From Plant Press, Vol. 4, No. 3 from July 2001.
In this essay, Laurence Dorr recounts his recent adventures in the Venezuelan field.
“The first sign was the patch of rabbit fur, later the scat with animal bones, and finally the half‑eaten ‘mapache,’ and I was convinced that there were puma roaming the Páramo de Guaramacal. At least the one (or ones) with whom we kept crossing paths was well fed and that lessened the anxiety that I might otherwise have felt. We also saw ample evidence of the presence of spectacled bear in the páramo. The clearest evidence of the latter were the fairly common patches of leaves left after the bear had dined on Puya aristeguietae, which conveniently for the botanist was in full flower.
“While the presence of these large mammals added some degree of excitement, the purpose of my recent trip was to collect plants in areas of Guaramacal National Park that had not been adequately explored before and to collect in seasons that had been neglected. We therefore found ourselves on top of Guaramacal in the middle of the rainy season. Civil Defense of Trujillo state lent us a large tent for use as a kitchen and pressing area, and TeleBoconó allowed us to use a small hut near their broadcast antenna where we could bunk sheltered from the wind, rain, and cold. Both tent and hut were greatly appreciated, especially since this ‘tropical’ field trip included night‑time temperatures as low as 3°C.
“We collected along a transect from the summit (3,100 m) of the Páramo de Guaramacal northeast to the Fila Los Recostaderos, essentially completing a loop that earlier had included a hike from El Cafenol to the Fila. Our little stroll in the páramo had us drop from 3,100 to 2,400 m and then climb back up the 700 m we had lost. While my rain pants, rain jacket, and poncho kept the rain from making me wet, I nonetheless became soaked by the sweat from my exertion and thoroughly exhausted by the end of the day. Another transect took us from the summit of Guaramacal southwest to the Páramo El Pumar. As with the Fila, we had also climbed last winter from about 1800 m to El Pumar at 2600 m. We did not find anything that was new on this trip. Last winter we collected quite a few plants in El Pumar that we had not seen previously in the park.
“The páramo collecting, apart from a number of parasitic Loranthaceae that could not be identified in the field, did not yield anything that was unexpected. The best collecting of this trip was above El Cafenol where we walked through a ‘potrero’ along the edge of cloud forest from about 1,700 to 2,200 m. A number of these collections, including a narrow‑leaved Piper, were species that neither I nor Basil Stergios and Miguel Niño could recall having seen before. Alas, our ‘Catalogue of the Flora of Guaramacal’ is rapidly becoming outdated. The last two trips (December‑January and June) have produced a total of 21 genera and 51 species not previously reported from Guaramacal. When all of the material is worked up we may well have records of 1,500 species of vascular plants in the park.
“Before returning to Washington, Stergios took me on a quick day-trip to see one of the last vestiges of montane vegetation in Portuguesa state. We drove northwest of Guanare, forded the Río Suruguapo, and climbed to the Fila de San José de la Montaña on the border with Lara state. Many of the plants were familiar from Guaramacal, including Croizatia brevipetiolata (Euphorbiaceae), a species that was scarcely known a few years ago but is now appearing in almost all of the cloud forests examined at 1,600 to 1,800 m.”
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