William R. Buck, Ph.D., is the Mary Flagler Cary Curator of Botany at The New York Botanical Garden. Every January for the last three years, Dr. Buck, a moss specialist, and a team of colleagues have journeyed to the Cape Horn region at the southern tip of South America, to document the area’s rich diversity of mosses and search for new species.
We returned to Isla Hoste the night before last, coming ashore at Punta Escala on Bahía Packsaddle. The day was colder than the previous one and sleet started falling shortly after we entered the field. It was a nice reminder of the “good times” we’ve had in years past.
I knew there was a stream somewhere in the direction I was headed, but every time I thought I heard running water it turned out to be the sound of the sleet pelting down in the forest. When I finally popped out of the vegetation and onto the beach, the stream was only a short distance ahead. Unfortunately, my scheduled pick-up meant I didn’t have time to work my way upstream. I left that to my colleagues John Brinda and Juan Larrain, who found a number of interesting mosses.
I would have wanted to collect everything myself when I was younger, but at my age I’m just glad that someone collected the material. I was simply happy to have had the time alone in the forest, finding what I did. There aren’t many advantages to advanced maturity, but a less competitive attitude is certainly one of them.
William R. Buck, Ph.D., is the Mary Flagler Cary Curator of Botany at The New York Botanical Garden. Every January for the last three years, Dr. Buck, a moss specialist, and a team of colleagues have journeyed to the Cape Horn region at the southern tip of South America, to document the area’s rich diversity of mosses and search for new species.
Yesterday our activities were dominated by water. Due to a shortage of fresh water, we could no longer bathe until the tank was refilled, and flushing the toilet was accomplished with a bucket of sea water. We started the day at Bahía Windhond on the south shore of Navarino. I’d never had the opportunity to collect on this side of Navarino, so I was glad to see this prominent bay at last.
William R. Buck, Ph.D., is the Mary Flagler Cary Curator of Botany at The New York Botanical Garden. Every January for the last three years, Dr. Buck, a moss specialist, and a team of colleagues have journeyed to the Cape Horn region at the southern tip of South America, to document the area’s rich diversity of mosses and search for new species.
We left Coloane a bit before 8 p.m. yesterday evening. Navigating down the southwest arm of the Beagle Channel, we got our first opportunity to see the string of glaciers that crown the rugged peaks. Fortunately, the waters were calm and the temperature relatively warm, keeping many of us on deck to enjoy the scenery in the dimming light.
We awoke shortly before 7 a.m. when the ship’s engines finally shut down. Coming out onto the deck, we were greeted by Bahía Orange, the site where an early French expedition had stopped. We were anchored in Caleta Misión, the exact place where the French had sought shelter over a century ago. Although the sky was lightly spitting, the day promised pleasant weather, at least according to the rising barometer. I hoped this would mean we could get back to our original itinerary and head out to Isla Hermite, but the northeastern direction of the wind meant the seas would be rough. The captain, Ernesto, and I went over the maps to determine where we should go in the coming days.
We were scheduled to leave Punta Arenas on January 7, but after waiting all day, we finally took our luggage to this year’s new ship at about 10:30 p.m. and weren’t underway until after midnight. The owner of the previous years’ ship had increased the price so much that we could no longer afford it. However, we were lucky to find a ship for the same price as last year, and we began settling into the Doña Pilar. We have a crew of four this year. Interestingly, the captain has the same name as our previous captain: Pato, short for Patricio. The new ship seems to have the same dimensions as our previous boat but with a different configuration. Unlike before, where we had a single large bunkroom, the Doña Pilar has four small bedrooms, each with a single bunk bed and a pair of small cupboards. The space under the bunks is open, allowing us to stow our luggage there rather than in the middle of the bunkroom floor.
Statue of the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan – Punta Arenas, Chile
After several years of shuttling to and from the far end of South America, this is to be our final expedition as part of this project to inventory the mosses and liverworts of the Cape Horn Archipelago. I have mixed emotions. Although I am sad to see the fieldwork come to a conclusion and, as a consequence, never again see this majestic landscape, at the same time I won’t miss the long, often exhausting flights down to the southern end of the world.
My flight out of New York was scheduled for the morning of Friday, January 3. Coincidentally, this was the day after a major winter storm had dumped eight inches (15 cm) of snow on the city, letting up only a few hours prior to my departure.
In contrast, the surrounding hillsides shone brown as my plane descended onto the airstrip in Santiago, Chile. It was obviously summer. Only a slender silver thread of water made its way along the valley bottoms, and I was glad that I found myself headed to a more verdant destination. Once inside the airport, I had expected to meet my Chilean counterpart, Juan Larraín, but he failed to appear by the time my connecting flight to Punta Arenas was ready to depart. The flight to Punta Arenas usually stops in Puerto Montt. While on the ground there, I glanced up from my reading to see if I could catch Juan among the boarding passengers, but to no avail. However, after the plane was in the air again, I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned to see the person I was looking for. Juan had boarded in Puerto Montt after all. One more piece of the puzzle fell into place.
Fabian A. Michelangeli, Ph.D., is an Associate Curator of the Institute of Systematic Botany at The New York Botanical Garden. His research focuses in part on the evolution, identification, and classification of neotropical plants. This is the last of four posts about an expedition last year to Suriname in northeastern South America.
