Photography by Eileen Hall
Words by Tamsin Cunningham
The rainforest in which the Tayos Cave lies is one of the most biodiverse regions of the planet. Just a single patch of forest would yield to the observant eye a whole spectrum of existence. Home to thousands of species known and likely as many yet undiscovered, this landscape is a festival of life. Here, the diversity of the natural world is at its most celebratory; exhibiting ever more imaginative ways of employing colour, form, pattern and texture in the skins, feathers and fronds of flora and fauna.
On Stan Hall’s groundbreaking Tayos expedition in 1976 the new species of birds, bats, butterflies and other insects discovered numbered in their hundreds. Who can tell how many more diverse varieties of life anonymously inhabit the vast expanses of forest that form the wide threshold of the journey to the Cave?
The way many of us live, deeply embedded in landscapes where humanity dominates, makes it easy to forget the breathtaking breadth of lifeforms that share space alongside us. But the rainforest is a reminder of the extraordinary scope of existence, creativity and celebration that we can choose to befriend and learn from.
As you absorb these images your mind begins the work of cataloguing these new forms, colour combinations, design and detail, ever ready to take down from the library shelf of your memory. How might you feel if the book of rainforest was to be lost? What would our lives look like if the book of human was the only education we had to refer to?
Count the ways in which we thrive on diversity.
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