Understory Enterprises, who I am enormously grateful to, took myself and a handful of other hobbyists to a wonderful site to look for black bassleri. Â There were some oddities here that even during the rest of the trip, I don’t think anyone encountered. Now I regret not photographing the impossibly small humming birds nest at eye level, plastered to a thin pole tree, and a jumping spider who (and perhaps this is just in my mind), I remember having a mark on his bottom the shape of a scull.
The area was dry in October, and at the beginning of the trail (there was a trail!), there weren’t many frogs.  Further in, I think we were going down, there were some trickles and at least one pond that had tadpoles and toadlets of Rhinella margaritifera, and not far from here we saw some very pretty black bassleri.  One of the most captivating sites here was a high wall of shale (?), where many species of gesneriads were growing lithophytically.  A surprising quantity of them were in flower.  They look to be Amalophyllon, possibly the species divaricatum. It was a very strange site as there seemed to be almost no other groups of plants growing in this particular place.
