Philip Brown

Into the Unknown

Today was one small step for Olly, Kristen and I but one giant leap for the Yachana Reserve. We set off
this afternoon as intrepid explorers going into the unkown with only a GPS to protect us.

The north eastern corner of the reserve has never been studied or mapped before and the topographic
maps on the GIS programme indicated that there is a big depression which potentially may hold a
stream with a collection of tributaries. Our objective for the afternoon was to find out if there were any
streams and to map the location and route of any we found.

Olly, Kristen and I set off from base after lunch at a fast pace and made it to the point where we
intended to leave the trail in good time. Within ten minutes of leaving the trail we stuck gold and found
a small but fast flowing (it has rained a lot this week) stream. We walked along the stream plotting
points on the GPS every five meters. We knew no recent GVI staff and volunteers had ever been along
that stream before and judging by the density of the undergrowth, nobody had walked along it in years,
if at all. It was quite exciting to think that we were the first people (or at least the first people for a very
long time) to walk that route.

We followed the stream for just under an hour passing over a few small waterfalls and interesting rock
forms where the water had slowly erroded it over the years. When it was time to head back to base we
cut off from the stream and used the GPS to find the most direct route back to the trail. A couple of
minutes after leaving the stream the wind picked up and within ten minutes the rain and thunder had
rolled in as it has done increasingly so over the last two weeks. We quickly made our way back to the
trail looking like three drowned agouties and headed back to base.

In the evening, after we’d dried out and eaten tea, we put the points we had plotted onto the maps on
the GIS programme on the lap top. The stream we found matched where the depressions on the map
were and further along from where we left the stream, the ground gets even lower and had gullies and
gorges to the one we followed joining it. Over the coming weeks we will go and map the rest of the
stream, other similar ones and hopefully a larger stream or river where the smaller ones converge.

Before I came here my friends were asking me if I would find any species new to science. I told them
that I didn’t think I would, what I should have told them was that I may find a stream new to the reserve
which will provides a habitat for a wide variety of rain forest species!