A Field Guide to Trees

Plus the perfect gift for globally curious friends and family

Field Guide Vol. 257

As the crisp days of late fall settle in, the beauty of trees around the world takes on a new kind of magic as we transition from fall foliages to the holiday season. From the vast towering giants of California’s redwood forests to Japan’s delicate cherry blossoms, trees play a vital role in shaping the landscapes and cultures around us. Journey with us from the Amazon rainforest to New York City in this week’s Field Guide dedicated to trees worldwide.

Stranger’s Guide makes a perfect gift for globally curious friends and family—and right now we’re offering a 20 percent discount! Not only do they get special subscriber-only emails like Field Guide, they’ll also get to select one of our award-winning print guides, mailed directly to their door. Each of our print guides explores a single location through photography, essays, journalism and fiction. And of course, your dollars go directly to supporting journalists around the world. 

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Did you know?

By Hugo.arg, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

In Georgia, the country’s richest man, billionaire and former Prime Minister, Bidzina Ivanishvili, has a seemingly bizarre obsession with trees. Ivanishvili spent tens of millions of dollars and erected a park next to his residence filled with trees that were hoarded in from throughout the country. More than 200 trees were dug up from Georgia’s impoverished villages and various forests and shipped off to the park site by boats and trucks to be replanted in his family’s Shekvetili Dendrological Park which was opened to the public in 2020 with free entry. During the tree transplantation process, massive trees were seen atop floating barges on the Black Sea and disrupting train routes so trucks of trees could cross. According to local reports, at least five trees died over the course of the process. 

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Trail near a tributary of the Amazon. 2013. Photograph by Steven Prorak/Alamy.

Birding Hurts Your Neck

By Karim Ganem Maloof

After spending whole days looking up, your neck grows sore. You get spasms and realize how unnatural it is to gaze at the sky for more than a few moments. After several days of doing it, your head can remain fixed in that position, your gaze glued to the ceiling, your cramped muscles not letting you look down again. I imagine an island of bird-watchers, their heads in the clouds, visited by Gulliver on one of his voyages. It could be located in the middle of the Amazon River.

If you look at a map of Colombia, you will note that its southern tip has what could be a fanciful little tail drawn by a child. It was drawn in a 1922 treaty that granted Colombia a trapezoid of Amazonian forest in Peru that provided access to the largest river in the world—and with it a Peruvian port that has since passed into Colombian hands: Leticia.

In a park in this small riverside town, a wondrous thing takes place at dawn and at dusk: flocks of thousands of white-wingedparakeets, Brotogeris versicolurus, arrive from the jungle to perch in the park’s trees. It is a mystery why, of all the countless trees in the Amazon jungle, the birds choose the ones in this park. Some say it may be due to genetic memory, because this place used to be a wetland. Or perhaps parakeets prefer a moderately urban environment where they can spend the night, thus avoiding the predators that abound in the jungle.

At dawn, the bright green of the parakeets blends in with the foliage of the trees. When they begin to vocalize, it’s as if the mass of leaves were turning shrill. Suddenly, the birds fall from the branches, screeching in unison, an explosion of color denuding the trees. They spread and compress like green clouds above our heads, and a few feathers float down from the sky. The birds spend an hour in a sort of dance, stretching their wings before returning to the forest in small bands. They remind me of murmurings, the way thousands of starlings oscillate without touching each other in a silent flock that looks like an equalizer wave. The little parakeets, by contrast, vibrate in a cacophony.