Word: tree
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...walk: if Mittermeier is Tarzan, me Jane's grandmother. I stumble frequently and cut my hand on a rock, but eventually I turn clumsiness to my advantage by forcing everyone to slow down. I am seeing the jungle for the first time. Here alone are 300 species of trees. They are at once the pillars and the superintendents of the rain forest, the frame of the house and its chief occupants. The spiny understory palm trees make baskets from branches growing out of their trunks, which become compost machines for falling leaves, which in turn sustain the trees. Since...
...tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, according to Mittermeier, he would be better off. He tells me that the scariest sound he ever heard in the rain forest was the explosive crack of a dead trunk, followed by a rush of plummeting branches so loud it might have been a storm...
Here's a remarkable structure: a kiddie pool, perfectly round, dug by a Hyla boans tree frog as a nest and nursery for its tadpoles. The pool's sand walls look as if they have been carved and smoothed by a sculptor; they hold the tadpoles until they are transformed into froglets...
...while and comes back with two frogs and a toad, in part to show me their characteristics (one is poisonous), but mainly because he is still a kid who likes to go out and get frogs. In the morning, one of our guides spots a parrot high in a tree, a Fransemadam, so called because it spreads a scarlet frill when excited, like the gaudy costume of a French madam. I admire, take note of the bird and am ready to move on, but Mittermeier could stand under the tree for hours lost in the intellectual pleasure of seeing...
When he first proposed the idea of forest protection to the Eyak Corp., his fellow board members voted him down, 8 to 1. "They called me a greenie and a tree hugger," he recalls. Undeterred, Lankard gave up his fishing business, set up the Eyak Rainforest Preservation Fund and began lobbying politicians and native Alaskans throughout the state. "Indigenous people have thousands of years of being preservationists," he would argue. "We need to become stewards of the land again." In Lankard's view, not only the trees and streams were endangered; so were the native cultures that depended on them...