Sometime around noon, rain clouds began building in the skies overhead. Spiral handed her bulging bag of fruit to Juna and left, motioning that she should stay in the tree and wait.

Juna settled herself into a comfortable, secure perch and watched life in the treetops unfold around her. Off in the distance, a bird called over the clamor of the jungle, letting out a long, mournful hoot with a rising note on the end. Back at the base, they called them pooo-eet birds, after the sound of their call. Closer by, a troop of squirrel-sized lizards glided from branch to branch. Long loose flaps of skin between their front and back legs billowed out like sails. The lizards hung from the branches by their tails, eating plump purple fruit, red juice staining their lips. As Juna watched, a baby lizard’s head poked out of its mother’s pouch. It nibbled at the bottom of the fruit while its mother ate the top, pausing occasionally to peer wide-eyed at the world around it.

These lizards were marsupials, like the large grazing reptiles the Survey team had found on the great central savanna on the other side of the mountains. These were the first marsupial lizards recorded in the jungle. She wondered if they followed the same reproductive pattern as the savanna reptiles. Juna’s fingers flexed. If she had her computer, she could record their picture for the Survey. Nine months wasn’t long enough to sample more than a tiny fraction of the species on this planet. With so little time, each new species was important.

A large black pooo-eet bird landed heavily in the tree, causing the lizards to scatter and regroup on another branch, scolding the bird with high-pitched, liquid notes. The bird pulled branches toward it with the claws on the bend of its wing, and fed greedily on the plum-sized fruit. The bird tossed a fruit into the air and caught it in its enormous red beak. Juna laughed at the bird’s antics. It eyed her suspiciously, then dropped from the branch, spread its broad, stubby wings and flew heavily oH into the next tree. It preened itself, then shuffled its wings into place and began letting out mournful pooo-eet calls. This close, the bird’s calls were painfully loud. Juna hefted an overripe fruit, preparing to throw it at the bird and scare it off.