Much activity (and reading) has meant I neglected to keep my diary for a couple of days…
The transect activity was interesting, through the forest from the flood plain to the palm swamp looking at the distribution of 4 palm species. Quite a noisy activity so saw no wildlife apart from a pair of very surprised Spix’s guan (Penelope jacquacu) that stumbled into our path! We did get quite good at identifying palms though…
Another good meal, an hour looking at insects, 5 hours sleep and a colpa later and I was back out into the jungle again, this time on the hunt for evidence of mammals. The forest was badly flooded about 2 weeks ago (as it does every 30 years or so) and so there was a fresh covering of mud everywhere making tracks really easy to see! Evidence of peccaries, paca, agouti, cayman (not a mammal), ocelot, tapir, capybara and coati (but no actual mammals) was abundant, and we got some VERY good casts of the prints using wax. We did eventually come across some live mammals – a group of red howler monkeys having a siesta! After lunch I fell asleep and woke up at dusk having missed an afternoon’s fishing.
As I’d had a lazy afternoon I decided to go on the night walk. We wandered into the jungle armed only with our torches on the lookout for the telltale reflection of eyes. We saw a fair bit of stuff – wolf spiders, a tree frog, a wolf spider eating a tiny tree frog, some moths (attracted by our torchlight) and some bats (attracted by the moths) but nada mas.
The following morning I slept in until 5am when I got up to accompany the kids on the birds activity. We set 2 mist nets and waited, checking every 15 mins (the optimum balance between scaring the birds away and leaving them exposed to predators in the nets). At 0730 when we went in for breakfast we’d caught nada. After breakfast we did catch a male plain throated wren, measured him and then let him go. We then had quite a long break before going out to the palm swamp to measure the biodiversity of the various regions of the forest using the Simpsons biodiversity index. I’d never heard of it before so it was good for me to learn some new ecology stats!
At the end of the walk was a 15m high scaff tower, built by the National Geographic to photograph the blue and yellow macaws that nest in the aguaje palms, which we climbed without harnesses or helmets – slightly different from UK health and safety. I only got half way up before I got too scared and had to stop. I’m not too good with heights! The walk back to the lodge was uneventful and after a good meal and a little time to read I went to bed happy that I was getting a lie in the next day.
The lie in was spoiled slightly by the amount of noise the kids made getting up for the colpa at 0430 but I dozed off again to the sounds of insects chirruping and birds starting their dawn chorus. I got up at 7 – what luxury! After breakfast Myself and Sandro were taken on a walk by Harry. We went to an area called ‘ the bowl’. It was fantastic! The scenery was amazing and the bowl was beautiful, a sort of swamp with quite unique ecosystem compared to the rest of the forest.
We saw LOADS of dragon flies and damsel flies and other arthropods as well as getting very close to a rufescent tiger heron and a pair of razor billed curasow. Best of all we saw a lot of small (30 – 50 cm I’d guess) cayman in one of the pools. On the way back we saw a family of Taira (pole-cat family) making their way through the forest, que lindo, but also quite smelly (they are mustelids after all).
After lunch there was a little time to rest before we went off for a ‘pechanga’ (that may not be the right way to spell it!) – a thank you football game with the local staff from the lodge. Despite being roughly half the height of the Markham lads, and playing barefoot (and despite 3 of the lads playing for national sports teams) they hosts won 8 – 1. To be fair to the kids the conditions of the pitch are not really what they are used to! Ankle deep clarty mud is not a common feature in Lima. Afterward, to get rid of the mud, we went for a mud-fight and swim in the river. Much fun was had by all…
After tea and thank yous the kids got stuck into the booklets that they should have been completing after each activity. By all accounts some of them were up VERY late, I’d gone to bed at 11 as by that point I wasn’t being much help!
Another lie in and then a struggle to get the kids to finish their booklets, get packed, tidy the rubbish out of their rooms etc. Then there was the shoe episode… but that’s another story entirely! The majority of the kids, Harry, 2 of the guides and Sandro went back towards Puerto Moldonado and I stayed with the kids that were fortunate enough to do geography as well! The seven of them (well 6 – 1 had his leg in plaster and couldn’t do the longer or wetter walks!) and 2 guides got a packed lunch and went for a walk to the bowl, where we hoped to catch cayman. We didn’t see any cayman at all this time, but we did see squirrel monkeys, a saddle backed tamarind, some stranded fish (the water level in the bowl had dropped a lot overnight!) and more curasows. We ate our pack-up (rice and chicken wrapped in leaves) on a bench overlooking the forest with pairs of macaws flying past – bliss! Back at the lodge we saw the taira again and an agouti 
We got back in plenty of time to have a shower and a ‘rask’ (a Harry-ism. He’s an Aussie and often comes up with Spanglish slang, the derivatives of which are often a little risqué to use at school really, but he seems to get away with it! ‘Rasking’ comes from a Spanish term meaning to scratch one’s balls apparently, although most of the kids seemed to think it was an English word…) while we waited for the next group to arrive.
The geographers are better behaved than the biology lot that have just gone, and Geoff has them well trained (and there are fewer of them which always helps!). Going to the colpa again tomorrow – can’t wait!
) but we did find some trumpeter birds, some dung beetles and LOTS of socratea trees.
