Barro Colorado — Tropical Island 

 Laboratory ^ 



By Lloyd Glenn Ingles 



Department of Biology 

 Fresno State College, Fresno, Calif. 



[With 6 plates] 



Near the forest edge two rufous motmots, their voices an octave 

 apart, greet the dawn with short bursts of hollow hoots. High over- 

 head a pair of red-lored parrots squawk raucously, making a noise out 

 of all proportion to their numbers, as they plunge swiftly down to 

 become silent in the verdure of the forest. Then, far up the ridge from 

 the giant branches of a towering Bombacopsis tree, comes the first deep- 

 throated roar of a howling monkey and another sultry tropical Feb- 

 ruary day begins. This day finds us on Barro Colorado Island in the 

 middle of Gatun Lake beside the world's greatest highway, the Pan- 

 ama Canal. Many years ago, as the Chagres River was dammed to 

 form the lake, 6 square miles of fine tropical forest on higher ground 

 became Barro Colorado Island. How the persistent efforts of James 

 2Jetek, its resident director, William Morton Wheeler, Thomas Bar- 

 bour, Frank Chapman, and other fine scientists finally culminated in 

 getting the island set aside under the auspices of the Smithsonian In- 

 stitution as a tropical wildlife reserve, with a laboratory for many 

 kinds of tropical research, in a story all its own. Here a scientist, or 

 any person interested in nature, may come, live under comfortable con- 

 ditions, walk over machete-cut trails through the forest, and study any- 

 thing he wishes. Nearly 700 publications based on research done on 

 the island speak well for its importance as a scientific institution. 



It was here my wife Elizabeth, our 5-year-old son John, and I set- 

 tled down for an entire winter after an arduous trip by car as far as 

 Nicaragua over the Pan American Highway. Barro Colorado is not a 

 jungle or a tropical rain forest in the technical sense because it does 

 have a dry season during the winter months when only 10 to 15 inches 

 of rain falls. The rest of the year, however, there are over 100 inches 

 of rain, but the decrease during winter months gives this forest a dif- 



* Reprinted by permission from Pacific Discovery, vol. 6, No. 4, July-August 1953. 



361 



