Word: forester
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...Dutchman eventually tracked down his marmosets to a black-water branch of the Amazon, 200 miles southeast of Manaus. A farmer pointed toward the edge of the forest, where five marmosets happily snacked on the resin of a morototo tree. On later visits, Van Roosmalen noticed that the soil of this farm was 3 1/2 ft. deep and richer than any he knew of in the Amazon, where the earth is sandy and gives out after a couple of years, forcing farmers to raze hundreds of square miles of rain forest every year...
...knows exactly how many tigers prowl Russia's taiga, the vast northern forest, but their numbers have dropped sharply in recent years, perhaps to no more than 350. The pressure on the animal intensified in the 1990s, after the Soviet Union collapsed and Chinese traders flowed across the newly porous border with Russia. In traditional Chinese medicine, tiger parts are reputed to have almost magical powers, and even though China has outlawed products made from the endangered cats, traders will pay Russian poachers big money for bones that will fetch $10,000 a lb. on Hong Kong's black market...
...degrees]F, Fomenko can glide through the deep snow like a cat, carefully placing one foot in front of the other, so his footprints disappear in the steps of his prey. Now and then he stops, sable hat in hand, to do what he does best: listen to the forest. "When you live alone in the taiga for months," he says, "you get to know all the animals in these woods." Over the years he increasingly knew that excessive hunting, beyond what was authorized by the government, was taking a terrible toll. That made him receptive in 1994 when...
Besides his monkey business, Van Roosmalen specializes in medicinal plants (he even apprenticed to a shaman of the Kamayura tribe) and in rain-forest conservation. He knew he wanted to do fieldwork when he studied primates in Holland. There Van Roosmalen clashed with his university professors over the value of observing lab monkeys. "It was like putting a child in a cage and drawing conclusions about all Homo sapiens," he huffs...
...anthurium with leaves bigger than elephant ears. And best of all, Van Roosmalen stumbled on traces of an agricultural technique--invented by Stone Age tribes around 10,000 years ago--that may help save the Amazon from the damage caused by farmers who slash and burn the forest to clear land...