The Path Up the Mountain
By Matt McGee, Student Researcher, UC Berkeley
I first came to Anjanaharibe-Sud Special Reserve (ASSR) in February, where I left with one major certainty—that this would be the study site for my dissertation fieldwork—and a few dozen fragmented research questions bouncing around my brain. By the time I arrived back in the US two weeks later, those fragments had combined into a tentative starting point. I’m fascinated by species distributions, and I always want to know why certain animals are here, why they aren’t over there, and where they could be in the future. Luckily for me, a montane rainforest is an ideal model ecosystem for such questions, thanks to the high rates of biodiversity and wide range of microhabitats. An elevational gradient study that included many interconnected species—birds, lemurs, plants, bugs—seemed like the perfect opening stanza for my dissertation.
Of course, I wasn’t the first person to have this idea, as a team of researchers led by Dr. Steve Goodman had conducted an elevational gradient survey at ASSR in 1994. It was the first and only such study at the reserve, and Dr. Goodman’s team had conducted their research at four discrete elevations: 865m, 1260m, 1550m, and 1950m. If I repeated those elevations, I could evaluate how things had changed in the past 30 years. Species were vanishing from tropical mountaintops in other parts of the world, likely due to warming temperatures—to think that could be happening at ASSR was such a horrible, mesmerizing thought. It was an ambitious push for my first field season, but it somehow didn’t feel like enough at the same time. I wondered if I was speaking too much with someone else’s scientific voice instead of trying to find my own. But it was still early in my dissertation, and this would give me a strong foundation to build on.
I planned out a five-month field season. I would have the first two months, July and August, to set up the sites: establish four remote camps, cut 8km of transects, and mark 64 study plots. Before I left, I drew circles on a map around every area in ASSR that fit into the four target elevations. There was one particular area that I desperately wanted to include, a large tract of forest in the southwest of the reserve that had been only scarcely surveyed, but the entire area fell between the first and second elevations. I circled it anyway.
Just in case.
I stumbled off a taxi-brousse in Andapa on July 4, with nothing but my map, my plan, and my dreams (and four bags of equipment, plus my student counterpart, Niaina, from the University of Antananarivo). On July 9, my team, composed of me, Niaina, three guides (Richelin, Lawi, and Jao), and two cooks (Pettie and Elissé), embarked on our first of seven planned trips into the forest, this one to 865m. The first trip was meant to be exploratory, and explore we did, bushwhacking through the forest until we figured out what we were looking for. We lived in tents under tarps, cooked over a fire, and ate at a table made of tree branches. I watched a kingfisher hunting in the river, stared at a crab spider tucked under the curl of a leaf. We ran out of sugar, and my feet were always wet, and I forgot what it was like to eat a meal without rice. The transects we cut were slippery, narrow, and steep, and my guides made me a walking stick so I wouldn’t fall down so much. I waved it around gleefully, pointing out the direction we should go next. Everything was breathtaking in its newness, not just the forest, but also leadership, and project design, and those incredible first days when I realized I was actually out here doing the thing I had talked about doing for so long. I knew things would change from when I was sitting in my lab, clacking away on my laptop, but I didn’t expect how quickly, or to what extent. Through it all, through every change I made, the core of my project stayed the same: the four elevational sites.
For all the newness the first trip brought, it also brought the kinds of mistakes you would expect from an excited PhD student figuring things out through trial and error. For the second trip, I came up with a novel concept: what if we scouted an area to find suitable locations for the campsite and transects before blindly trekking in with all of our gear and supplies? It was a winning strategy. We found a disturbed area near a stream, a remnant of illegal crystal mining, and we repurposed it into our campsite. We nestled into a green cloud, with blue pigeons in the trees and black indri calling nearby. The forest at 1260m felt mystical, like I had stumbled into a fantasy novel. We pushed deeper into the unknown, constantly unsure of how each day would go. I passed rainy afternoons in my tent scribbling on datasheets, creating ten versions of every plan, then redoing them the next day. Sometimes my eyes would drift to the bottom left corner of my map, to the area I had circled in the southwest, and I would daydream about making it work. But it wouldn’t work. I didn’t have enough time, I didn’t have enough money, and it just didn’t make sense with the rest of the project. And so on July 31st, I fell asleep in my tent, content with our progress, only 300 meters away from completing site 2.
Left: Camp 2; Right: Dinner in the rainforest
Those 300 meters went quickly on August 1st, and we decided to hike farther up the mountain to start scouting for the 1550m study site. There were two potential areas, one on the east side of the Marolakana River, not too far from us, and one on the west side, closer to the summit. I wanted to see both. We climbed higher, eventually entering our target elevational range, and we found a possible campsite. But I wasn’t satisfied yet. I wanted to press forward.
The trail started to crumble. The air had an extra bite to it. Jao pulled me over a fallen tree, my stick getting caught in the branches. I was soaked with sweat and mist. How would we haul bags of equipment and food up here when I could barely haul myself? And still, onward. We hiked another 10 minutes before we entered a clearing. The summit loomed ahead of us, still achingly far away, and the trail started to plunge downward toward the Marolakana river. And from down the slope came the sounds of scraping rock and clanging metal—the unmistakable symphony of illegal mining.
On the morning of August 5th, I sat in the Madagascar National Parks office with Niaina, Richelin, and Delaïd Rasamisoa, Wildlife Madagascar’s Conservation Program Manager for ASSR. My team had scouted all the way to the river and they had found more miners and extensive damage to the trail. MNP was working together with Wildlife Madagascar and Lemur Conservation Foundation to send a patrol to clear out the miners, but the trail damage was another matter. Our supplies would never make it to the summit unless the trail was repaired. Neither would I, Richelin told me bluntly, after he had watched me slip on a wet tree root and go bouncing down a hill. It would take days to fix, maybe even a week. Those were days we didn’t have. Those were days we couldn’t afford. The summit was out of my grasp, and yet I clenched my fist even tighter. Onward.
I spent the next three days with my brain on fire. I tried to make money appear that I didn’t have. I created wild, improbable schedules. I walked down paths that didn’t exist. On August 8th, my team joined me in Andapa to provision for our trip to the summit, but I just sat in the office, surrounded by partially sketched-out plans—for the summit, for the site in the southwest, even for the next field season. It was all so disconnected. And then Richelin sat down beside me, looking somber, and told me I needed to call Delaïd.
The patrol had been delayed. We couldn’t go until it was over, and by then it would be too late. We were already trying to do a month of work in 19 days; there was no way we could do it in three. I stood alone in the cool night air, my project crashing down around me, hours before we were set to leave, with my support system half a world away. I didn’t have an answer.
I walked back inside and told my team the news, my voice shaky, and I as tried to find the right words, the answer was suddenly there. It was only the beginning, the first sentence of something longer, but it already made sense. I had been stuck on the idea of the four elevational sites not just because the comparison was interesting, but because I thought I knew how to do it. Because I didn’t know how to say the things I really wanted to do. But isn’t that the point?! To sputter out gibberish until you learn how to speak coherently?
There’s a lot of unknown ahead. My plan still starts with an elevational gradient. It’s still a great foundation for the research I want to figure out how to do. And—for this season—it will still include three of the original sites, plus the site I circled in the southwest. The summit can wait. I’ll still make the comparisons, but that can also wait. Why do I need to start with what’s been done before? Why not push it further and embrace my own ideas?
Why not survey the whole damn thing?
TO BE CONTINUED….
