She was “very proud of myself,” she has said of this moment. In the context of eleven days of pain and fear and exhaustion and grief, the satisfaction of applying specific knowledge correctly to a navigation problem — of hearing a bird call and knowing what it meant and being right — is an entirely human moment. It is also the clearest possible illustration of what her parents gave her.
Maria Koepcke was an ornithologist. Her daughter recognized a bird call in a rainforest and followed it to safety. The connection is not symbolic. It is literal. Her mother’s expertise, transmitted to her daughter through years of shared life in the forest, may have directly contributed to the route she found to the river that led to the camp.
## The Ongoing Work
As of the sources available for this article, Juliane Diller — now in her seventies — continues her work at the Zoological State Collection in Munich and at Panguana. The research station her parents founded in 1968 is now more than fifty years old, in protected status, and the site of continuing scientific work.
The Amazon basin in which Panguana sits is not under less pressure than it was in 1971. The deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon has been extensively documented; the Peruvian Amazon, less discussed in international media, faces its own combination of mining, logging, and agricultural encroachment. Panguana’s protected status, achieved in 2011, means that its specific ten square kilometers of primary rainforest are legally shielded from the forms of development that have altered surrounding areas.