My first experience of rainforest was in the Congo Basin of Central Africa in 1977.
Walking along the ground trails, it seemed a dark and rather gloomy habitat by comparison with the sunlit savannas and open woodlands that I was familiar with. There was not much going on, at least not to my untutored eye, with the main interest being in finding the odd cave and minor waterfall.
I knew there were exotic animals in the region, not least the gentle okapi and lowland gorilla, but they were difficult to observe. Habituation of gorilla troops was only just beginning back then. So rainforests didn’t make it into my book of wonders. It was only later, when I went to Malaysia for two years to study wild figs and fig wasps, that I discovered the real rain forest.
My view of rainforests changed the day I joined the Malaysian Nature Society and went on a guided rainforest walk. These were usually led by one or both of a highly knowledgeable couple, Ruth and Kiew – she was a botanist and he a zoologist. It seemed we could scarcely take a single pace along a forest path before another treasure was revealed – a parasitoid wasp laying eggs inside a caterpillar, a new species of ant, a gaudy-coloured spider with its own unique web, the nest of an arboreal termite, a fern epiphyte lodged on a branch, the rhizomes of a ginger plant, a fan palm, an orchid, a strangling fig tree, a giant meranti towering above, a pale fungus growing from a fallen branch, pungent-smelling fruit that had fallen on the path, the tracks of a forest rat in softer soil edging the path, the gnawed remains of a squirrel’s lunch, the splash of colour from a tree kingfisher, the hollow hoot of a helmeted hornbill, and in the distance the haunting song of a lar gibbon.
Thanks to Ruth and Kiew, and others that I met who were studying birds, insects or mammals, the forest opened up for me, day by day, bit by bit, like a large book of knowledge. Far from the bland bleakness I had supposed when in Africa, it was filled with extraordinary creatures and complex interconnectivity. Certainly it was gloomy on the forest floor, but it was also spacious, just as open in fact as a British wood in Autumn. The great trunks which were from two to six or more feet in diameter shot up for a hundred feet without a single side branch or leaf, and then burst into a crown, extending in some cases another one hundred feet in height, to co-create the full emergent splendour of the forest canopy. Up there, the habitat was sun-drenched arboreal, the home of squirrels, primates, forest birds, butterflies and a host of other insects. The cool shade below was a more comfortable place to be. The air was still. Haunting forest sounds lingered.
When walking into a rainforest after a busy week in town, it was always a relief to leave the forest edge behind, with its chain saws and vehicles, seared by intense sunlight by day, and plagued by hungry mosquitoes by night. Under the leafy dome, all was quiet and still. It was like entering a new world – unknown, infinite. And after a year of rainforest walks, I was still discovering new species on every single hike. The mind filled with thoughts of how such diversity and complexity had evolved. As the tropical botanist, Professor John Corner remarked, ‘If man was not so ignorant, rainforests would be the wonder of the world.’