It’s 8am on a Tuesday and Rudi Swart, 33, is getting ready for yet another day in the office. After tossing his work bag in his car, he picks up his colleague – experienced rock climber, Matthew Kingma – from his home in the South African town of George. From there it’s a 20-minute drive to the Groenkop Forest parking area, and a 25-minute walk to the 17-metre (55-foot) assegai tree (Curtisia dentata) Swart – who himself measures 1.94 metres (6.36 feet) – will be climbing today.
Before climbing the tree, they need to throw a rope with a weighted end over a suitable branch. This is a frustrating process that can take up to an hour of trying, but today they are in luck: Kingma scores a perfect strike on his fourth attempt. Once the rope is around the branch, they pull it down and use it to take a second rope to the top of the tree. Swart attaches one of the ropes to his harness and climbs the other one, while Kingma waits at the bottom and makes sure his charge cannot fall. “You feel it in the legs, not the arms,” says Swart, with a diffident laugh. “When I started, I was slow. But now I can get up a tree in about 10 minutes.”
After making himself comfortable on a branch with a good view of a clump of the assegai’s small, off-white flowers, Swart gets to work. Over the next four hours he makes a note of every creature that visits the flowers, and he tries to catch at least one sample of each different species. He also takes hourly temperature and wind speed (he brings a portable anemometer up the tree with him!) recordings. Kingma, meanwhile, sits on the forest floor and waits …
As fascinating as the world of forest canopies is, why does it matter?
“The simple answer is ‘because destroying the planet would be bad for us’,” says Midgley. “People know that the trees matter, but the trees matter because they support all these species.”
And it works both ways, says Haddad. “These giant trees, which are so important for carbon sequestration, depend on tiny insects for their survival.” The insects don’t just pollinate the trees, adds Swart. “They retain connectivity between the forests and keep ecosystems healthy.”
Cataloguing the secret world above our heads is the first step to conserving this biodiversity, says Midgley: “We need to know what we’ve got. Then we can try to work out how it all fits together.”
“There are still a lot of blank spots on the map,” agrees Haddad. “While there are pockets where we have a lot of material [most of it still waiting to be identified], countries like Angola and Mozambique are very poorly studied. And the canopy is the last spot you look at in a new country…”
It’s a mammoth task ahead, but all the scientists Al Jazeera spoke to seemed undeterred. Midgley is experimenting with artificial baits in a bid to attract hoverflies to bucket traps; Haddad is “frantically trying to describe as many species as possible”; and Swart is working hard to secure funding for Africa’s first canopy crane.
The good news: It is not too late. “We still have forests that are functional,” says Midgley. “We just need to keep looking.”
The only way is up.