Most Exciting Event of Amazon Watershed Trip

This may not seem like it, but it was the most exciting part of our trip to the Amazon Jungle.

We did NOT get to see the elusive jaguar. Going to Tambopata gives you pretty good odds of seeing a Jaguar (they estimate that 13% of their guests get to see one. Our guide told us he sees one about every 10 days to two weeks).

The odds of these guys? Tambopata lists them at 2% but our guide told us this was his third or fourth spotting in 10 years of guiding.

That's right - those are Anacona. Take a good look to the right of the photo and you'll see the female's body starting to drop down the riverbank to the water. It's hard to tell from this photo but that body is MASSIVE.

The big one is the female but there are two smaller ones visible as well. Those are the males. That's right, this is a breeding ball.

They stayed in a visible spot on the river bank for 2 or 3 days. We were lucky enough to see them while heading upriver to the research center.

I know the only people who get excited about seeing Anaconda are biology geeks but I'm a biology geek and I got real excited!

Afternoon in the Amazon

After lunch we would generally have some down time. We could do laundry, lie in a hammock or observe the wildlife around the lodge.

These lizards were all over the place during the afternoons. I think this one was eating a tarantula.

This is a white lipped peccary, relative of pigs (you probably guessed that) and the greatest natural roto-tillers I've ever seen. A whole herd of them came by one afternoon and turned up the soil around the lodge.

Peccaries come in large groups (up to a couple of hundred) and the weakest and slowest are stuck at the back of the group. That way if a jaguar comes upon the group from behind (or they're fleeing) it's the weak and slow that get eaten.

And they STINK. Worse than well-kept domestic pigs. You could tell when they were around by the smell.

Oddly the temperature peaked about lunch time and the afternoons got cooler so by 3 or 3:30 it was time to head out again. My favorite afternoon hike was to a large tower on the edge of a cliff. It was a bit of a slog through the mud but then we got there. And had to climb up a ladder on the outside of the tower. The (estimated) three story tall tower. 

The view was nice.

The Husband is a bit afraid of heights, though. Or, as he puts it, not heights, not falling, it's the LANDING he's scared of.

I'm more scared of these guys - Bullet Ants. When they bite it's supposed to hurt as bad as being shot. And they were moving quickly along the railings, including where we had to get hand holds to climb down.

Gulp.

When we could, we timed our hikes back to occur in the dusk of the evenings (around 6 pm) so we could use our headlamps to spot insects, frogs and other small critters.

Anole 

Tree Frog 

I haven't ID'd this snake yet. The guide picked it up but he was squeezing it a bit tight. Once he handed it to me (yes, me) I help it more loosely and it calmed down and everyone who wanted to was able to pet it's tail. Unfortunately the snake being calm did not translate into The Husband being able to take an in-focus picture of it in my hand (or to include my face in the photo). 

Waxy Monkey Frog. Also known as Please Don't Eat Me!

On one of our dusk hikes I taught everyone in our group an old Boy Scout Trick my dad taught me - Smelling Spiders. It works really well with a headlamp on but you can also hold a flashlight up by your nose and get it to work.

This only works at night and with an artificial light source. Go outside, have your light near your nose and start smelling.

SNIFFFFFFF

Smell that? 

NO?

Do you see any tiny glimmers of green light down in the grass? Those little greenish glimmers are the light reflecting off the tapetum lucidum of the spiders' eyes (a reflective layer at the back of the eye - the same layer that makes cats eyes glow in reflected light).

The trick is to look for those green reflections and just tell the naive young boy scouts that you're smelling them. [I know, it's kind of a dumb joke but from what I could tell a lot of boy scouts is about kind of dumb jokes]

There were spiders EVERYWHERE.

Not all were this big, many of them were tiny. It was pretty cool when you could see the tiny jumping spiders' movement based on their eye shine.

[By the way, moth eyes reflect red]

After finally making it back to the lodge we usually had just enough time to shower before dinner. Which was good because after hiking all day through inches of mud we smell pretty much like... well, like a bunch of monkeys.

Dusky Titi Monkey [photographed from my room.]

First Tomatoes!

On Friday I picked the first tomatoes of the year! Finally.

Baby Boomer Hybrid Cherry Tomatoes

My neighbors make fun of me every year when I plant tomatoes so early (the mantra up here is not until after Labor Day - it's tradition, the way it's always been done).

