A Botanical Expedition
To the Sierra de Lema
La Gran Sabana, Venezuela

At last mention, the shamwife was heading off for El Jardin Botanico del Orinoco in Ciudad Bolivar, Venezuela. This gig I found by e-mailing Venezuelan Botanists (using the extent of my spanish language abilities) seeking opportunities to volunteer doing field work. Wilmer Diaz, the curator of the Herbarium was the first and only to respond. Based on the somewhat sparse volley of e-mails that preceeded and precipitated my visit, I was to "work in the herbarium and greenhouse, and to assist with botanical expeditions" in exchange for an apartment with a kitchen. For the past three weeks, I had been living happily in my habitacion, (apartment) all to myself, playing cuatro by night, and collecting and identifying trees and ferns by day, patiently awaiting my opportunity to work in the field.

Luckily, the herbarium was equipped with an excellent tool. The Flora of the Venezuelan Guayana is a 9 volume guide to the nearly 10,000 species of plants recognized in the geographical area, and I use it on a daily basis to attempt to identify the trees and ferns in my inventory of the garden. I spent many an air-conditioned morning in the library reading about the history and geography of the Venezuelan Guayana. The Gran Sabana, the highland area of the Guianan shield is characterized by enormous table mountains called tepuis. Angel Falls, the tallest waterfall in the world pours off Auyun tepui in Canaima National Park. Botanically speaking, this area is interesting because the geographically isolated tepuis and abrupt elevational changes create a high rate of endemism. Forty percent of the plant species found on the Guianan shield are found no where else on earth.

I was beginning to wonder if I would ever actually get to work in the field, or if my experience would be confined to "el centro horticola". Wilmer later informed me that he didn't think he was going to make it to the field in the two months that I would be residing at the garden....but....Bruce Holst, one of the editors of The Flora was coming in a couple weeks on an expedition to the Gran Sabana. "When he comes, you should try to buddy up with him and get him to take you along." This was my only chance to do field work in Venezuela, or so it would seem. I remembered seeing an image of Bruce on a poster in the Herbarium. He was decked out with rock-climbing gear, exploring the summit of a tepui unknown to botany until 1987. To reach it, one needed to jump out of a helicopter, and rapel down the side of a cliff. This guy was a badass. For the next week and a half, I anxiously awaited his arrival.
The night he finally did arrive, I was at Wilmer's house and we were enjoying the Orinoco breeze and a case of Solera, the best Venezuelan beer money can buy. They pulled up in their pickup. I took another pull off my Solera.

Bruce: "So how did you end up here?"

Me: "I graduated from college, and set off traveling to try to figure out how to spend the rest of my life. Somehow I ended up here."

Speaking in English felt awkward. Bruce was accompanied by a couple folks from the Botanical Garden in Caracas; Yuribia Vivas, who studies Bromeliads, and Jan Tillett, who was collecting live plants and seeds for the garden. His parents are of German and North American heritage, and he is the son of a famous botanist. He has blue eyes and a bushy blonde beard, but his demeanor and speech are pure Venezuelan.

Bruce: "So, Wilmer still hasn't taken you into the field?"

Me: "No, not yet."

Bruce: "Uh huh."

They were leaving in the morning. They were bringing back lots of live plants, and had little room in the truck. They had no idea who I was prior to this evening. I had less than ten hours to convince him to take me with them. I had been drinking. Bruce did not seem impressed. Soon Wilmer and Bruce wandered off in search of more beer, and I began chatting with Yuribia. I told her of my desire to work in the field. She seemed open to the possibility. When Bruce and Wilmer returned with the beer, I wandered off to use the bathroom. I could hear them discussing me (in Spanish). I later gathered that Yuribia convinced Bruce to take me with them.

The following ten days were some of the best of my life. We were working out of Canaima National Park on the Sierra de Lema, along the border with Guayana. There was another team of botanists sharing our base camp. They had with them a professional tree climber and a Swiss botanist who was an expert at identifying neo tropical trees based purely on vegetative characters ( a feat, any botanist will tell you). This group spent much of their time slicing and sniffing bark, and with necks craned back, looking up into the canopy, walking the same pre-determined plot.

