Word: forester
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...were revealing. For one thing, astute viewers learned that the President's phrase "Let me put that in perspective" is like a road sign: EVASIVE GENERALIZATION AHEAD. And Bush's tactic of touting his Administration's record at every turn seemed laughably transparent. "How are you helping the rain forest?" asked a little girl from Georgia. "By having the best environmental record of any country," replied the President...
Ndokanda, a bangombe pygmy, hunkers down beside me. Holding the bridge of his nose, he lets out a loud bray -- his dead-on imitation of the cry of small rain-forest animals called duikers. These deerlike creatures make the noise in the throes of giving birth, and Pygmies imitate it because other duikers come running when they hear the call. This time, however, the braying attracts a large band of chimpanzees, drawn by the prospect of dining on vulnerable duikers. For a moment I feel the shiver of being hunted...
Instead, for more than two hours, the mesmerized chimps hover around us, drawing to within a few arm lengths. I am flabbergasted. Wild chimps do not react this way to humans in any other part of the African rain forest. But this is no ordinary meeting of fellow primates. For the chimps surrounding us, seeing humans amounts to an ape version of Close Encounters of the Third Kind...
...this drama, we are the aliens. We have ventured into the last vast unexplored rain forest on earth -- the unsullied Ndoki region of northern Congo -- a place where the animals do not know what to make of us because they have never seen humans before...
...hills to the north and the forbidding Ndoki River to the west, the region is almost inaccessible. Pygmies have crisscrossed central Africa for thousands of years, but there is no evidence that they have entered beyond the fringes of this 3 million-hectare (7.5 million-acre) expanse of virgin forest, which is about the size of Belgium...