THE MANU NEGRO TREE
Was it Worth the Snake Bite?
By Jack Ewing
When I first arrived at Hacienda Barú most of the lowlands were pasture and several parcels were rice fields. Some species of trees that had once been abundant had all been cut down and were locally extinct. In other words, they were absent from Hacienda Barú, but a few were still found in the region and the rest of the country. Probably the manu negro tree (Miniquartia guianensis) was the most sought-after, and the closest to extinction.
I first set foot on Hacienda Barú in February of 1972. According to Daniel Valverde, the foreman at the farm at that time, the posts for the corral were all manu negro, and the boards were made from another very scarce tree, the “ajo” (Caryocar costaricense). We still have a few ajo trees on the hacienda. The manu posts are resistant to the molds, fungi, and other microorganisms that rot the bottoms of most wooden posts. The ajo were perfect for boards because they were strong and resistant to the rain and sun.
Daniel told me that a couple of years earlier there was one manu negro in the old-growth forest in the highlands of Hacienda Barú, but somebody had cut it down. At that time the foreman was a man named Alvaro and Daniel was pretty sure that he was the culprit. One morning, Alvaro didn’t say where they were going but started into the rainforest with all the workers, Daniel, Nato, Challo and Arcele, and walked for about an hour through the jungle, uphill all the way, until they found the fallen manu tree. Alvaro left Arcele and Daniel to cut the trunk into two-meter-long logs which they would then split into posts that they needed to finish building a corral. They did this by pounding wedges into the logs to split them into thinner pieces the right diameter for a post. Alvaro left with Challo and Nato. He said they were going to blaze a trail where the workers would walk while carrying the posts on their shoulders down the mountain to the corral site. Daniel knew Alvaro well and suspected he was really headed to a pre-Columbian gravesite where he hoped to dig up some gold artifacts.
About twenty minutes after Daniel and Arcele started working they paused for a rest. They were sitting on a log taking a breather when Daniel thought he heard a distant voice. “Daniel, Arcele, come. Hurry. Alvaro’s been snakebit.” The voice came from the direction of the gravesite. Arcele heard it too.
“We’re on our way,” shouted Daniel.
Challo had waited at the gravesite while Nato took Alvaro down the hill to the road where they hoped he could catch a ride. It was three hours before a car came by and took a delirious Alvaro to San Isidro to the hospital, arriving six hours after having been bitten. They did what they could, but the bite was so serious that the doctors sent him to the San Juan de Dios Hospital in San Jose. The doctor in charge took one look at the bite and knew that amputating Alvaro’s arm was the only way of saving his life. Three weeks later Alvaro left the hospital with only his upper left arm from just above his elbow, but he was alive and doing as well as could be expected.
Daniel killed the huge terciopelo. He said it was over two meters long.
“God put that snake there to guard the grave. The bite was Alvaro’s punishment”, asserted Arcele.
During the next few days, the workers finished splitting the manu logs into posts. They carried about half of the posts down to the lowlands where they finished building the corral. The other half stayed on the mountain.
Around 1976 we decided to build a new corral. The old one had been built in a bad location for loading and unloading cattle, and it was too small. We bought one big manu negro tree from a man who had a property with old-growth forest about 10 kilometers from us. Including the posts we got from that tree, the rest of the posts from up on the mountain, and about half of the posts from the old corral, we had enough to build the new corral in an ideal location.
That all took place in the 1960s and 70s. In October of 2024, the foreman of Hacienda Barú National Wildlife Refuge said he had found two manu negro posts still upright in the ground, in a secondary forest on the south end of the hacienda. He asked if I knew how old the posts were. We talked for a while about exactly where he found them. It had been a long time, and things had changed. I finally figured out that they were from the old corral. I am holding those two posts in the photo. They were obviously from the tree that Daniel and Arcele were splitting into posts the day Alvaro was bitten by the snake. That was between 50 and 60 years ago. No other wood will last that long in the soil. No wonder people coveted the manu negro and the trees became locally extinct.
Around 1980 we started rewilding Hacienda Barú. Mother Nature did most of the work. We just quit chopping the weeds and She brought back natural vegetation, including native trees. Also, we planted some trees of several species that had become locally extinct or nearly so. Manu negro was the most important. Today we have about 30 of them. They grow slowly and it could be another 50 to 100 years before any of them are as big as the tree the two old posts in the photo came from.
Jack Ewing was born and educated in Colorado. In 1970 he and his wife Diane moved to the jungles of Costa Rica where they raised two children, Natalie and Chris. A newfound fascination with the rainforest was responsible for his transformation from cattle rancher into environmentalist and naturalist. His many years of living in the rainforest have rendered a multitude of personal experiences, many of which are recounted in his published collections of essays, Monkeys are Made of Chocolate & Where Jaguars & Tapirs Once Roamed. His latest book is, Monkeys are Made of Mangos.