A botanical sketch in progress

One of a series of blog posts written during the Field Museum's 2010 Yaguas rapid inventory of Yaguas, Peru, and published by the New York Times.

"Yesterday, after pitching our tents at our third (and last) campsite, the four of us headed out to spend a couple of hours collecting along a tributary of the Rio Yaguas. What made the afternoon memorable was that the river we were collecting along — a river that measures a long stone’s throw across, from one bank to the other — was almost entirely empty. We’d seen it earlier in the day, flying in to camp, after kilometers and kilometers of Amazon green: long channels of cracked, whitish mud that looked like something from the Aral Sea. Now we could walk, Moses-like, down to the bottom of the river and up the other side. The channel is reticulate, so that once we started wandering around on its bed we discovered we were in a sunken maze of miniature forested islands...."

Read the whole post here.

Photo by Roosevelt García