In Search of the Phantom Tanager (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine June 2002

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In Search of the Phantom Tanager (Cont.)

WE'D SETTLED into a routine—up at 4:30 in the morning, we'd load our old VW van in the dark, wash down some crackers or granola bars with packaged fruit juice, and arrive in the field as it was getting light, to take advantage of the dawn frenzy of bird activity. We spent days exploring the mountains near the Bolivian border and the floodplain of the Rio Guaporé; it was rugged, beautiful country, a green wall edged with orange cliffs like castle ramparts, above which flew flocks of scarlet macaws. Many times, our hearts would stutter when a black-and-white bird flew into view, but it was always something pedestrian. In truth, it was much too lush and wet a forest for the conebill, and so eventually we turned north, hunting for a way to the Rio Juruena.

We were following a clue, the sort of accidental lead that can change everything. We'd heard from an old man of a ghost town called Juruena, on the headwaters of the river of the same name—a place long gone from the maps, but which was a thriving community in the 1930s when Vellard passed through this region. This, we hoped, was the mysterious "Juruena" where Vellard's notes indicated he shot the first cone-billed tanager.

The problem lay in getting there; the only access was by swinging far to the west and north, then backtracking east across one of the chapadas. After spending so much time in dense forest, it was liberating to rumble along beneath an open prairie sky. The cerrado extended to the horizon in all directions, dotted with head-high trees and bushes bearing colorful flowers, among which grazed groups of rheas, South American ostriches, one of them a male tending a convoy of new chicks the size of terriers.

The map said the river was about 50 miles across the empty chapada. At first, the going was smooth, but as the morning coolness gave way to a white sun, the road steadily deteriorated until it was no more than a dry, sandy streambed along which our van slowly lurched and fishtailed, almost bogging down time and again. Finally, as both dusk and the edge of the plateau approached, the old VW settled into a deep rut and wouldn't budge.

For a long time, no one said much; three guys stood staring at a white van that tipped unpleasantly toward its left rear corner. Doug and I shouldered the back of the van while Fabiano gave it some gas, but the tires just splattered a rooster tail of sand against our legs, and the vehicle sank farther. So we did what anyone stuck in the middle of nowhere would do. We went for a hike.

It was an odd time to take a walk, I now realize—the sun had set, our only transportation was mired a very long way from help, and we hadn't made camp for the night. We walked, I think, because we'd been on the go all day and we just couldn't quit. We walked because we sensed the end of the road was close, and after weeks of scheming to get here, we wanted to see it. Finally, we walked because the crest of the hill was just ahead—and peeking over the crests of hills is what human beings have been doing for hundreds of thousands of years.

Over the last rise, in the dim twilight, the land dropped off in a series of mile-wide steps to the valley of the Rio Juruena, vague in the hazy distance. Not far away, like a line drawn across the chapada, lapped a low, scrubby forest that could not have looked more ideal as potential tanager habitat. We were stuck, but we were stuck in the right place.

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