This poem is a pantoum, which is based on a Malayan poetic form. Every line in the poem is used twice. Study the poem and see if you can make a chart of the pattern of repetition. Notice that the last stanza picks up the two unrepeated lines from the first stanza so that the poem begins and ends with the same line.

The poem is called "Looking for Jaguar" because in fact jaguars are seldom seen. Silent, secretive, and mostly nocturnal, they are one of the rain forest's most mysterious creatures. A skilled hunter, the jaguar gets its name from the Guarani Indians who called it yaguara, which means "beast that kills its prey in one leap."

The largest cat in the western hemisphere, a jaguar can weigh as much as 300 pounds and measure over six feet long. It often catches its prey by the head, and its powerful bite can easily crack open a skull.

To learn more about jaguars, you might enjoy reading the following books:

Rosa Raposa by F. Isabel Campoy
Jaguars by Jason Cooper
Jaguars by Pat Lalley
The Jaguar by Ann Malaspina
Jaguar in the Rain Forest by Joanne Ryder
Jaguars by Darlene R. Stille
Jaguars by Lynn M. Stone
Jaguars by Elizabeth Vogel

The idea for this poem was given to me by Jasmine, a fifth grader whose class I met at the Philadelphia Zoo. Her response to a foot-long milipede was "I'm going to have nightmares tonight." The milipede isn't a part of my poem, but it wasn't hard to find rain forest creatures who could give me nightmares.

One of them, the Goliath bird-eating spider, can measure eleven inches from toe to toe. When it's angry, it can hiss by rubbing its leg bristles together and can flick from its body tiny hairs which are irritating to human skin.

The eyelash viper dangles out of trees and instantly strikes if anyone accidentally brushes against it. Its fangs are very long and its scales sharp and rough. An especially large scale above each eye resembles an eyelash and gives the snake its name.

Vampire bats, of course, live on blood. If they fail to drink blood two nights in a row, they will die. Outside of Dracula movies, however, vampire bats aren't really dangerous unless they happen to carry rabies.

A vampire bat doesn't suck blood, but bites the skin and laps up the blood that oozes from the wound. A chemical in the bat's saliva prevents the blood from clotting and keeps it flowing for the half hour the bat needs to finish its meal. A vampire bat has a wingspan of only about eight inches and a body no bigger than an adult's thumb. It only drinks about two tablespoons of blood a night.

To learn more about giant spiders, vipers, and vampire bats, you might enjoy reading the following books:

Tree Vipers by Sherie Bargar
Vipers by Eric Ethan
Tarantulas by Helen Frost
Vipers by Linda George
Bird-eating Spiders by James E. Gerholt
Bird-eating Spiders by Louise Martin
Vampire Bats by Patrick Merrick
Vampire Bats by Laurence Pringle
Vampire Bats by Emily Raabe
Vampire Bats by Anne Welsbacher

The giant armadillo can range in length from three to five feet and in weight from 55-130 pounds. It has large, curved claws which make it a powerful digger and have earned it the nickname "gravedigger armadillo" because it digs holes as large as a person.

When it's frightened, it speedily digs a hole to hide in (this only takes about two minutes). Once inside the hole, the armadillo braces itself and can be pulled out only with great effort. Occasionally when an armadillo is scared, it jumps straight up in the air, as high as three feet, with such force that it can sometimes dislocate a predator's jaw.

To learn more about armadillos, you might enjoy reading the following books:

The Strange Armadillo by Wyatt Blassingame
Armadillos by Judith Jango-Cohen
The Armadillo by Seliesa Pembleton
The Armadillo by Steve Potts
The Astonishing Armadillo by Dee Stuart

I wrote this poem because the sounds I heard on rainforest videos fascinated me. I "watched" one videotape over and over with my eyes closed, so I could concentrate on what I was hearing.

The most striking sound I heard was the roaring howl of the howler monkeys, which are not only the noisiest residents of South American rainforests, but the loudest land animals anywhere. Their calls can be heard for a distance of two miles through the jungle foliage or for three miles across a lake. The only animal who makes more noise than a howler is the blue whale.

