Perhaps fittingly, the day I visited a patch of Valdivian temperate rain forest, it was raining cats and dogs. As we passed the north shore of Lago Ranco, the lake appeared little more than a vision in gray — leaden water, ghostly hills, and ashen masses of clouds — while the town of Futrono glistened under a sheet of water. From there, we headed into the hills.
Drenched hills near Futrono
I’d been invited to see the forest with a new friend, Caro, and her two young daughters, a toddler and a newborn. She and her husband had returned to Chile, to Valdivia, after living in San Francisco, California for several years. Before returning, they’d bought property in the hills with an eye to future landscaping conservation. I had learned of Caro and Tomás through a friend of theirs, the son-in-law of a college friend of mine. In spite of the tenuous connection, they were wonderfully welcoming.
After dropping off equipment at the home of a property caretaker, we drove on an unpaved road through lush, multi-storied vegetation, then veered onto a rutted, rooted track to the edge of a stream. While Caro nursed her newborn, I donned rain hat and jacket and set out on a mini-exploration.
From tropical to temperate rain forest:
I am well acquainted with tropical rain forests, having lived in Puerto Rico for many years and written a book about one particular forest there [titled Where Dwarfs Reign: A Tropical Rain Forest in Puerto Rico, it can be found online]. I’ve also visited the temperate rain forests in western Washington State. But this is forest in a distant hemisphere. Would it somehow feel different?
As I walked, the setting seemed comfortingly familiar. The stream flowed swiftly along its banks, mud-colored from the heavy rains. Moss covered wet tree trunks. Ferns clustered on the ground, and bamboo shrubs added delicate greenery to the understory. It felt good to be back in such lushness.
Puerto Rican rain forest
Valdivian rain forest
La Selva Valdiviana:
The Valdivian temperate rain forest covers some 96,000 square miles, extending along the Chilean coast from the city of Concepción in the north to Cochrane in the south, overlapping into Argentina where conditions permit. Combined with the Magellanic rain forests farther south, it is the only temperate rain forest in South America and the second largest in the world. [First are the Pacific rain forests from Alaska to California.]
Westerly winds and oceanic currents carry rain and fog across the Valdivian region, and temperatures range between 70° F. (21° C.) and 40° (4°), creating a lush landscape and an unusually high diversity of forest vegetation. Understories of bamboo, ferns, and the deep-pink bell-shaped blossoms of the copihue, Chile’s national flower, thrive beneath majestic broadleaf (hardwood) and mixed broadleaf-conifer forests.
Alerce trunk
Scientists have classified four main eco-systems — the deciduous forest, known for its tall southern beech species; the laurel-leafed forest; the Patagonian Andes forest; and the Northern Patagonian Forest. The Patagonian Andes shelters two of Chile’s best known conifers — the pehuén or monkey-puzzle tree (Araucaria araucanía), an ancient species that coexisted with the dinosaurs, and the giant alerce (Fitzroya cuppressoides), second oldest living organism on Earth.
Hemmed in by the Andes, the Pacific Ocean, and the vast deserts of northern Chile, the Valdivian forests have flourished in relative isolation over the millennia, giving rise to a great number of ancient endemic species, that is, species found only in the region. Yet many plant families of the Valdivian forests are also found in the temperate rain forests of Australia, Tasmania, and New Zealand.
You might ask how those plant families crossed the ocean. Well, they didn’t. At one time — between 550 and 320 million years ago — today’s continents of South America, Africa, Australia, and Antarctica shared one supercontinent known as Gondwanaland, and relics of that early vegetation endure.
Since the arrival of Europeans to South America, more than one-third of the original Valdivian forest region has disappeared, cleared over the centuries for agriculture. Of the remaining forested areas, approximately half is secondary forest: the original forest was felled and replanted with such popular lumber trees as eucalyptus. Original forests outside protected areas are in danger of shrinking further. Yet today more than 50 public and private parks and reserves protect 25 million acres of temperature forest in Chile and Argentina, and national and international efforts are being made to provide additional protection.
One international group, the World Wildlife Fund, has offices in Valdivia, on beautifully landscaped grounds in the Zona Típica neighborhood along the river. For more in-depth information about the forests, refer to its WWF website.
Copihue [Wikimedia Commons]