Elaphoglossum backhouseanum: A Real Basket Case!

摘要

Walking quietly with wife Linda, I hear the light gurgling of a creek, the actual water out of sight down a rather steep wooded embankment. Sounds from the boulder-strewn creek bottom are hardly noticeable now, this late in the dry season. Even the calls of a black-throated trogon drown it out. It is the end of the third week of April, and we are still awaiting the year's first big rains. The dry season persists in central Panama, on average, from mid-December to mid-April. But where we are standing, beginning sometime in April and continuing into December, a whopping 120 inches of rain, on average (by my records), are crammed into an eight-month-long wet season. And this is on the rain-shadow side of the mountains, the "Pacific" side of the divide. Much more rain is dumped on the wetter Caribbean side, as the moisture-laden breezes blow predominantly from the northeast, resulting in the clouds releasing the bulk of the rain before ever reaching us. But life has adapted quite nicely to this annual natural cycle of a four-month drought, followed by eight months of several-downpours-per-week rains.