But there's one jungle song that's even more overwhelming than the cries of the howlers. So that's why the poem ends with that most frequent sound of the rainforest, the music of rain.

You can find out more about howler monkeys by reading:

Tropical Forest Mammals by Elaine Landau
Animals that Live in Trees by Jane R. McCauley

The slowest mammals in the world, sloths live in trees, where they slowly move upside down along branches and lianas, eating leaves. Algae often grow in the grooves of a sloth's shaggy hair, giving the animal a greenish tinge, which camouflages it well in its leafy world.

Sloths rarely descend to the rainforest floor, where they can't even stand up straight but have to drag themselves along by their front claws, with their bellies scraping the ground. Strangely enough, however, sloths are excellent swimmers and can travel long distances when the rainforest is flooded.

Sloths eat about two percent of the total leaf-production of the jungle. Because leaves take a long time to be digested, a sloth spends eighteen to twenty hours a day just sleeping and digesting.

If you like sloths, you might enjoy reading the following books:

Score One for the Sloths by Helen Lester
The Sloth: World's Slowest Mammal by Joy Paige
The Upside-down Sloth by Fay Robinson
Sherman Is a Slowpoke by Mitchell Sharmat
Anteaters, Sloths, and Armadillos by Ann O. Squire
Too Tired by Ann Turnbull
Sloth's Shoes by Jeanne Willis

The most wonderful aspect of writing these poems was discovering the absolutely unbelievable plants and animals that live in the world's rainforests. One of the most amazing of these is the Amazonian walking palm (socratea exorrhiza), which over a very long period of time "walks" toward the nearest patch of sunlight. The poem itself explains how the tree moves.

To learn more about tropical plants, you might enjoy reading the following books:

Trees of the Tropics by Jennifer Cochrane
Palm Trees by Marcia S. Freeman
Plants of the Tropics by Susan Reading

Probably the most mysterious kind of rain forest is the cloud forest, which occurs on mountains at high altitudes. Cloud forests are cooler, more humid, and more dense with growth than other types of rain forest. At altitudes above 6600 feet, the cloud forest canopy may not be much higher than a person's head.

The temperature in the cloud forest ranges around 50-65 degrees Fahrenheit, and plants like mosses, orchids, and ferns grow on almost every branch and tree trunk. The air tastes clean and fresh because it contains extra oxygen. Clouds drift through the forest, and the plants catch droplets of mist, along with particles of dust blown there from as far away as the Sahara desert.

Because of the abundance of water, there is an abundance of animals as well as plants. More than half the world's species live in the cloud forest. The animals mentioned in the poem can all be found in the Monteverde cloud forest in Costa Rica. In that one forest, there are more than 5,000 species of moths, 30 kinds of hummingbirds, and over 420 different types of orchids.

To learn more about the cloud forest, see if your library's collection contains the videotape, "Expedition to the Mist. Mysteries of the Cloud Forest" (Amazonia Expedition. Voices from the Rain Forest).

Or read the following books:

The Umbrella by Jan Brett
Quetzal: Sacred Bird of the Cloud Forest by Dorothy Hinshaw Patent

The anaconda is the world's largest snake. It can grow to be 20-30 feet long and weighs about 200-300 pounds (females are usually larger than males). The anaconda is short-tempered and can strike very quickly, biting and holding on with large, sharp teeth. It kills its prey by constriction or sometimes by drowning. Anacondas occasionally eat humans, and some people eat them.

This poem is a ghazal, a variation of an ancient Persian poetry form written in couplets (two-line stanzas). Each line is long, and each couplet is like one bead on a necklace - it stands alone, but it adds its own small part to the overall thought and feeling of the poem. The poet Ron Padgett says that a ghazal is more like a piece of music than a story.

To learn more about anacondas, you might enjoy reading the following books:

Anacondas by Sherie Barger
Boas, Pythons, and Anacondas by Eric Ethan
Anacondas by Linda George
Anacondas by James E. Gerholdt
Anacondas by Christy Steele
Anacondas by Valerie J. Weber
Anacondas by Anne Welsbacher

The blue piranhas described in this poem are among the most ferocious piranha species. They attack in schools of hundreds, each one biting off a piece of their prey and swallowing it whole. Their 28-31 teeth are so sharp they're used as a cutting tool by some rain forest people, and they eat so fast they can devour a cow in a few minutes.

