When the mist rolls in and all you can see are the silhouettes of ferns and tree trunks, you’d be forgiven for thinking that you’re standing in an ancient forest.
But once a gust of wind lifts the blanket of white, you start to notice things. The trees aren’t so big here. The canopy is quite low. Sometimes, there’s a length of barbed wire running through the understorey, or some other relic of bygone human presence; a pile of planks or well-trodden path.
What is a forest today—resplendent with bird song, orchids and cushiony layers of moss underfoot—wasn’t always so. Not so long ago, you wouldn’t have been standing in a forest at all. It would have been a cattle pasture.
It’s three weeks into our field season in the Colombian Andes. We’re here looking at how biodiversity, carbon and soil change between habitats, from the farmlands of the high Andes to the portions of cloud forest that cling to the mountainside.
As per, I’m on dung beetle duty. I’m armed with what now seems to be my ever-present Tupperware and an inordinately large supply of plums (plums = regular bowel movements = bait = dung beetles = data = happiness).
Gruesome stories of dung beetle sampling aside (I’ll save them for another time I promise!), I’m once again struck by how amazingly resilient forests can be if they’re just given a bit of a chance.
In Borneo, it’s the staggering diversity that persists in some of the most intensively logged rainforests in the tropics that really stuns me.
Related Videos…Borneo: Life after Logging.
Here, it’s the forest regrowth. It really takes the biscuit.
It’s hard to tell how old some of the secondary forests we’re working in really are. Some may have sprouted from abandoned cow fields as little as ten years ago. Others,where the trees are a bit larger, the forest structure a bit more complex, the canopy a little more enclosed, are maybe thirty or even forty years old.
At what point do we lose the ability to tell that it’s a secondary forest at all? I’ve been thinking about that a lot when I’m setting dung beetle traps in what looks, at least to my eye, like old-growth forest.
The history of farming in the Andes stretches back such a long time. Maybe one hundred orso years ago, on the very spot where I now use my own dung to catch beetles in the forest, a big fresh splodge of steaming cowpat would have been one of the few features punctuating an otherwise barren field of grass.
I know next to nothing about filmmaking but here’s something I would pay a lot of money to see.
Remember that awesome time-lapse from Planet Earth of how a British woodland changes through spring?
Wouldn’t it be great if some camera boffins set up some decades long time-lapse of an abandoned cow field in the Colombian Andes?
First, you’d see little more than grass. Then, as seeds were carried over from nearby remnant forest patches — by wind or by wing — a few plants would start to establish themselves.
The grassland would become shrubby. The shrubby area would become denser, with thickets of vines and brambles.
Soon enough a few trees might start to grow, eventually forming some semblance of a canopy. One day, a forest proper would emerge once again.
And wouldn’t it be even greater still if we could track the flora and fauna that recolonise the regrowing forest? If in real-time, we could watch bird flocks as they spread outwards into newly extended forest? Or see dung beetles working their way back into former habitat alongside the mammal communities upon which they depend?
That would just be awesome.
Somebody do this please.
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