Rain Forest

Monkey screeches blended with the buzzing of bees and high-pitched bird calls. Wide green leaves formed a canopy overhead and leaf cutter ants marched up sturdy tree trunks encircled by clinging vines. The first-grade classroom at Oakmont Elementary School in Haverford had become a jungle. Actually, a rain forest, said teacher Nancy Scanlon. The scenery includes tissue-paper orchids, cardboard carpet roll tree trunks and a cloth, ice-blue waterfall. The children provide the sound effects.

Germany has joined the clamor to save the tropical rain forests with a semi-postal stamp, part of the proceeds of which will go to protection of the environment. The 100+50 pfennig semi-postal, which will be issued Thursday, depicts a rain forest with the sun in the background and a body of water in the foreground. German Post said the stamp is being issued to highlight the intensive threat commercial interests pose to rain forests. Stripping the forests of timber, scientists say, already has resulted in ecological damage that will be felt both by man and animal.

Young readers in the Marple Library's summer reading program did more than pore through books during the six-week session - they built a whole tropical rain forest. The library is adorned with decorations depicting trees, vines and exotic flowers.

Students in several West Chester Area schools have been gaining knowledge of the Peruvian rain forest. This knowledge has not come from a textbook, but from a Peru-based program made available to the school district through its partnership with West Chester University. Roger W. Mustalish, a professor of environmental health at the university, learned of the Adopt-a-School program during a trip to Peru in 1993 and contacted the Amazon Center for Environmental Education and Research (ACEER)

The main hallway at the Samuel Everitt Elementary School in Levittown was transformed last week into a tropical rain forest by third through sixth graders. The project was part of the students' "Save Our Rain Forest" curriculum, in connection with Earth Day.

The sounds of the bamboo flutes, steel guitars and synthesizers had the first graders swaying to the rhythms of the rain forest. "I can hear drums," said 7-year-old Adam Feiner. "It sounds like dropping rain," said Claire Avis, also 7. Using a colorful poster, their teacher, Dottie Nicolas, explained about the floor, understory, canopy and emergent layers in the rain forest and the products the rain forest produces. The children listened attentively as she talked about the rain forest as home for hundreds of species of plant life, insects and animals, including tree frogs, tree porcupines and toucans.

There are few places left on Earth that possess an awesome presence like that of a tropical rain forest. The forest's soaring trees, the searing heat and the stifling humidity create a place at once breathtaking and oppressive. What makes the rain forest most remarkable, however, is that it is a living entity. It is not a creation of geology or man but an intricate web of nature. And this is what is vividly captured in Tropical Rainforest, the new film opening today at the Franklin Institute's Tuttleman Omniverse Theater.

Saviours of the Forest, a winning and witty documentary about the wholesale destruction of the South American rain forest, proves there are more than two sides to any question. Like just about everyone else on the planet, Bill Day and Terry Schwartz are appalled by the loss of a precious and irreplaceable resource. But when they arrive in Ecuador, they discover just how complex the issue is, and the movie that results is an often hilarious dissection of fallibility, stupidity and greed.

The Rainforest/Crossroads, an installation by Paula Rendino at Owen/Patrick Gallery in Manayunk, schleps a ton of ideological baggage about the depredations visited on the Brazilian rain forest by a rapacious patriarchal culture. In fact, all three of Rendino's installations involve variations of this most cosmic of themes, the need to balance the needs of man against the capacity of the environment to sustain life. Not that this isn't a topic worth investigating, but in this case, it's more rewarding to ignore the artist's tendentious explanation of purpose and let the work speak for itself.

The ride into the rain forest was a hellish four-hour trip in a covered wagon pulled by a tractor. Every other second, it seemed, the tractor would slip into a ditch, jerking the wagon forward and causing us to fly into the air, hit our heads on the frame and then slam back down on the thinly cushioned, wooden bench. I swore I would never do it again. So when time came to leave the 882 acres of rain forest called Rara Avis, I decided to hike. A few minutes into the walk and I was dreaming about the luxuries of tractor travel.

AVON, N.J. - This Jersey Shore town, facing the threat of a boycott over its plan to use rain forest wood to rebuild a boardwalk destroyed by Hurricane Sandy, isn't backing down. Avon, in Monmouth County, says it will stick with its plan to use ipe wood. At a meeting Monday night, several environmental groups asked the Borough Commission to reconsider but were rebuffed. "There is a consensus to move ahead," Commissioner Frank Gorman said after hearing nearly two hours of objections from residents and out-of-town environmentalists.