The fierceness of piranhas, however, has been exaggerated. Many species of piranha are quiet, peaceable fish who feed primarily on fruit which falls into the water. Both kinds of piranha live in the Amazon River, where they congregate especially in areas where the water is sluggish, often lurking among giant water lilies.

To learn more about piranhas, you might enjoy reading the following books:

Piranhas by Mary Berendes
Piranhas by Sam Dollar
Piranhas by Elaine Landau
Piranhas by Emily McAuliffe
Piranhas by Manolito Pinkguni
10 Sly Piranhas by William Wise

One of the most unusual rain forests is the flooded forest along the Amazon River, which occurs when the river overflows its banks, sometimes for a distance of 30 miles inland. For part of every year, thousands of square miles of forest are covered by water to a depth of 40-50 feet. In this extraordinary habitat, creatures of the trees and creatures of the water intermingle.

A person in a boat can find at eye level plants and animals that normally would be located high in the treetops. Noisy Amazonian birds called caciques nest in colonies which sometimes hang only 4 or 5 feet above the water. Curious capuchin monkeys lean close to observe humans paddling past. Orchids bloom within easy reach.

And river creatures swim through the trees. Pink river dolphins leap over branches. A species of blind, blood-red catfish about half an inch long spends its whole life living in the leaf litter. When the flooding recedes, sponges can be found stuck to the tree trunks, a unique and magical conjunction of worlds.

To learn more about the flooded forest, you might enjoy viewing the National Geographic video, Amazon: Land of the Flooded Forest.

Or you might want to read the following books:

The Amazon by James Barter
River Life by James L. Castner
This Place Is Wet by Vicki Cobb
River by Judith Heide Gilliland
The Amazon by Rosemary McConnell
Encantado: Pink Dolphin of the Amazon by Sy Montgomery
The Amazon by Michael Pollard
The Amazon by Julia Waterlow

White tent-making bats from Central and northern South America make shelters for themselves out of large leaves. They chew through the leaf veins on both sides of the midrib so that the leaf collapses into a tent. These round little bats, about the size of golf balls, cluster in groups as large as 18.

Lianas, found in all tropical rain forests, are woody climbing plants that grow upward from the forest floor, heading toward the sunlight. They often flower high in the canopy. A liana can be hundreds of feet long and as thick around as a man's chest. Twenty percent of the forest's total biomass is composed of lianas, which festoon nearly every rainforest tree.

Although bananas didn't arrive in North America until the 1870's, they have long been known to indigenous people. The banana plant is not a tree but the world's largest herb, and there are over 800 varieties widely distributed throughout the world's tropical rain forests. Banana leaves are so large that some people have used them as sails for boats, and the fruit is so much enjoyed that the average American eats 25 pounds of bananas every year.

To learn more, you might enjoy reading the following books:

Bananas: from Manolo to Margie by George Ancona
Bananas! by Jacqueline Farmer
Bats of the World by Gary L. Graham
Beautiful Bananas by Elizabeth Laird
Plants of the Tropics by Susan Reading
Banana by Pam Robson
Why the Banana Split by Rick Walton

The panther chameleon, found in Madagascar, uses its ability to change color in 15 seconds as a way of expressing its emotions. Green when it's happy, it fades to tan if it becomes tired or ill and turns yellow when it feels like giving up. If it gets mad, bright stripes appear, and when it loses its temper completely, it turns black.

A chameleon's tongue - hollow inside like a straw, with a sticky tip - can shoot out and catch an insect in 4/100ths of a second. Its eyes move individually and can swivel down, up, and backwards.

