I took two weekends off in the month of March, 1999, to go out exploring for CPs in areas relatively close to São Paulo city, inside the state of São Paulo. It was also an opportunity to meet three Brazilian CPers I only knew through e-mail.

First I went with my friend Fábio Pinheiro to Mogi das Cruzes, a town just east of S.Paulo city, located near the edge of the coastal highlands on which S.Paulo sits. This is prime habitat for several CP species which like the constant fog which forms as the humidity rises from the coast and condenses into heavy clouds.

There we met Mauro Peixoto, who I'd recently contacted over e-mail. He took us in his jeep along a dirt road to the base of the Morro do Garrafão, a tall granite dome similar to the famous Sugar Loaf Mountain in Rio de Janeiro, with lots of large bromeliads forming mats on the steep cliffsides.

It was a short climb to the top, maybe half an hour, through eucaliptus plantations. Once on the summit, I was stunned with the fantastic view! As for CPs, we found Drosera villosa, Utricularia reniformis, and U.subulata, all very common around the summit (around 1000m alt.). The D.villosa had already finished flowering and there weren’t even any seeds left, yet we were lucky enough to catch an inflorescence of U.reniformis with two open flowers.

Later on, Mauro took us to his nearby ranch. On the way we passed a pond full of the aquatic U.foliosa and U.gibba. I was surprised at first to see U.gibba out in the middle of the pond with U.foliosa. U.gibba only grows in shallow water, usually terrestrially on mud at the edge of ponds and lakes. But then I realized that it was only growing "epiphytically" on the aquatic ferns, Salvinia sp.! The green strands of U.gibba grew imbetween the Salvinia leaves and especially at the backside of the floating stems.

After showing us around his beautiful greenhouse full of fantastic native Brazilian orchids and Gesneriaceae, Mauro showed us another nearby pond with U.foliosa and U.gibba, as well as a seepage with the new species I discovered a few years ago: D.sp."communis green giant". These were growing among grasses on very wet white clayish soil. Mauro said he'd seen some D.communis there previously, but we couldn't find any. Maybe the grasses had grown too much.

The second CP trip of the month began as I left home on a Saturday at 6:30am to pick up Marcelo Karklin Fontana at the main bus terminal of the city. Marcelo is the person responsible for putting up a web page with Brazilian CPs (which we hope to add MANY pictures to soon...). Although we've been in contact for a while now, we had never actually met.

Together, we drove to the city of Rio Claro, about two hours from S.Paulo to the NW, where we met Vitor Oliveira de Miranda, who I also only knew through e-mail. He is a biology undergrad student at Rio Claro and has been studying germination in Drosera spp. He showed us some of his sketches, which left us wide-mouthed in awe. Beautifully drawn!

He then took us to a nearby site where he'd found some CPs. It was a large grassy bog at c.750m alt. by a road. We walked around this bog under a fierce sun, through clouds of nasty mosquitoes, sinking in mud nearly to our knees, for about an hour or more. We found a few D.communis growing under heavy shade of grasses, and therefore greenish. No flowers or seeds unfortunately.

The most common CP there was U.trichophylla. This affixed aquatic has nice yellow flowers and offered some good shots for our cameras, where clusters of flowers occurred. We also found some U.triloba, the near idetical twin of U.subulata. I was most interested in the rare aquatic U.cucullata, which at this site (it's quite variable) had large purplish-pink flowers. Vitor told us that three other Utric species grow there, but I forget which. I'm sure one was U.tricolor and I imagine the other two may have been U.subulata and U.hispida.

After lunch, Marcelo and I said goodbye to Vitor and we drove around two hours SE to the city of Botucatu, where another e-mail acquaintance and CPer lives: Alessandro Tomazini Dias. Although we arrived there around 4pm, we already went out to search a nearby CP site. He took us to a large seepage on a hillside where we saw an amazing ten species of CPs! They were all growing at c.800m alt. among grasses in sandy to peaty soil, except for the aquatic U.foliosa which was found in a stream at the base of the hill, where there was a small pool.

