The Adventurer's Son(12)
Before moving to Puerto Rico, I went down to scout for living arrangements and brought three-year-old Cody with me. This eased Peggy’s duties as she finished up with our move. It also provided my first real father-son trip with him. Together we explored a world new to us both: the tropical rainforest. We investigated giant land snails clinging to rainforest palms; watched bright green lizards do push-ups on buttressed trees; and tossed insects into the webs of hand-sized Nephila orb-weaver spiders. Cody displayed a child’s innate fascination with life—biophilia, a relic from the past when children’s interest in their environment made the difference between life and death. Some of us never outgrow it.
As a family, we had often visited California’s tide pools. Young Cody thrilled to the incredible diversity of invertebrates he found there: starfish, sea anemones, and amphipods, to name but a few. The Puerto Rican jungle offered a similar diversity, but with land creatures instead of intertidal ones. Like every three-year-old, our boy asked a bottomless barrel of questions starting with why: Why do lizards lose their tails? Why do birds sing? Why are flowers bright? I tried hard to nourish this insatiable curiosity on a trip that initiated our shared explorations across five continents and two decades.
Soon after Peggy and Jazz arrived, we settled into a condo a block from Luquillo Beach. With no car, we pedaled bicycles locally, pulling the kids in a bike trailer. Each morning after a mug of Puerto Rican coffee, I’d crank my mountain bike five miles and a thousand feet up into the Luquillo Mountains to work in the treetops. My old climbing partner Carl Tobin, himself a grad student in ecology, came for a month at the start. During January 1991, we strung horizontal traverses and vertical access lines in the forest using a mixture of mountaineering and arborist techniques I’d learned from Mike Cooper, my best friend from childhood.
Mike had started an arborist business after college. The autumn before I left for Puerto Rico to start the project, he showed me the ropes in my parents’ front yard, where we went up, across, and down tall white oaks and tulip poplars. Mountain and tree climbing both use harnesses and ropes, but their use and design differ. Arborists hang from harnesses on thick-sheathed ropes meant for pulling across limbs. Their techniques for tree climbing rely on sliding ropes and clever knots, rather than hardware. Arborists move around for pay, unlike mountain climbers, who go straight up for thrills.
Mike’s rope tricks allowed Carl and me to move around inside each tree’s crown. With access throughout the canopy, we could mark every lizard we saw with our paint guns; it was good fun, squirting droplets of blue, pink, and yellow paint from up to twenty feet away for mark-remark statistics to estimate anole abundance. We used blue paint the first day, pink the second, and yellow the third, recording how many lizards we saw in each tree with each color scheme each day. One-color animals were seen only once; two-color twice; and three-color three times. We then applied a statistical model to calculate how many lizards we missed, based on the chances of painting we observed. Summing all these observed animals and the single “guess” gave the estimate of total lizards in a tree. We even authored a scientific paper on the arborist techniques, then unknown to the canopy science community. Among other things, we illustrated how to go from tree to tree, enabling a multiday, canopy-level forest traverse without touching the ground—a sort of “canopy trek.”
Down in Luquillo, Peggy and the kids spent most days at the beach. Playing in the warm water and collecting seashells left them tanned, blond, and barefoot. Cody delighted in watching colorful reef fish through a kid-sized snorkeling mask. He stood in the shallows, bent over and holding his breath, exploring the watery world at his feet. Yards away on the beach sand, Jazz gathered foot-long tropical seedpods washed ashore by gentle waves.
Inspired by visits to my study site, Cody decided to establish his own in our yard of low shrubs and fleshy ornamentals. Marking its corners with surveyor’s tape, he’d catch and release the anoles that lived there.
“Dad, I made a map of my study site!” he said, running up to me, home from my day in the jungle. He had watched me labor over my study-site map, then worked hard on his own in crayon and colored pencil. “Do you want to see it?”
“Yes! Of course, I want to see it!” I said, both delighted and impressed my four-year-old son had made his own map.
“Well, here are the corners. They have orange flagging.” He pointed to squiggly orange Xs. “And here is where I caught a cristatellus in this bush.” He moved his pudgy little finger to a green scribble that marked where he’d caught the brown anole with the orange dewlap and tail crest, an animal he recognized by its scientific name, Anolis cristatellus.
“And over here a grass anole lives by the fence. I caught him and let Jazzy hold him, too. She was careful, Dad,” he assured me. Both kids knew to hold the delicate animals by a toe with the creature perched on their fist. “And here”—he moved his finger to two parallel lines—“here is where the Ameiva lives. He’s big!” Unlike the svelte anoles that spend their time in trees or bushes, the fat-headed ameiva with its striped sides is a ground lizard that prowls the leaf litter for insects like a tiger prowls for deer: stopping, looking, moving on.
When Roughgarden heard about Cody’s study site and map, he warned, “Better watch out, or he’s going to be a biologist, Roman.” That doesn’t sound so bad, I thought, pleased and imagining a future when we did science together.