Julian Aguirre and Mani collecting aquatic plants in Arrowhead Basin
Rain, isolation, and a unique geology, all factors that I have referred to in previous posts about Tafelberg, play very important roles in the amount of biodiversity on the summit of the mountain. However, another important factor is the great variety of environments on the summit, whose flat surface is the reason its name is Dutch for “table mountain.”
The top of Tafelberg is a very large, roughly triangular plateau. It measures about nine miles long by six miles wide and covers an area of some 30 square miles. The surface of the plateau looked homogenous as we approached the summit in the helicopter, but it quickly became clear upon landing that we would be able to explore many different vegetation types. Large areas of the summit are covered by tall forests filled with a close relative of the rubber tree. A network of small creeks crisscrosses the summit, creating hundreds of “islands.”
Fabian A. Michelangeli, Ph.D., is an Associate Curator of the Institute of Systematic Botany at The New York Botanical Garden. His research focuses in part on the evolution, identification, and classification of neotropical plants. This is the third of four posts about an expedition last year to Suriname in northeastern South America.
Augustus Falls as it plummets from the summit of Tafelberg to the forest below
Collecting in remote areas always presents interesting challenges, some of which are precisely the reason we visit these places. Tafelberg, a table mountain in central Suriname, is an isolated mountain that has only been explored a handful of times in the 60 years since the first ascent by New York Botanical Garden scientist Basset Maguire, which I described in a previous post. One of the reasons the vegetation is unique is the extraordinary amount of rain that falls here every year. Although our team of six scientists had planned our visit for the “dry” season, a rainforest is always…well, rainy. The difference between the seasons is not whether it rains or not, but the number of hours that it rains and the total amount of rainfall.
On our third day on the summit, the storm clouds that had been menacing us since the first afternoon finally came over the mountain. The skies opened for more than 30 hours straight. Because our time was limited, we kept working through the downpours.
Fabian A. Michelangeli, Ph.D., is an Associate Curator of the Institute of Systematic Botany at The New York Botanical Garden. His research focuses in part on the evolution, identification, and classification of neotropical plants. This is the second of four posts about an expedition last year to Suriname in northeastern South America.
The helicopter leaves Rudi Kappel airstrip with a sling full of cargo for the summit camp
As I recounted in last week’s post, it took Basset Maguire, a famous New York Botanical Garden scientist of the mid-20th Century, more than six weeks to travel to the base of Tafelberg, a “table mountain” in central Suriname. It took our team of six scientists and five support staff just over an hour to fly from Paramaribo, Suriname’s capital. Yet we still faced the same problem that Maguire had of getting our equipment and team to the summit, nearly 3,400 feet above our base camp.
In our case, the cargo included all of our food and camp essentials for two weeks, plus all the equipment to collect, study, and document the many different groups of organisms targeted by the expedition: plants, aquatic insects, frogs, lizards, snakes, and fish. Altogether, we needed to move about 1,200 pounds and 11 people to the summit. Once again, we had a faster method that wasn’t available to Maguire: a helicopter.
Fabian A. Michelangeli, Ph.D., is an Associate Curator of the Institute of Systematic Botany at The New York Botanical Garden. His research focuses in part on the evolution, identification, and classification of neotropical plants. This is the first of four posts about an expedition last year to Suriname in northeastern South America.
Our first view of the Tafelberg, rising from the surrounding forest as we fly into Rudi Kappel airstrip
As a field biologist, you see some places mentioned in old literature that have achieved classical status, places that you think you will never be able to visit. Until recently, Tafelberg—Dutch for “table mountain”—in central Suriname was one of those places for me.
Geologically, Tafelberg is part of the Roraima formation of northeastern South America, with a layer of sandstone that lies over a granitic base, similar to several mountains in southern Venezuela that are of a type usually called a tepui (from the word for “mountain” in the language of the indigenous Pemon people). Tepuis often have steep rock cliffs that rise from the surrounding forest or savannas, giving these mountains not only their characteristic table-top shape but also a sense that their summits are effectively isolated. This shape and sense of isolation were prominently featured in Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel The Lost World, contributing to the lore and mystery that surround these mountains.
Shannon Asencio, who works at The New York Botanical Garden’s William and Lynda Steere Herbarium, is the Project Coordinator for the Macrofungi Collection Consortium. This Garden-led project, involving institutions across the country, will result in a publicly accessible database and digitized images of several hundred thousand specimens of mushrooms and related fungi.
The beautiful gills of a specimen collected during the NAMA Foray in the Ozarks.
A couple of months ago, I attended the 2013 “foray” of the North American Mycological Association (NAMA), held at Shepherd of the Ozarks in northern Arkansas. I was there not only to participate in the search for mushrooms—mycology is the study of mushrooms and other fungi—but also to deliver a presentation on The New York Botanical Garden’s exciting new crowdsourcing initiative.
These annual forays are a way to record the mycological species that occur throughout North America. The collection data, photographs, and dried specimens are housed at the herbarium of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. These specimen records provide data about the distribution of macrofungi—mushrooms and other large fungi species—in North America and serve as a resource for additional studies, such as DNA research.