Our group, on the other hand, set out to collect all kinds of plants, high and low, continuing the massive inventory of the Venezuelan Guayana. Each day we visited a different site, Bruce with his boyish face and build of a Forty-Niner in the lead clearing the way with a machete. I followed close behind carring la barra, a massive telescoping set of tree-trimmers for collecting specimens 15 meters up. The field work was of an intensity I had not encountered in any of my field courses at the University of Michigan.

Bruce: "Would you mind scurrying up that tree to get that Psicotria?"

Our collections were largely focused on epiphytes and bromeliads, and thusly involved some scurrying. In thicker brush, Bruce would seek out fallen trees, and we would balance our loads, walking single file across the slippery bark above the dense brush. When we reached the clearing, "See that hill? Let's see what's at the top of it." We navigated tapir trails through more thick brush, and spiny Zanthoxylum, their footprints in the mud like dinosaurs'. We encountered orchids 7 feet tall, Elaphoglossum ferns with golden scales and Scleria, or cut-grass that grows long and tall, and lacerates your skin upon contact. It was beautiful. Every day lunch consisted of some variation on canned peas and mayonaise.
For plants of interest (those bearing flowers and/or fruits) we would collect four specimens; one for The Herbarium in Caracas, one for the Herbarium at the Jardin Orinoco, one for Selby Gardens (where Bruce now works) and one to send to a specialist to identify. We filled giant plastic bags with plants, and worked in the field as late as the sunlight would allow, then spent the evenings, sometimes until 2am, pressing and numbering our specimens, then drying them with a space heater on a rack ransacked from a file cabinet.

I was struck by the diversity of habitats in the comparatively small area surrounding our camp. We visited tall forests (the "classic" rainforest image), and bosques enanos (Midget forests) where the trees were all twisted, tangled, and thickly covered in moss so that one had to climb rather than walk to get through it. We visited riparian habitats, upriver from a 100 foot waterfall, with clear, boulder-lined pools ideal for skinny dipping. I took off my boots (which were thoroughly soaked in failed attempts to cross the river from rock-to-rock) and wandered barefoot upstream, collecting ferns with fronds nine feet long, their tips dangling from verticle cliffs into waist-deep cool water.

We were based at about 1400 meters, near the open savannahs. Here I found the familiar faces of Drosera and Utricularia. These genera of carnivorous plants are also found in Michigan, where I know them from nutrient poor sites such as the interdunal areas along the Great Lakes. There also grew the magnificent Orectanthe, Stegolepis and Brocchinia. On the last day, Bruce and I performed a taste test. The stalk of Orectanthe sceptrum is sweet, and the nectar of the flowers taste like corn. The young shoots of Stegolepis guianensis are delightfully mucilaginous (though not overly flavorful) but the juice in the bottom of Brocchinia reducta (a carnivorous bromeliad) has the flavor of a lemonade most exquisite and delicate, though one must be mindful to filter out the partially digested insects... Or not.

A couple days we took trips further from base camp, once south to Santa Elena on the Brazilian border, past a massive chain of tepuis (the largest of which is Roraima, 2800 meters) and once to the west 200 kilometers of dirt roads and two-tracks, expertly maneuvered by Bruce and Yuribia to a valley surrounded by tepuis. Here, after hours of travel without laying eyes on another human presence, we encountered the pueblo of Kavanayén, which was not of grass huts or corrugated steel as one would expect, but beautiful centuries-old stonework, spanish architecture. From there we traveled hours more in our truck over boulders and through streams to Salto Karauay (another waterfall) in search of the wily Guzmania retusa, a Bromeliad that has not been collected for 50 years. We arrived shortly before dark, and settled in the valley to enjoy our peas and mayonaise, and the sunset behind the tepuis, marvelling as a million fireflies filled the valley and the stars seemed to fall to earth.