario’s help, Mark, Greg, Jim, Dave, and the boys dove after frogs, spiders, millipedes, and beetles. At the day’s end, they had collected eleven Ziploc bags of animals to take back to camp to be identified and photographed before they would be freed the following morning. Among them was a brilliant, two-inch green and black frog unlisted in any field guide. But Moises knew it, though not by any Latin name. It was one of the frogs the people on the Napo River use to produce poison for arrows and blowgun darts. In poison glands scattered all over the body, frogs of this family, Dendrobatidae, produce some of the most potent toxins in the world—so poisonous that one species, the bright yellow Phyllobates terribilis, will burn your skin if you touch it. One frog can provide enough secretion to poison fifty darts, which remain potent for a year. The poisonous secretions of another frog, which the Mayorunas call dav-kiet!, is used to produce sapo, a paste which is applied to the skin through a burn wound. Though at first sapo causes great pain—the blood rushes as if the heart will burst—its later effects are worth the ordeal. The drug heightens the senses and strengthens the body, allows you to see in the dark, sense the powers of plants, and foresee the plans of animals. The frog who gives these powers is held captive for three days before its poison is removed through gentle scraping, and when it is set free, village children run after it, wishing it a good journey home.

  With the others bent over their frogs and fungi, I looked for Gary. On the long boat ride from Iquitos to the lodge, Gary had begun to tell me about some of the prehistoric animals who had inhabited South America millions of years ago. At the time pink dolphins may have entered the Amazon from the Pacific, 15 million years ago, the dominant predators on the continent were wolf-toothed marsupials called boyhyaenids, who carried their young in pouches like kangaroos, and six-foot-tall terror birds, who were essentially feathered dinosaurs, 50 million years after dinosaurs had gone extinct. Only in the previous months had paleontologists found the forelimbs of the giant birds, Gary had told me, and the discovery was a shock. Though the creatures were clearly birds, with feathers and beaks, they did not have wings: they grabbed their prey with grasping, three-fingered arms. Listening to Gary was like standing beneath some magnificent, fruiting tree, where you are showered with stories and facts and theories so exotic and delicious you swallow each greedily and wait hungrily for more. It’s no wonder Gary’s students love him and year after year vote him one of the best teachers at Northwestern.

  But now the professor was uncharacteristically silent. He stood at the edge of a swamp. Gary’s green eyes were illuminated by some inner light, focused on something in the distant past. I touched his arm. “Where are you?” I asked.

  “Carboniferous,” he said softly.

  His words came as an echo from 300 million years back in time—back to when South America, frigid and sometimes glaciated, huddled with Africa, Australia, India, and Antarctica in one giant continent near the South Pole. But the landmass that would become Europe and North America, hovering over the equator, contained vast, dreaming swamps: the world’s first rain forests. Back before the plants had learned to flower, back before the animals learned to lay hard-shelled eggs, back before hearts beat with four chambers, day-long twilight glowed green through the scalelike leaves of thirty-foot-tall club mosses. Two hundred fifty million years before the first grasses evolved, tube-shaped plants called horsetails grew skeletons of silica, and ferns danced and curled into fifty-foot trees. Six-foot, flat-headed amphibians lounged in blood-warm shallows. The ancestors of the millipedes now in our Ziploc bags grew six feet long back then, and dragonflies soared on the wing spans of macaws. The Carboniferous was the cradle of Eden. During its 75-million-year reign arose the three lineages that would lead to the vertebrates that dominate the land today: the salamanders and frogs, the reptiles and birds, and the four-legged, lizard-like animals called synapsids that, many millions of years later, would lead to dolphins and to scientists.

  Dawn itself, as Gary saw it, was preserved in the green glow of this rain forest swamp. This place preserved not only the strange, ancient pink dolphins in its rivers, but the future glimmer of dolphins encoded in the genetic material of the first fleshy-finned fish ancestors who emerged from shallow swamps like these. The ferns and millipedes had outlasted the driftings and collisions of continents; the dragonflies had survived desiccation, asteroids, cataclysmic extinctions. But could this place now survive the apocalypse of human greed? In this era of bulldozers and oil wells, gill nets and cattle ranches, what could preserve its future?

