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And yet the animals are much more interesting - after all, the Atlantic Rainforests are home to 180 of the 202 species considered endangered in Brazil. For example, the yellow-breasted capuchin (Cebus xanthosternos monkeys) is the only animal species to escape near extinction in this reserve. Both plants and animals here are full of "endemics" - species not found elsewhere. For example, the little bird Scyta psychopompus, which Brazilians call Papaculo, is found only here and nowhere else. My gaze is always directed upwards, then to the ground: maybe I will see a snake? In general, there are enough snakes in Brazil, but in Central America there are more of them than in South America, especially the venomous ones. Snakes came here from Asia around the Tertiary period and managed to form many new species (especially poisonous snakes have distinguished themselves). In South America, they spread out later, and there are very few of them - only 7 genera, five times less than in Africa or Asia. Nevertheless, it is better to walk in the woods with boots and at night with a flashlight. There she is! No, I was wrong, it's just a "weeping" monster (from the aronicaceae family), a typical woodland liana. Its wriggling green stem with dark spots really looks like a snake. And "crying" it was nicknamed for the fact that the watery mouths of its leaves actively secrete water, which runs down to the pointed end of the leaf, a kind of "spout", and drips down. No, no luck with snakes, too curso de diseño de interiores. I saw the famous hummingbirds only on the terrace of my house tens of kilometers away from the reserve - there were much more flowers with such attractive nectar on it than on the first "tier" of the damp semi-dark forest.
My only "prey" was a terrestrial planaria (from the order of ciliate worms), a wonderfully strange inhabitant of the dampest places. From a distance, it can be mistaken for a random crack in the soil, but up close it seems to be a frozen stream of dark glass. But the "glass" suddenly comes to life and begins to flow very slowly somewhere to the side, revealing a moving proboscis from a slit in the front of its body. Of course, you won't be satisfied with just one planaria, but to have a successful date with all the other forest inhabitants, you should come here not for a day, but for a week, and then we would be lucky, and more than once, I'm sure.
Perhaps, one can be completely calm about the fate of the reserve - in recent years, the ideas of nature conservation have been resonating in the hearts of Brazilians, and the words "ecology" and "forest protection" evoke the most positive reaction. At least, people working in this field are treated with great respect everywhere. A peasant, of course, will not cut down his hectare of plantation, from which his family feeds, in order to plant a "natural forest" on it. But he doesn't need to - the main thing is not to cut down the protected forest. And when the government allocates land for a plantation, it now requires guarantees that 20 percent of the area (if at least 20 hectares are sold) will be used for "natural plantations.
