La Manga del Peligro blooms in samara

That Sunday, Michel Salas set out alone to walk La Manga del Peligro beneath a sky without a single cloud — that deep, saturated blue that only appears when the dry season truly bears down on the Coast. The scrubland was caught in that particular transition botanists love so well: a patchwork of vivid green and brittle brown, branches woven together and heavy with seed pods that crack and rattle in the wind. Michel carefully logged two GPS coordinates and moved through the brush, recording what the monte chose to reveal: a liana bearing fruit in samara — those light, winged structures that the right breeze will one day carry far from here — and several trees of the family Fabaceae hung with dense clusters of dry, beige legumes, heavy on their branches. But the sharpest find of the day was a plant Michel recognized without hesitation: Brickellia sp., of the family Asteraceae, its dry, feathery fruits drifting through the undergrowth like tiny cotton rockets. It is a species rarely recorded within the reserve. Six photographs remain as testament to a stretch of land that, judging by what the images show, holds far more than it offers at first glance.