April’s first week or two can tend to be toward the dry season on the weather chart but even at that the rains will be picking up. The last couple of weeks you can’t count on anything but the rains and lots of electrical storms blowing down the river. Having said that I must add that I’ve seen years when the water was still very low the first of May, but that wasn’t the norm.
Those jungle palms along the river banks (including the now famous Acai palm) will have their fruit pods showing anytime now. Their fruit however won’t be ready to harvest for several months yet when the water is deep and the jungle floor is flooded. The jungle animals and birds will be anticipating a change of diet as the fruits and berries common to wet season begin to show.
April is the last opportunity a procrastinating jungle gardener will have to fire his garden before May’s grey skies and tropical downpours end all chance of a dry clean burn. Even at that it may be too late already. Those that fired their gardens weeks ago are already planting their sites. Remember that when a garden is burned off what is left looks like a giant game of pick-up-sticks. Ideally the leaves, branches and smaller trunks will be burned to ashes but the bigger trunks will still be there and will still be there when the site is abandoned several years hence. The better the burn the more ashes and the more ashes the better the cassava, pineapples, taro, sugar cane, bananas etc. will grow. After the site is abandoned ( left because the weeds are uncontrollable and the soil has lost it’s nutrients) brush begins to grow on the backs of the weeds and eventually trees will once again grace that spot on the river bank.
At dawn you might hear a diehard turkey singing but the turtles big and small will have stopped laying till next dry season. Soon all the sand bars will be under water and the only way for a turtle to even sun itself will be to crawl onto a log along the river bank. The rocks, sand bars and river banks all wait wait for the cool, cleansing waters from the rains upriver to wash and cover them for the next few months. Come next dry season the once again uncovered rocks will be right where the waters covered them but some of the sand bars will have shifted. The swift current is perpetually marching the millions of grains of sand downstream and while most of those grains of sand that collectively make up the sand bars end up in the same configuration as last year, some, because of the river’s current will end up as part of a sand bar that didn’t exist at that spot last year.
Though rainy season isn’t as pleasant for living in the jungle, it is as necessary for the jungle’s life cycle as is the dry season and when April comes around you know rainy season is waiting to appear any day from behind the next storm cloud.
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