The making of a rainforest

Natural History, June, 1998 by Brian Morrissey

With scientific accuracy their goal, a team of Museum scientists and artists traveled to Central Africa to gather material for an ambitious new diorama.

For four hectic weeks starting in November 1996, twenty of us from the American Museum of Natural History worked in the forest around Bayanga, a village in the southwest corner of the Central African Republic (CAR). Our task was to collect plants, insects, animals, and information for an ambitious rainforest diorama that would be the centerpiece of the Museum's new Hall of Biodiversity.

We walked the forest in the shadow of Carl Akeley, who died in the mountains of the Belgian Congo (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) during a collecting trip in 1926. Akeley, a pioneer in both diorama construction and taxidermy, was one of the first Westerners to promote wildlife conservation in Africa. The twenty-eight habitat groups in the Museum's Akeley Hall of African Mammals are the result of his vision and skill, and many of the methods he and his contemporaries employed to create those groups are still in use. The diorama that we were collecting for, seventy years later, focuses on pristine and degraded forest, as well as on marshy salines (or salt licks), where elephants dig holes with their tusks to get at mineral-laden water.

A project of this scope is by necessity a collaboration of designers, artists, scientists, naturalists, and in this case, video and Film crews as well. It combines Akeley-vintage skills with far newer ones. The techniques for collecting and replicating plants and leaves for the traditionally designed foreground in the 26-by90-foot diorama remain virtually unchanged since Akeley's time. But instead of conventional background paintings, the new diorama features state-of-the-art video projections. The expeditions video crew shot seventy hours of material, and renowned wildlife photographer Alan Root filmed at three forest sites to provide material for the moving backdrops.

The Bayanga site was chosen primarily because of the nature of the forest surrounding it. The Dzanga-Sangha, a relatively intact virgin rainforest, is part of nearly 500 million acres of tropical moist forest that covers the center of Africa. Forest elephants roam the Dzanga-Sangha, along with buffalo and antelope, white-nosed and moustache monkeys, gray-cheeked mangabeys, duikers, bushpigs, and elusive bongos. The forest also provides habitat for western lowland gorillas; but only one person in our group was lucky enough to spot one. Plant life is diverse, with African tulip and rubber trees, strangler figs, cecropia, and more. The Museum also chose this site for what it could teach us about threats to that diversity--and about threats to forest people's traditional ways and to their use of the forest's raw materials.

Twenty-five years ago, Bayanga was a village whose 300 people got by mainly through fishing the adjacent Sangha River. The population grew when a Yugoslavian logging company set up operations nearby, providing some jobs and the hope of more. Today 3,000 people live there, most having come in search of work from elsewhere in the CAP, and from neighboring countries. The unemployment rate is more than 90 percent. Families living in mud huts or wooden shacks help sustain themselves with a few chickens, goats, or pigs. Although they trade with the indigenous BaAka people, the relationship between the groups seems uneasy. The BaAka, who number between 2,000 and 3,000, live in their own villages scattered through the forest and have given up their traditional nomadic life.

We employed both BaAka workers and other locals to help cut trees and vines and do other tasks. We also learned from them: for example, the BaAka sutured cuts with the pincers of live, half-inch-long driver ants. One notable item of local lore concerned the potency of garlic root. The information that it was to be chewed by "the married men" was imparted with a grin. Some of us (not I) partook of two-inch-long roasted goliath beetle grubs and live termites, which--I'll have to take their word for it--taste sweet and nutty. With the local workers' help, we documented and preserved leaves, plants, and trees--close to 130 species in all; in the end we used 90 in the diorama.

What made this venture different from previous Museum collecting trips was the large size of the planned diorama, the number of people who participated, and the remoteness of the site. As the work was coming to an end, political unrest 300 miles away in the capital, Bangui, forced us to improvise a quick exit through Cameroon. We crated the several tons of material we had gathered and arranged for its transport to New York. The four weeks had been grueling: the heat, the sweat bees, the mosquitoes, the logistics, the sheer scale of collecting. The venture had also been exhilarating.

Certainly, a diorama could have been made with photographic references alone, and most observers would not be able to spot slight inaccuracies. But we were on a quest for scientific accuracy. Just as in Akeley's day, we gathered small trees, vines, branches, and other woody material and--once they had been fumigated--incorporated them into the diorama. We took photographs and measurements of larger trees to help us construct replicas back In New York. We made latex rubber molds of tree bark and plaster molds of leaves to get their textures just right. Leaves, fungi, mosses, fruits, and flowers cannot be well preserved and must be replicated. We documented the minutiae of the forest on film. We made color studies so that precise details could be recalled later. The one thing we could not measure was the advantage to us, as re-creators, of experiencing the full power of the Dzanga-Sangha: its light and sound, its colors, insects, and debris--the myriad details that make up the whole forest.