D.communis was all over, many of which in flower. I was extremely surprised to see Genlisea there, I think for the first time in São Paulo state. And not only one, but two species. One was G.repens, growing as an affixed aquatic as usual. The other was found in humid sandy soil and I'm not sure what it was. It was either a large (and weird)-flowered G.filiformis or a not-so-pubescent G.pygmaea. I'll have to check the herbarium specimen in more detail.

As for Utrics, we saw U.amethystina with small white flowers, U.hispida with greyish-white to yellowish-white flowers, and the yellow-flowered U.subulata, U.triloba, U.trichophylla, and U.gibba. U.amethystina was also a surprise, something I would never have expect to see in the interior of S.Paulo state. I'm sure we would've found more species if we'd only had a few more hours of sunlight to explore that site. But it started getting dark and we soon had to escape from the army of blood-thirsty mosquitoes.

Marcelo and I spent Saturday night at Alessandro's house, where I entered a deep temporary coma, dead tired as I was from having slept only two hours the night before and then driving all day in a total of over 600km. Nonetheless we all woke up early the next day, excited with the prospect of more CP hunting. Alessandro wanted to show us a place where he'd seen D.sp."Emas" (the first new species of CP I discovered, back in 1991) but it was a bit far away and of difficult access, so we decided to leave it for another occasion.

We ended up exploring a large hillside seepage next to a railway, where the CPs grew at c.800m alt. in wet sandy-lateritic soil. There we found TONS of D.communis, many of which in full bloom, with light-lilac petals. I'm not sure I'd ever seen so many open flowers of this species before. D.communis usually only bears three or four flowers on each scape, but at this site near Botucatu, I found one specimen with ten spent flowers and another with eleven – an alltime record!

Also present at this site were U.subulata, U.triloba, U.tricolor, and U.laxa. We only found a single large purplish-blue flower of U.tricolor. We saw several of the yellow U.laxa flowers, all on short scapes only a few cm tall. It seemed they were just beginning to develop (the scapes of this species are usually much longer).

After this site, Alessandro took us to his university to show his endless flasks of in vitro D.communis. He's working on his master degree with D.communis biochemistry. I was surprised that he was getting good germination of D.communis, since almost everyone I talk to says they can never get the seeds of this species to germinate. Alessandro told me he always gets best results when the seeds are freshly harvested. After a month they already begin going bad according to him. So that may be the problem, the seeds of D.communis may only viable for a very short time!

Although none of the species I saw in these two weekend trips are exceptionally rare here in Brazil, it was nonetheless exciting to visit new CP sites and also very important to better establish distribution patterns for each species. Furthermore, I was very interested in visiting CP sites in the interior of S.Paulo state, since I had practically no records of CPs for this region. S.Paulo is the most developed state of Brazil, and by developed you should also read "devastated". Not much of the original rainforest/ savanna vegetation is left and unfortunately it all became coffee plantations well before any of it could be studied. So it is actually a sad and unsolvable botanical mystery: what was the original vegetation like in S.Paulo state?

I'm not sure which, if any, of the CPs we found grew where we found them say 200 years ago, or even if they grew in S.Paulo state at all until recently. They've sure had plenty of time – over a century – to colonize those areas, and we all know what good colonizers of disturbed habitats CPs are.

So that was it! It was great to finally meet Mauro, Marcelo, Vitor, and Alessandro. I had a great time and both trips were well worth it for the company and new friendships alone. It's great to see that the number of CPers in Brazil is steadily on the rise and I sure hope they'll all help me explore better this immense country for CPs! So to finish off, I'd like to thank Mauro, Marcelo, Vitor, and Alessandro for their company and/or hospitality and especially for showing me new CP sites. Thanks guys and I hope we’ll continue CP hunting together in the future!