To learn more about chameleons, you might enjoy reading the following books:

Chameleons by Kathy Darling
The Panther Chameleon by Gary W. Ferguson et al
The Remarkable Chameleon by Lilo Hess
Chameleons Are Cool by Martin Jenkins
Colorful Chameleons by Michelle Knudsen
Masters of Disguise by James Martin
The Chameleon by Jake Miller
Chameleons by Rebecca Stefoff

A resident of dense rain forest in the eastern Congo region of Africa, the odd-looking okapi is a member of the giraffe family. A timid, leaf-eating creature, it's smaller and has shorter legs than a giraffe. The okapi can clean its ears and eyelids with its long tongue.

Although indigenous people were familiar with the okapi for centuries, European explorers thought it was an imaginary animal until the early 1900's when an okapi was finally "discovered" by Sir Harry Johnston, the governor of Uganda.

If you find the okapi interesting, you might enjoy reading:

Ever Heard of an Aardwolf? A Miscellany of Uncommon Animals by Madeline Moser

The snake in this poem, a green mamba, belongs to the most feared group of snakes in Africa. Mambas are aggressive, fast-moving, and highly poisonous. Just two drops of black mamba venom can kill a human.

Green mambas are well-camouflaged in the trees where they spend most of their time, looking for birds. They will flee from humans if they can, but they fight fiercely if they're cornered.

If you're interested in mambas, you might enjoy reading:

Mambas by Sherie Barger
Mambas by Adele D. Richardson

The world's largest frog, the goliath frog, starts out as a normal-sized tadpole, eating water plants that are found near rapids and waterfalls. As an adult, it weighs as much as a large housecat and stretches out to two and a half feet in length from head to toe. Its body alone is a foot long. The goliath frog is mute because it has no vocal sac. It can be found in West Africa, along fast-moving rivers in Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea.

The world's smallest antelope, the royal antelope, stands only ten to twelve inches high at the shoulder. It's the size of a housecat or rabbit, with legs as slender as a pencil. It has sharp striped horns and a trunk-like nose that wiggles up and down. Shy and nocturnal, it eats fruits and leaves. The royal antelope is found in West Africa, from Sierra Leone to Ghana, where it lives in the most remote and dense forests though it occasionally wanders onto peanut plantations.

Both of these animals are typical of evolution in the rain forest. Because the antelope lives in thick undergrowth, it has evolved into a dwarf so it can travel more easily while the cold-blooded frog, because it lives in a constantly warm climate, was able to evolve into a giant.

To learn more about the goliath frog and royal antelope, you might enjoy reading The Last Rain Forests, ed. by Mark Collins.

Named for its colorful plumage, the rainbow lorikeet lives in eastern Australia and New Guinea. This bird has a long fringed tongue which helps it to lap up nectar, one of the main components of its diet. It has a tough beak like a nutcracker, which is useful in crushing flowers to squeeze out the nectar. Its beak also helps the lorikeet to grasp branches as it climbs, and its short legs give the bird balance and stability.

Rainbow lorikeets often travel in flocks that can contain as many as 1,000 birds. They're also sociable with humans and are easy to tame, often making themselves at home in backyards or campgrounds where they can learn to land on a person's arm or follow someone into a camper for a snack.

To learn more about lorikeets and other rainforest birds, you might want to view the Rand McNally videocasette, "Exploring Tropical Australia."

You might also enjoy reading the following books:

Parrots by Helen Frost
Parrots by Casey Horton
Rainforest Birds by Bobbie Kalman
Parrots Around the World by Mark Rauzon
Parrots by Lynn M. Stone
Parrots by Merebeth Switzer

The rafflesia, the world's largest single flower, grows up to 3 feet across and weighs up to 38 pounds. A parasite, it grows inside the Tetrastigma vine, a member of the grape family. It has no leaves, stem, or root, and only the flower appears outside the vine. Though the bud of this flower can take up to 10 months to develop, the blossom only lasts 3 to 6 days. The flower contains several gallons of nectar that smells like rotting meat and attracts flies, which pollinate the plant. The rafflesia is found in Sumatra, Borneo, and the Malaysian peninsula.

To learn more about rafflesia, you might enjoy reading Rafflesia of the World by J. Nais.

