To People, Places and scientific Principles, add Pizza, delivered by Dominos to CG’s home. We continued chatting over a slice or two, and as CG’s young family go off to bed, I look around the house he and his vibrant young wife have built for themselves, at the end of a road fronting on rainforest. I admire the painted lizard above the doorway, a tasteful reminder of the natural world he studies and with which his kids have become familiar. After a few more maps are drawn and additional names of scientists are listed to contact when I return to the states, I look back at the wall: the single painted lizard has been joined by a dozen companions. I realize it was nature, not human design, that I was seeing. The lizards had emerged into the cooler air in search of bugs for their dinners. If Manaus was this full of life, what must the forest be like, I wondered, and requested an overnight out at one of the forest camps.