Something people often ask about, and you might be curious also, are the trees you see along the river with the kind of yellowish orange trunk, skin-like bark. They look like someone has been peeling the bark off of them.
Those are called Madrone trees, and what gives them that appearance is that’s actually what happens to those trees. The brittle outer bark of the Madrone tree is deftly peeled away, on a regular basis, by the Madrone monkeys that live along the river. Now, Madrone monkeys are not indigenous to the south coast. Where you find them historically, is in the vast rain forests, that is, the jungles of the Amazon river basin, where they have flourished for eons, subsisting on the nutrient rich outer bark of the Madrone tree, until as of late – where you read so much in the paper, and see on TV, about the heavy clear cutting – the deforestation – of those wonderful jungles, to the point that there is a real potential to lose this species to extinction through loss of habitat.