To them I say nyah, nyah, nayah. They're still weeks away from getting theirs.

To myself I cringe, realizing that my early planted tomatoes that do well EVERY YEAR are a sign of The Oncoming Storm of Global Climate Change.

On a more cheerful note - these were tasty after a winter of not having fresh tomatoes.

Sorry, Husband, you'll have to wait for the next ones to ripen.

A Morning in the Amazon Jungle

A typical day on our recent trip to Peru started early. Like 4:30 early. Since the walls were made of cloth and bamboo we could hear the staff getting up to make breakfast and the alarms of our fellow travelers.

So it's up, visit the fruit cage to get some fruit [the fruit had to be locked up so humans could have some - the scarlet macaws had no compunction about stealing food from the dining room during the day and I'm sure there were lots of critters who would gladly have wandered in during the night], throw on a pair of rubber boots and be ready to go at 5:15.

The 5:15 boat took us to an overlook at a parrot clay lick [the 5:30 boat was the only boat that took people back to civilization each day so you can see it's not a place for those wanting to sleep late].

 Parrots and Macaws congregate at these open cliff faces of clay early in the day.

Before landing on the face of the cliff they socialize in the trees by the 100s (parrots) or dozens (macaws). Then some of the land on the cliff face and eat the clay.

Why do they eat the clay? There are two theories: one, the clay serves to detoxify something in their diet or two, the clay provides vital nutrients that are missing in their diet.

After about two hours the parrots head out and we head back to get our breakfast and [finally!] coffee. Very strong coffee. Like, I diluted it with hot water and still added lots of sugar and oh, did I miss my Paul Newman's Nell's Breakfast Blend, coffee.

After breakfast it was time for another hike through the mud. Not surprisingly the Amazon Rainforest has a lot of mud. Mud so deep that I couldn't wear my hiking boots that are waterproof to 4 inches the mud was too deep. Mud so deep that, at one point, The Husband came within an inch of getting mud INSIDE his rubber boots mud.

The best morning hike we had was to an oxbow lake - the best place to see Hoatzin.

What is so special about these birds (besides the fact that they look so cool?)? They are flying cows. They eat leaves and have a special structure full of bacteria that break down the cellulose in the leaves. Because this structure has to be very large Hoatzin do not have strong flight muscles and are very clumsy in the air. Their young are so clumsy that they nest by water so the young can jump into the water and SWIM away rather than fly! AND they [the young] have a special claw on their wing to climb back up into the trees. 

Like I said, a seriously cool bird.

And all of this before lunchtime!

My favorite garden plant this week is... Asclepias tuberosa!

As we move into the heat of the summer the delicate flowers of spring start to fade and the tough mid-summer bloomers start to shine. In this case I'm talking about Asclepias tuberosa [butterfly weed] a native wildflower that provides nectar for bees and wasps.

Even better than helping out the native pollinators it is a larval host plant for the rapidly declining Monarch Butterflies! Of course I almost never see them here in New England but when I lived in North Carolina I would have whole plants denuded of leaves by the caterpillars. But these little toughies would come right back.

Don't baby this "weed" - it likes dry, hot weather (can't you tell by the color?) and neglect. It will gently reseed in the garden so if you don't want more you'll need to remove the very obvious, kind of neat looking, seed pods before they open (I probably have a photo but I'm not well organized enough to find it... sorry).

Thanks to Danger Garden for this meme.

Rio Tambopata - the journey

I haven't been posting much recently. In part it was due to a visit from the Queen Bee (my mom) and the Fledgling Eagle (my nephew). In part it was because, shortly after they left, The Husband and I flew off to Peru.

This post is about getting to our lodge deep in the Amazon Jungle.

It takes a lot of effort to get to the Tambopata Research Center (TRC) where we stayed - 3 flights, a bus ride and hours on a boat - but it was an amazing adventure. I'm not going to talk about the flights - they were uneventful, long and mostly boring - so I'll start in Puerto Moldanado, Peru.

We landed at an airport that was so small it only had one gate. It would be hard to get lost here! This is where we meet our guide for the first half of our trip, Fernando. It's always nice at this point in the trip, because all the worry and making sure you get where you need to be and all that is in someone else's hands. He made sure we got on the right bus (a private bus) to the river port of Inferno. Yes, that's right, we went to Hell and Back for our vacation.

