Free The Kingdom of Rarities by Eric Dinerstein

dance around their bowers. Nearby, the male six-wired would shake himself into a joyous blur, and the uninhibited displays of other birds in this paradise would resume without a human audience.

Chapter 3
A Jaguar on the Beach
    T ROPICAL RAIN FORESTS OFFER stunning exhibitions of animals and plants. Many artists have tried to portray this richness, none better than the French painter Henri Rousseau. His canvases, filled with curious primates and fearsome wild cats, grace the walls of leading museums, and reproductions appear on the covers of ecology textbooks. Despite Rousseau’s lack of formal scientific training or travel to equatorial regions, his paintings capture many of the central themes in modern tropical ecology. A biologist wandering through a Rousseau retrospective would marvel at how the Parisian anticipated such key topics as the importance of predation by large cats on large plant-eating mammals, the abundance of plants whose seeds are animal dispersed, and even a visual hint of the rarity of tropical forest dwellers.
    To understand rarity in nature, whether as an artist or a biologist, one of the best places to look is in the tropical belt. The Amazonand Congo basins, Southeast Asia including Sumatra (Indonesia), and New Guinea are the four largest expanses of rain forest; along with some smaller regions, they hold more than 60 percent of the world’s known species—crammed into less than 5 percent of Earth’s surface. Because these rain forests are incredibly rich in species, they contain unusual numbers of rarities. The Foja Mountains of Papua Province, Indonesia, on the island of New Guinea, serves as a great starter location for understanding how rarity is created through extreme isolation on mountain chains. The Amazon rain forest, the next locale on our journey, is a vast, low-lying region where native tree species and a wide variety of vertebrates that inhabit them—carnivores, monkeys, and macaws, to name a few described here—illustrate another crucial type of rarity to consider: species that occur at a very low density but over a wide range. Three of these great reservoirs are mainland rain forests. They offer an important missing element in the mix of rarities that is absent in the New Guinea fauna—top predators, especially the large cats. These cats stalk their prey on the rain forest floor: jaguars and pumas in the Amazon, leopards in the Congo, tigers and clouded leopards in parts of Indonesia and Indochina.
    One of the most cat-rich rain forests on Earth is a nearly unbroken belt of wilderness in the western arc of the Amazon basin. In the secluded Madre de Dios region of Amazonian Peru, we can examine how and why individuals of the wild cat family and other terrestrial organisms inhabit great expanses but are relatively distant from one another. In this remote Amazonian locale, enclaves also exist with no evidence that large cats have ever been hunted. In such a sanctuary, we can see how rare rain forest mammals and birds, such as jaguars and pumas, even at very low densities, influence the species-rich domain over which they rule.
    On a sunny morning in August 2009, in the very heart of the Madre de Dios region, I joined the husband-and-wife team of George Powell and Sue Palminteri to survey a stunning rain forest panorama from the top of the canopy-viewing tower in Peru’sManu Wildlife Center. Some fifty meters above the ground, I wondered what Rousseau would have chosen to portray in the scene before me. Surrounding the tower was perhaps the world’s richest natural arboretum, a forest holding one-tenth of all bird species and enough as yet unnamed invertebrates to fill several natural history museums. Acrobatic spider monkeys and their slow-moving relatives, red howlers, appeared below. In a neighboring fig tree, brightly plumed trogons and barbets decorated the branches. Flocks of tricolored scarlet macaws flashed by at eye level, penetrating the forest