One Tree in a Billion

This is an exciting new project that I am involved with in the rainforest in the Peruvian Amazon.We are recording all the biodiversity around a tree on a nature reserve over a period of two months. We will be photographing everything from mites up to mammals, which will hopefully include charismatic megafauna such as jaguar, giant otter, and the many primates. I’m responsible for the canopy part of the research, which means accessing the higher levels of the tree. In the rainforest the bulk of the biomass or weight of species is actually above ground, due to the levels of light that reach the forest floor. I will be using climbing techniques; a mixture of arboriculture and industrial rope access to get up to where the biodiversity is thickest. I am currently rehearsing and refining techniques in the Chilterns and in Norfolk, where I am also photographing the wildlife. I’ve always enjoyed climbing trees but getting up really high is a whole new level of experience altogether. Firstly it is extraordinarily beautiful – not perhaps a deep scientific insight but a profoundly aesthetic one. Secondly it is just exhilarating, possibly due to the exertion and the successful avoidance of serious injury.

There is a beech grove where I go to play where the trunks soar clean from the forest floor and where you can walk up the bole into the canopy. Beech is widely viewed as the noblest and most beautiful of trees largely because of the clean lines that the trunks form. There is a popular myth that the arches of the Gothic cathedrals were modelled on the beech. Going further back and into the realm of Robert Graves’s historical grammar of poetic myth, The White Goddess, the beech is imagined as a tree of learning and wisdom.

Here are a few images taken from a recent trip ‘up the glades’.