Last Wednesday I went on another walk with Cooper and Rachel in the morning. I had been concerned that I would influence their data by adding another person trampling around, and because I was so far behind of Cooper that it was hard for me to contribute by spotting something that he hadn’t already seen, but I felt a bit more useful when I noticed tree movement and it turned out to be howler monkeys, an unusual species to spot from the transects because they’re so high up. At almost the same time Cooper heard leaf crashes of more monkeys farther along the trail, so we separated and Rachel and I tried to count and mark the howler monkey distances. Turns out Cooper had found howlers too, and we had a bit of trouble narrowing down which group was found where, given the difficulty in getting accurate distance measurements in the field and because we had measured them separately.
We had moved along the transect a bit but then gone back to doublecheck the measurements, when we heard more leaf crashes and discovered a bunch of capuchins traveling through the area. Cooper had barely finished counting and distance-measuring these monkeys, when we heard trills and counted five tamarins in the same spot! We must have been in the same stretch of trail for almost an hour, and seen four different groups and three different species of monkeys. Whew!
The remaining transect was less exciting, although we did get a nice look at a white-throated toucan, which is a large toucan with a greenish bill and an orange stripe on its tail. Lots of the toucans here are small and hard to see, because they’re up in the trees, although we hear their annoying repetitive call a lot. Carlos the guacamayero has several tracks of jungle noises mixed with beats, kind of like jungle techno, and Rachel said she realized the toucan was a toucan and not a guan (one of the big black, bush-turkey-like birds that we see a lot) because she recognized the call from the music track! This toucan eluded photo attempts, but was definitely the closest I have ever been to a toucan here or in Mexico.
That afternoon the howlers were moving around in the tree outside the lodge again, and I saw a baby howler clinging to the top of the mama (I’m assuming) as she climbed around in the tree with the rest of the group (I practiced my counting skills, and I think there were nine total). I’ve actually seen a lot of babies, including the spider monkeys, howlers, dusky titis, peccaries and pacas (if you count the camera trap), which surprised me, since at least the macaw breeding season is later in the year and in general there seems to be less to eat right now since it’s the dry season. I’m not sure what the deal is with the mammal babies, since I’ve seen even more that than (read on, read on…).
I was going out to explore a trail to do my personal transects when Richard (Ricardo, except he always tells everyone to call him Richard) asked if he could come along. I thought it might be interesting to walk briefly with a guide, so we set off and he showed me a sneaky path to an overlook view. We saw a three currasows walking sedately along the path. I’ve reached the point where I’m tired of carrying the camera on me all the time, so I have yet to get a photo of them, but they’re big, black, turkey-like birds with bright red on their heads and glossy black and white tails. From the overlook we saw another currasow, which definitely beat the record for the most seen in one day!
On the way back I cut my ear slightly on a sharp palm spike and Richard insisted on showing me some fancy bush-medicine, even though it was a tiny prick and we were fairly close to the lodge. He found a tall plant growing near the trail and chopped off the leaves. Then he twisted the stem and pounded it against the tree so that the juice came out. I rubbed a little bit of the juice on my ear, because it is supposed to be some sort of antiseptic/aspirin-type plant, and it did actually feel a little better, although I put real antibiotics on it when I got home as it was only a temporary remedy.
That night I hung out at the bar with Cooper, Rachel, and Andrew (one of the Australians) and we tried the Gato Sour, which is similar to a Pisco Sour except with an added flavor called “Una de gato” (cat claw) which is a type of root. It was very tasty. The good food karma continued at dinner, where they had lots of leftover tourist food, so we got semi-fried chicken with roasted brazil nuts on top, and some nice rice pudding. Yum!
Thursday I went walking again with Cooper and Rachel, but I don’t remember seeing much, and didn’t write any cool notes about it. Right before lunch Richard invited us to go swimming, since I had mentioned the day before that I still hadn’t yet. Rachel and I decided to wear full layers of clothing, since the sand flies are supposed to be abundant at the river bank, so we looked a bit like swamp-monsters when we came out of the water (me especially because my clothing was all the same brownish colour). The river was nice, but also very fast, so it’s fun if you walk up the bank, get in, and float down a little ways and then get out and do it again, although you can also sit in the shallow water if you are holding onto a rock. There are lots of little fish (Richard called them sardines, but I was confused if sardines really live in the Amazon…) and they sort of bite you! I felt all these weird little bumps against my toes when I first stepped in, and watched the tiny fish barreling into them, almost on purpose. Occasionally I felt a few nips, but they were harmless. We were very relaxed and refreshed after we got out of the water, and the Texan in me thought nothing could make it more perfect than some coleslaw and a Dr Pepper (typically, I was still thinking of food).