There we loaded into our covered canoe (with a motor) and headed upstream.

The Rio Tambopata is an impressive river - very wide but with a strong current. The first half of our boat ride took us past small settlements and papaya farms, gradually getting replaced by lodges. Our final destination, the Tambopata Research Center, is deep in a restricted area; a nearly pristine part of the rainforest. Once we entered this restricted area the river got more challenging, for this stretch we needed a navigator in the front of the boat to make sure we didn't hit a fallen log or a shifted sandbar.

This is also were the wildlife became more common. We saw quite a few waterside bird (the best sighting, for me, were the capped herons. These are absolutely gorgeous birds.) But I didn't get any photos. It's hard to take good pictures of birds and it's hard to take good pictures from a moving boat. Doing both simultaneously is beyond my skill level. 

I WAS able to get some good pictures of a few other, more cooperative animals (including The Husband, above). The boat stopped for a very nice river side capybara who sat still for us.

These are the world's largest rodents, weighing in at 75- 150 pounds! And they are kind of cute. Notice how the mud goes all the way up his legs? Amazon Jungle Mud is seriously deep, boot stealing, muscle straining, clothes staining mud. I've never seen it's equal.

We also got nice looks at a couple of spectacled (or white) caiman.

This one was just laying there so it was relatively easy to photographs (the boat driver stopped but we still had current and rocking of the boat to contend with!).

This caiman was better. At first she was partially hidden by branches on shore but then she moved into the water. Why was she better? The butterflies! [We also saw several turtles who also had butterflies on their faces but didn't stop for them.] The butterflies are taking up salts from the tears of the turtles and caiman. Since this also helps the turtles and caiman by cleaning their faces they tolerate the swarms. 

I wouldn't mind a butterfly facial, myself.

The butterflies were one of the most amazing parts of the trip - they were EVERYWHERE. They would cluster in areas on the bank to get salts out of the mud, flit through the forests, everywhere we went we saw them.

Technically this one is a moth, but it's still gorgeous! 

[There are over 1280 species of butterflies in the Tambopata Preserve. We didn't even try to identify the ones we saw.]

The Husband asked me why they were choosing these particular spots to gather and I wasn't sure but I did mention that butterflies have been known to gather on areas where animals have peed (and on animal feces) to get salts. Interestingly these butterflies usually turn out to be male. Scientists think they need the salts to make sperm or that they collect the sodium salt to pass on to females as a "mating gift." 

I tried to get The Husband to provide me with a location just outside of our room to test this theory but he wouldn't oblige.

Finally, after two days of traveling, three plane rides and a boat trip, we arrive at the Tambopata Research Center and get to our room.

You can't stay here if you're modest. No back wall, the side walls made of bamboo and the "door" was a curtain. Not your typical 5-star resort, huh?

The downside was made up for it by the welcoming party.

The big focus of research at TRC are the Scarlet Macaws. The facility has hand reared some macaws and released them back into the wild (at best macaws can only raise one chick a season but they will lay 2 or 3 eggs so the facility will sometimes take the second chick and hand raises it to increase the population size). Needless to say these hand raised macaws are not shy around people.

I'll post more about the trip and get back to posting about my garden in the days and weeks to come. I don't have any more trips planned... this month.

Favorite plant in the garden this week - Campanula Pink Octopus

My favorite plant this week is Campanula Pink Octopus (Bellflower).

Of course it is. Not only is Pink Octopus the best of the Bellflowers, but this week is cephalopod week! A week to celebrate all things cephalopod.

What are cephalopods? Cuttlefish, Nautilus, Squid and... OCTOPUS!


Photo from Wikimedia Commons by Nick Hobgood - a tool using octopus (it carries those shells around and uses them as shelter in case of predators)

[What? you didn't know I was a total biology geek?]

I bought Pink Octopus because I wanted a low growing, spreading plant for the corner of my yard. You can see it filled in nicely between the Buddleia and the Gaura. It spread a bit more aggressively than I would like...

So can I recommend this plant? Maybe. It's cute, low growing, but aggressive and, unlike most of my plant choices, doesn't seem attractive to pollinators. Still, I like it. And what other plant works for cephalopod week?

thanks to Danger Garden for this meme