  This was the task that the Rainforest Conservation Fund took on when Jim Penn first approached the group with the idea of protecting a reserve. Previously, the group had contributed money to projects in Costa Rica and New Guinea. “We were looking for a project that wouldn’t happen if we didn’t do it,” said Gary, who had been president when Jim came to them with his idea. RCF could not afford to finance guards, or to open and staff an office in Iquitos. But this, Jim pointed out, was fortunate: “What you think conservation is in the United States doesn’t work here,” he told them. In fact, almost everything we think of as effective conservation in the States has backfired horrendously in Peru. Jim knew from his years of work here that laws don’t protect the land. Officials are commonly bribed. Guards do not protect the land. In fact, park guards are often the most notorious poachers. Ecotourism seldom protects land. Unlike at Paul’s lodge, where the staff is employed full-time and have health and retirement plans, at most lodges, the support staff are paid only during the busy season. To supplement their sporadic income, they work part-time for logging operations and poach game to eat and to sell at the market in Iquitos.

  To the local people at Tamshiyacu-Tahuayo, Jim explained, “conservation means gringos, fancy cars, ecotourism. Conservation is people sitting behind big mahogany desks in offices in Iquitos and Washington. Conservation is a business”—one that employs scientists and bureaucrats in the business of telling local people what they can and cannot do in their own backyards.

  Instead of implementing a conventional conservation scheme, Jim asked the Rainforest Conservation Fund to secure this land’s protection by supporting the people’s old ways of guarding it—ways that don’t sound or look like conservation at all.

  Today parts of the reserve are still vulnerable; but on two sides, thanks to the people who use the reserve, its boundaries are secure. The southern half of the reserve is guarded by warring Indians, the Mayorunas and their enemies, the Remos; it is simply too dangerous for loggers or cattlemen or oil explorers to enter there. And along the western border, where 175 families lived in the six villages Dianne and I had passed daily, the reserve is protected by a growing fortress of orchards.

  “This is sangre de dragon,” Jim says, as Don Jorge points to a sapling with heart-shaped leaves. “It means ‘ blood of the dragon.’ It yields a red resin that heals skin burns, wounds, dysentery, and internal ulcers. It stimulates regrowth of tissue.”

  Jorge speaks, and Jim translates for us. Jorge is slender, wiry, and spry, with the face of an imp and a smile that gleams with dental gold. His hair is soft and curls l
ike a cherub’s just above his shoulders, with a strange white patch in the back as if he slept with his head in a shallow pool of Clorox. He does not seem seventy-one years old.

  This two-foot sapling? Its name is ojé, Jim translates for us, a species of ficus, whose latex can be fermented into a medicine to kill six kinds of intestinal parasites. This spiny, climbing vine is called cat’s-claw. Dutch scientists are investigating its abilities to build up the immune system of HIV patients, Jim adds. The people use the bark of the yerba santo, or saint’s weed, to make a medicine to deliver miscarried fetuses.

  “Everything in here is useful,” Jim says. “This is exceptionally diverse, with over sixty different species.”

  As we follow Jim and Jorge along a slender trail, Jorge briefs us on the plants we meet as if introducing us to old friends—as Moises did in the rain forest with Dianne and me. But we are not in the rain forest. We are at the edge of the reserve. Though all these are rain forest plants, and the place looks exactly like a young forest, this is his chacra, planted on fallow land—an orchard at once jungle and garden.

  This cedro is an important lumber tree, for making furniture. And this bush is ajo sacha, which will yield a garlic-scented tea to reduce fever and cure colds. From this cashapona, a spine-fringed, stilt-rooted palm, you can make the gating around your house. But it has another use, too, Don Jorge tells us: it’s a penis enlarger. How does it work? Well, first, of course, it is necessary to scrape off the spines. Then the bark is plastered against the penis for fifteen minutes. This must be done on three consecutive nights, during a new moon. Why? Because new moons cause things to grow long and thin, while full moons cause growth that is short and wide.

  Such is the case with trees as well. Jorge is careful to prune his cainito tree, which produces a delicious fruit, during the full moon, so it, too, will grow full.