That afternoon I went with Carlos to the opposite island again to look for a spot to set up my camera on the beach. He showed me a really nice sandbank that isn’t directly exposed to the water, but is instead closer to the island and secluded and covered in tracks! I haven’t been able to check the camera yet, but I have high hopes of catching a capybara on it at the very least.
Since Carlos was on the island to do a parrot census, and the boat wouldn’t return for another couple of hours, I walked with him to finish the trail. I’ve gotten to know Carlos a lot better since coming back, and we all agree that he is a quirky character! Seriously story-worthy. He only eats the right chicken wing (he says it’s better) and though he has a washer and dryer at home (he lives in Puerto), he insists that only hand-washing really cleans clothes, and I have witnessed him devoting hours of soaking and scrubbing to a single day’s outfit. He also runs a karaoke bar in Puerto that I am determined to visit, although it will involve me convincing other people at the hostel or whatever to come too, because it is a little farther away from the plaza. Anyway Carlos is funny and I had a long discussion about politics with him (he picked this topic) which was a little interesting since my knowledge of politics is equivalent to my interest in it: very little. However, I knew the basic facts well enough to explain, and I don’t think I could have communicated much more in Spanish anyway. Carlos also knows a lot about the parrots and how to distinguish them from far away by flight patterns, though I think I would need a lot more time to learn the differences between them by more than close-up sight at the colpa (I’m having enough trouble with mammals!).
I went to the colpa with Cooper and Rachel Friday morning, since they hadn’t been there yet. I almost missed the boat because they had changed the time since the sun rises a little earlier now, but fortunately my 4:40 wake-up time was not in vain. The colpa was fine, although they didn’t eat for very long and we waited for a while but they never came back. There were some cute white-bellied parrots there, though, which are sort of orangish, and tend to steal chunks of clay from the lick and then eat it in a separate tree, which drives the guacamayeros crazy because they have to count parrots eating clay every 5 minutes and the sneaky ones are hard to count. Cooper heard a currasow calling in the distance. It has a funky low throbbing tune, just a few notes, then it repeats it, and then it ends with a short final blast. It didn’t show itself, but I noticed it the next day when I was at the colpa again, and I enjoyed being able to point it out to the tourists. Here's a picture of the colpa on a nice sunny day, and some blue and yellows flying towards the lick.
Friday afternoon I walked around the overlook trail, trying to find another location to do my mammal transects, since Refugio has mostly higher ground while TRC has mostly floodplain, lower ground, so I’m trying to find equivalent trails in both sites. It wasn’t very successful, though, since the whole trail is covered with bamboo, which is very dense and supports a slightly different animal community than other types of “terra firme” high ground vegetation. I did see a few dusky titi monkeys as I was coming back, and saw a teeny tiny titi head poking out as the adult monkey jumped around! Super cute.
That night Stacy was back at TRC traveling with her family, so they invited me to eat with them after we played cards. It was a little strange eating with the tourists, and being served by the waiters and cooks, even though it wasn’t that fancy. I felt a little out of place, partly because I was away from my fellow researchers, and partly because I was with Stacy and her family, even though they were very nice and chill.
Stacy wanted me to come to the colpa with them the next day, so I got to experience the colpa twice in a row, like a guacamayero. Saturday was better than Friday, with a lot more birds eating at the clay, in fact eating at several different licks and segregated out a little by species (the blue and yellows had a lick to themselves). The morning was not without drama, because a cocoi heron (looks sort of like a great blue) kept flying over and scaring the birds! There were also a few caracaras soaring around, but the birds didn’t seem as bothered by them, which I thought was ironic because they are at least predatory while the cocoi could care less about parrots. Steve was telling me that the birds would actually do better if they stayed on the clay lick than if they fly up at once, which makes it easier for a predator to swoop in and nab one, but clearly the parrot paranoia has served them well for many years, so they must have a good reason for panicking.
I went out with Cooper and Rachel again after breakfast, but I guess it wasn’t too exciting because I didn’t write anything down about it. At some point around this time (not sure which day) I explored another trail and got to work on my GPS-ing skills because I wanted to see if I could skirt a long loop of the trail and go in a straight line. Cooper had helped me learn how to use this important piece of equipment, and I successfully bushwhacked through a section of the forest, although not without a few battles with bamboo, since I had forgotten a machete. I realized why the trail wound around that way, and I decided not to use the narrow trail I had blazed, but it was cool to know that I could do it if I wanted to.
