He pointed across the street to a tall palm spreading over a trash-strewn lot, holding his finger steadily, waiting. Then I saw: like drips from a leaky faucet, bats trickling from a hole in the trunk.

"Molossus molossus," Dad said. Pallas's mastiff bat. A junk species.

"They're lousy fliers," he explained. "Very fast but not very agile. They need wide-open spaces to hunt in, because they're not nimble enough to navigate tight spots. So for them to be this abundant means that an area has been extremely disturbed."

We were after something more elusive: Lophostoma schulzi, Schulz's round-eared bat, a species discovered by my father deep in the Amazon in 1979. Like many bats of the old forest, schulzi is a nimble flier that has the ability to thread dense undergrowth. Whenever timber is cleared, faster competitors take over, so our only hope of catching one was to go out among the tall trees, far from human development. We would confine ourselves to the areas where Dad had collected schulzi before—jungle outposts inside Brownsberg Nature Park and at the base of the uncharted Tafelberg Plateau, in the Central Suriname Nature Reserve (CSNR). In Dad's heyday, he led teams of well-trained, well-equipped researchers, but this time it would be just the two of us, using a few ten-foot-tall nets. Dad didn't equivocate: He didn't like our chances.

"It's like casting out a net in the middle of the ocean and hoping to catch a specific fish," he said.

The night had deepened and cooled, and the streetlights and neon signs of Paramaribo blazed in the twilight. A bass-heavy club beat struck up in the distance. Dad scratched his grizzled beard with mock seriousness, as if contemplating the half-moon climbing over the rooftops.

"But we came all this way," he said. "So, what the fuck, let's go get one."