Film New this week: Killing Them Softly (***1/2 out of four stars) Brad Pitt is a hit man called in to clean up after the messy robbery of a mob-protected card game in Andrew Dominik's jolting, suspenseful, bloody, and bloody entertaining, crime pic, adapted from a vintage George V. Higgins novel. - Steven Rea Music Nightlands The one-man band of War on Drugs bassist Dave Hartley, Nightlands will perform Hartley's original score for Stanley Kubrick's far-seeing 1968 sci-fi movie 2001: A Space Odyssey on Tuesday night at PhilaMOCA.

Beauty queen a human shield? CULIACAN, Mexico - A Mexican beauty queen killed over the weekend in a shootout between suspected drug traffickers and soldiers likely was being used as a human shield, a federal official said Tuesday. Maria Susana Flores Gamez, crowned 2012 Woman of Sinaloa in February, came out of the car first with a gun in her hands during the confrontation, with the other gunmen hiding behind her, according to the official from the attorney general's office. He spoke on condition of anonymity.

Explore the rain forests of South America at Delaware Museum of Natural History's "Rain Forest Adventure" exhibition through Jan. 6. The exhibition will allow visitors to learn though activities such as becoming a research assistant, wearing a lab coat, and using microscopes and slides to examine bugs from the rain forest, including a blue iridescent butterfly and other creatures. Via video display, families will meet children who live in the rain forest as they discuss the challenges they face.

Diane Cilento, 78, an Oscar-nominated Australian actress who was once married to Sean Connery, died Thursday in northern Australia. The Queensland-born actress rose to fame in the 1950s and 1960s, starring alongside such screen giants as Charlton Heston and Paul Newman. In 1956, she was nominated for a Tony Award for her portrayal of Helen of Troy in the play Tiger at the Gates . She received an Academy Award nomination in 1963 for best supporting actress for her work in the film Tom Jones . Her celebrity grew after she married Connery - her second husband - in 1962.

MANUEL ANTONIO, Costa Rica - The afternoon rains long gone, the beach crowd at Playa Espadilla sits back to watch the liquid golds and purples of the Pacific sunset spread across the sky. Surfers catch the last curls of the day breaking toward the crescent-shaped cove. The snowbirds who flock to this resort along Costa Rica's central Pacific coast won't be here for months. There's plenty of room - and plenty of bargains - in local hotels, inns, and restaurants for travelers who don't mind dodging a shower or two during the region's May-to-December rainy season.

It's breakfast time at the Ylang Ylang Beach Resort in Montezuma, Costa Rica, and that means not only fabulous food but also exotic entertainment. Hannah, my 7-year-old daughter, is enjoying tropical banana pancakes, while I savor the tipico breakfast of beans, rice, eggs, tortillas, and plantains. Perched on the back of the third chair at our table is a white-throated magpie-jay. The thunder of Pacific Ocean waves breaking 90 feet away bothers neither us nor the bird. Adjacent to the patio restaurant where we sit, a large spiny-tailed iguana ambles across the lawn.

CHICAGO - Around 3 o'clock yesterday afternoon, Roy Oswalt climbed onto a bullpen mound at Wrigley Field and went back to work. Earlier in the day, Roy Halladay did the same after arriving at the ballpark from the team hotel off Michigan Avenue. The reports on both men were positive. Halladay, who left a 6-1 loss to the Cubs on Monday night in the fifth inning because of heat exhaustion and dehydration, tapered down his usual day-after workout program but expects to resume his usual routine today.

NEW YORK - A new, posthumous story of science gone wrong is coming in November from the late Michael Crichton, with help by Richard Preston. Crichton, author of such blockbusters as Jurassic Park and The Andromeda Strain , died in 2008 having written one-third of Micro , a thriller about a biotech company in Hawaii and the graduate students who end up stranded and endangered in a rain forest. Preston, known for his best-selling nonfiction work about the Ebola virus, The Hot Zone , used Crichton's outline, reference materials, and notes to finish the book.

AS IT'S two days since the rapture occurred Saturday at 6 p.m., just minutes before Shackleford won the Preakness amid the thunderous sound of hoofbeats that some of you thought was the sign of a far greater longshot, Tattle is pleased to once again quote Barry Manilow : "Looks like we made it. . . . " But that doesn't mean that there weren't some heavenly occurrences. At the Waterford Mott High School prom, in Michigan, for instance, Kayla Staskiewicz got to wear Christina Ricci 's Oscars dress, a sparkling, pale gray, floor-length piece from Versace Couture valued in the un-prom-like neighborhood of $25,000.