Later in the day I was hanging out with the guacamayeros, and Carlos was trying to work on his English. I was in and out of the area so I’m not sure what happened, but next thing I knew Carlos was reading a random page from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Steve and Andrew were relaxing in the hammocks enjoying “storytime from Uncle Carlos,” as Steve put it. We had to help him with some words, and his accent was pretty thick, but we could sort of understand something about Cybernetics (he had trouble with many useful words, like “thought,” but he said “Cybernetics” perfectly!), the opening/closing door, and Eddie the computer. It was a singular moment in TRC life to have Carlos attempting to decipher the peculiarities of Douglas Adams for an adoring and amused audience in the middle of the rainforest. Hilarious.
That evening was the last night for Cooper, Rachel, Gustavo (until the middle of September), and Carlos (until October) so we got drinks at the bar. The new barman, Jorge, is very nice, but also very inexperienced at bartending, and we had to read him off the recipe for the drinks we wanted! I had wanted to get a drink that was handwritten on the recipe sheet and impossible to read, so I had to change my mind, although by the time everyone had their drink it was dinnertime. Oh well, my “Blue Morpho” (which was really very green) was still tasty. Here are Cooper and Rachel with Jorge (Carlos in the front), and Andrew, Caroline, and Steve (the guacamayeros), and me and Jorge with the fancy drink.
They made Cooper and Rachel a cake, which I must say was better than the cake they served the tourists the day before, and it had bananas on it = win!
Carlos had said he would draw me a bird with the huito we collected, so after dinner he sat down to draw his “picaflor” (aka hummingbird). I had no idea what an ordeal this would be, although knowing Carlos’s attention to detail I suppose I should have expected it. He was very thorough, and painstakingly slow at tracing the design in pen, and then he carefully scratched in the huito with a matchtip and using teeny amounts at a time so it wouldn’t run. The lights went off about halfway through this last bit, so he was sad the next day that he couldn’t see well enough to do it properly, but I thought it came out great! It’s hard to see in a photo, because I can’t flatten out my arm, but here’s part of it and a shot with the artist the next morning. Worth the long process.
Everyone left the next morning after breakfast, including Stacy and her family, and we were sad to see them go. I was particularly going to miss Cooper and Rachel, who were the only researchers I’ve seen here not working on the Macaw Project (nothing against the guacamayeros, but they sometimes speak their own language of birds and colpas, which I am not a part of) which was refreshing, and also of course because I had worked with them so much and they had helped me with my project. They went to Machu Picchu on their way home, so I will hopefully hear back from them about their recommendations for my own trip, likely at the very end of my stay. I was also sad to see Carlos go, because I may or may not see him in October and he was such an interesting person to have around and talk to. Gustavo will also be missed but I’ll see him in a month so no biggie.
I spent most of Sunday resting from two days in a row of colpa-ing and did a little bit of pacing practice, trying to improve my stride to be about a meter so I can accurately estimate distances in the field, an important technique for measuring animal abundances and distances from the trail. I also picked my “high ground” trail, although it is annoyingly hilly in one part, but it was the best I could do.
On Monday I attempted to mark out this trail, measuring and marking every 50 meters, but even the combination of my pacing and the GPS (which isn’t very good at short distances) was highly inaccurate. I ended up about 10 meters off, give or take an additional 3 for the GPS, which is pretty bad (remember a meter is roughly 3 feet).
Upstairs after lunch I saw movement and looked up to see a woodpecker on a tree right outside. It was one of the big “Woody” woodpecker types, like the pileated that we have in the States, but it was a little smaller than those and with a big red head. All the woodpeckers here look really similar, so I will just say that it was one of the many red-headed woodpeckers (probably a red-neck, which is one of the species, and not a stereotype haha). It came with its mate and they bopped around the visible trees a while before disappearing.
I went back that afternoon to lay out a piece of rope that was 20 meters long (I had felt like I should have a piece of rope, ala Samwise, so I bought it in Puerto and it has turned out to be useful) and slowly but surely laid out the official transect line. As I was laying out my rope one time I saw coming towards me a line of 15 bullet ants! They are usually solitary, but this bunch was definitely traveling as a team and making use of my trail. I started backing up with my rope, since the last thing I wanted was to get a bullet ant on me as I rolled up the rope again. The little jerks made me back up all the way to the start of the rope before they decided to veer off the path. I doublechecked that all 15 had left the trail and were well away before I put the rope down again. It was a sight to see 15 giant ants processing down the trail, and if I hadn’t been annoyed and tangled in rope I would have attempted a video.
When I was walking along a trail for my transects (not sure when) I thought I had dropped something on my boot, but I looked down and saw a confused frog instead. It felt like I had accidentally kicked it, but it may have just jumped to hitch a ride. It was another of those leaf-imitating frogs, and I couldn’t resist getting another photo of its face, now particularly grumpy because it was kicked (I’ve gotten a reputation as the frog-kicker in the researcher area, after this story, although I maintain that it ran into me, and not the other way around)!