Tigers live in rain forest habitat in various parts of Asia, including India, Indochina, and Sumatra. A tiger can weigh as much as 500 pounds and prefers to attack prey over 100 pounds, especially deer, buffalo, wild pigs, and young elephants - though a hungry tiger will eat almost anything, even humans.

To protect themselves from tigers, people working in the jungle sometimes wear masks on the backs of their heads so a tiger coming up behind them will think they're watching it and won't pounce. Another technique is to make a dummy of a human, wired with electricity so a tiger who attacks it will receive a mild electric shock and be reluctant to attack a "person" again.

Tigers sometimes lie in ambush for their prety or approach it stealthily until a final pounce when they spring upon their victim suddenly. A tiger can move at 35 mph for a short distance of 30 or 40 feet. It may fail in its hunting attempts, however, as often as 20 times before it finally succeeds in bringing down its quarry.

For more about tigers, you might enjoy reading the following books:

Tiger Baby by Susi Bohdal
Tigress by Helen Cowcher
Tiger Trek by Ted Lewin
Adventures of Riley: Tigers in Terai by Amanda Lumry and Laura Hurwitz
Tigers by Don Middleton
Nine-in-One Grr! Grr! by Cathy Spagnoli
Tiger Trail by Kay Winters

All of the plants and animals in this poem are found in the world's highest and densest rain forest canopy, located on the island of Borneo in Malaysia.

Fairy bluebirds are about 10 inches long and utter very loud calls. They generally travel in pairs or in small groups of 6 to 8 birds, living on a diet of flower nectar, fruit, and insects. But when their favorite food, the fig, is ripe, they gather in flocks on the fig trees. Sometimes a whole flock will descend together to bathe in a forest stream.

Hornbills are birds with huge bills topped by horny bumps called casques. The mainstay of their diet is wild figs, and they flock on the canopy fig trees with the bluebirds. They also eat snakes, lizards, and even bats. The call of the helmeted hornbill, which sounds like a cackling human laugh, can be heard for a mile.

Tualang trees grow as high as 250 feet tall. In the same family as peas, they have seeds enclosed in large pods. Their bark is smooth and silvery, and their irritating sap can cause a rash in humans. Tualang trees are the favorite nesting sites of the inch-long Asian rock bee, the world's biggest honey bee. One tree can hold, hanging from the bottom of its branches, as many as 100 nests. Each nest is about 6 feet across and houses 30,000 bees. Honey gatherers, who climb up to the bee nests with torches to scatter the bees, can harvest 1,000 pounds of honey from one tree.

Flying snakes actually glide rather than fly, so they can only travel from a higher tree to a lower tree. They do this by flattening their entire bodies and parachuting downwards. To go up a tree, they undulate up the trunk, using ridges on their bellies to help grip the bark. Flying snakes are 2 to 4 feet long and live on a diet of bats, birds, frogs, and lizards. They bite readily, but they have tiny fangs and a mild venom not poisonous to humans.

The flying dragon is a small lizard that can glide from tree to tree by extending its ribs and spreading out a loose membrane of skin on each side. It also has a dewlap that can be extended under its chin. Flying dragons can travel great distances this way. Usually only 7 to 8 inches long, they live on insects, mainly ants. When mating, they descend to the ground to bury their eggs in the soil.

The canopy itself is a tightly woven tangle of branches 100 feet or more above the forest floor. There in the tops of the trees, where sunlight abounds, most jungle flowers and fruits are found. The canopy contains 30,000 species of orchids, bromeliads, and other epiphytes, plants which grow on the trunks and branches of the trees and get their nutrients from the air. Many canopy trees flower too, creating such glorious color and fragrance so high above the earth that one jungle people, the Dayaks, say the canopy's beauty is intended "for the eyes and nose of God."

The canopy's fruits and flowers attract many kinds of insects, birds, reptiles, and other animals. Ninety percent of all rain forest organisms spend their time in the treetops, and some scientists believe that as many as half of all the animals on earth may be found in this high, airy jungle layer that the National Geographic Society has called "the roof of the world."

To learn more about the Asian rain forest canopy, you might enjoy reading The Nature of Borneo by Steve Yates.