Qualla: Caetetus Ecological Station

Caetetus Ecological Station: Introduction

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Patypm, CC BY-SA 4.0. For six years, no one saw them. The black lion tamarins - all four hands of fur and amber eyes, one of the rarest primates on Earth - had gone silent among the 2,176 hectares of forest that researchers had been combing on their behalf. Then in August 2016, near the administrative headquarters of the Caetetus Ecological Station, two adults appeared. They had been there all along. In the sandstone plateau country of western Sao Paulo, where 94 percent of the original semi-deciduous forest has been cut and burned and plowed under, the tamarins had simply refused to vanish.

Image: Patypm | CC BY-SA 4.0

Caetetus Ecological Station: The Six Percent

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. Once, a vast seasonal forest stretched across the western plateau of Sao Paulo, a green corridor where peroba and cedar and jequitibA rose in layered canopies above the red earth. The trees were too valuable to survive the twentieth century. Loggers took the hardwoods first - per...

Image: Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Caetetus Ecological Station: From Paradise Farm

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Patypm, CC BY-SA 4.0. The land began as Fazenda Paraiso - Paradise Farm - private property on the Marilia Plateau. In August 1976, Governor Paulo Egidio Martins signed decree 8.346, declaring the land of public utility and expropriating it for the state. It became the Galia State Reserve. Eleven years...

Image: Patypm | CC BY-SA 4.0

Caetetus Ecological Station: The Tamarin's Return

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Patypm, CC BY-SA 4.0. The black lion tamarin, Leontopithecus chrysopygus, is not black all over. Its body is dark, but the rump and thighs glow a deep rust orange, a flash of warm color when the small primate moves through the understory. Before its rediscovery, the species was thought extinct for mos...

Image: Patypm | CC BY-SA 4.0

Caetetus Ecological Station: Three Hundred Voices

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Patypm, CC BY-SA 4.0. Between October 2005 and December 2006, ornithologists counted birds at Caetetus. They recorded 226 species in a single forest of this modest size. Later surveys added 68 more, bringing the total to 293 - a roster that includes Atlantic Forest endemics, cerrado specialists, and t...

Image: Patypm | CC BY-SA 4.0

Caetetus Ecological Station: Walking the Paraiso Trail

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Patypm, CC BY-SA 4.0. The station admits visitors, but carefully. Students and organized groups follow the Paraiso Trail and the Cipo Trail through interpretive signs explaining the vegetation - the chupa-ferro with its iron-hard wood, the catigua, the guaraiuva. The aim is not recreation but reconnec...

Image: Patypm | CC BY-SA 4.0