Tuesday I went out to the researcher trail to start my first official transect. I didn’t see too much, just a squirrel and some peccaries right at the end, but I did get to check my camera traps, and finally caught a TAPIR! And a BABY TAPIR! This was a camera that Cooper and Rachel had put out right after they saw them cross the trail, but it took a few weeks for them to actually wander by there again to be recorded. So cool!
There also was a giant armadillo, which was also a new species for me to see in or out of a camera (I count the camera ones as almost a real siting…I should try setting the cameras to video, to see what happens with that).
At one point in the trail I rested on a log, and heard a loud buzzing that I thought was a giant beetle or other bug, but I looked up to see a hummingbird staring me in the face for a few seconds before realizing that I wasn’t a flower. It was very small and brownish, but I have no hope of identifying it much beyond that, because there are 40 pages of hummingbirds listed in the Birds of Peru book! Even though most are up in the mountains, that’s still not good odds considering I can’t really identify a trogon down to the right species and there’s only one page of them.
In the afternoon I went to do an evening transect, but had started on the transfer trail between the lodge and the official trail when I saw a peccary cross the road. I stood stock still and watched as 36 white-lipped peccaries crossed in the same spot, all the while grunting and occasionally running into each other (their eyesight isn’t phenomenal). It was like watching a train go by and trying the count the cars, although at any moment they could realize I was there and scatter. I didn’t get a great count, but there must have been at least six little babies! I thought I had seen peccary babies before, but those were teenagers compared to these guys, which looked so much like piglets (er…peccary-lets, don’t call them pigs, or they might get mad and clock their teeth in your general direction) that of course I thought of Babe. Soooooo cute!
A little farther down the trail I heard rustling and saw what I think was a red howler monkey climbing around in the high trees looking for leaves. Now that I’m actually trying to record data I’m having the classic problem where I only see animals when I’m not doing a transect! On this evening transect I saw only tamarins, and it was very tricky to count them in the dense area. In a moment of stupidity, I realized that I hadn’t factored in the time it would take to walk back from the transect before dark in my afternoon schedule. I realized I had forgotten a light, so I sped through the last several 100 meters of the transect and speed-walked all the way back to the transfer trail with a little light to spare. In the process I startled another group of peccaries (or maybe the same ones, meaning that I’d seen them three times in one day) and experienced, once again, the eeriness of their teeth clocks at night!
Wednesday I tried a transect in the morning again, but didn’t see much except a currasow. I finally finished laying out my new transect after breakfast, and then celebrated by joining Richard and his tourists for swimming in the afternoon. It was me and these two “Northerners,” as the Aussies and Steve call them, who said they were from Yorkshire (I had fun trying to place their accents before I asked, and I had a feeling they were from Billy Elliot land!) and were barely intelligible. Some things translate easily, though, and Richard and the boys and some of the other Peruvians all tried to outdo one another in jumping and flipping off a fallen palm trunk that was precariously balanced in the water. They also painted themselves with mud and tried to throw rocks across the river. Boys. The water was very refreshing, even in the shade, and we stayed in for almost an hour.
I went right back out with Richard to show him one of my camera traps and to collect the memory card. On the way he found a little hole covered with spider webs and peeked inside with his flashlight to find a giant tarantula! Whoa it made me squirm, to think that that giant arachnid was lurking just inside a hole, ready to attack anything that got caught in the web. At least the tarantulas in Mexico were obvious and not that sneaky. After I got over the initial shock, it was pretty cool to see, bigger than the one I had seen in the bathroom a while back.
I checked my camera, saw some more peccary pictures, and then walked out to the river to look at the sunset. Right as we got to the edge of the path opening back to the lodge, Richard stopped me and we listened for a second to a scuffling overhead. It was fairly dark by now under the trees, but Richard’s light showed a small fluffy creature, that I thought at first was a squirrel monkey, although its big eyes gave it away as a night monkey! It was no more than two meters above our heads, and it was adorable! It was a little perplexed by the light, and kept bobbing its head in a jerky pattern while making a sort of chip/grunt sound. It had round red eyes and a cylindrical body with a flat face, so it looked kind of like a fluffy roll pillow with a tail. We watched it for a while and then went inside and told the guacas to come look at it. They found a potoo when they were looking for the monkey, so I went back out to try and see it. It was far away up at the top of a dead tree, and I didn’t get a good look at it, so I’ll have to see a potoo some other time.
That’s it for now. Wow, I’ve been working so much (and hanging out with the guacamayeros) that writing isn’t as easy as it used to be. I’ll try to be more on top of it and will hopefully have a new (shorter) post out soon!
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