Following the experts to discover more about the wildlife populations of parrots and macaws in Peru,and how to survive life in the Amazon
All things considered, the Amazon’s waterways are not the best place to go for a dip. Yet, four hours upriver from the last major town, several of our crew members were plunging over the side of our little wooden motorboat into red clay waters that must, surely, conceal at least one of the species found on our ‘to-be-avoided-at-all-costs’ checklist.
As four brave, fully booted souls pushed against the boat’s roughly hewn hull, feet struggling for purchase against the obstructive sandbar, the words ‘piranha’ and ‘caiman’ formed in a collective thought bubble above our heads.
No one said anything, of course. That just wouldn’t have been... well, scientific. We had all attended the pre-departure risk-assessment talk. We all knew that you’re more likely to meet your end in the jungle by getting hit on the head by falling castaña (brazil nut pods) than you are being savaged by a raging school of toothy flesh-eating fish. Still, being hours from anything approaching a village does wonders for the imaginative fear factor.
Accompanied by two scientists, ex-pat Briton Emma Hume and her Peruvian partner Juan Julio (‘JJ’) Durand, we were making the seven-hour boat trip from Puerto Maldonado, the river port capital of Madre de Dios (Peru’s jungle province) to a research centre in the Tambopata region of the Peruvian Amazon. Our nine-strong team of amateur conservationists (previously armchair conservationists in most cases) was headed up by Biosphere expedition leader Helen Boulden and field operations director Dr Matthias Hammer.
We’d come all this way, by plane, Land Rover and aboard our little boat (until we hit yet another sandbar), to count parrots. Parrots and macaws, to be precise. A trickier-than-it-sounds scientific skill that our hosts were at pains to impart over the duration of our stay.
We were off to a good start. Rain hovered around the sharp bends of Las Piedras River like smoke. Through the mist, in the trees that towered above our tiny boat, we spotted 22 scarlet macaws hanging from the branches like ripe papaya and taking flight in a coordinated natural ballet of long tails and sweeping red wings. Next to them, in a stratosphere-scraping red kapok tree (which has a life expectancy of 400 years), a family of capuchin monkeys were gorging themselves on nectar.
Peru’s Tambopata region is one of the only places in the world where parrots and macaws gather to eat clay from riverbank mud cliffs known as colpas or claylicks. Scientists can’t really agree on why they do this, the main consensus being that the colpas’ clay particles help neutralise toxins ingested with the birds’ diet of fruits and nuts. What is agreed on is that this unique practice is somehow integral to their survival. The aim of our six-week Biosphere expedition was to gather data: mammal and bird behaviour at the colpas, population densities and effects of human traffic on wildlife.
Logging, farming and tourism are all taking their toll on the Peruvian Amazon, home to some of the planet’s most endangered species.Working alongside Biosphere staff our team carried out Rapid Assessment Programmes (RAPs), snapshot studies of the region’s flora and fauna. Las Piedras, on which we travelled, connects the protected zones of Tambopata and Manu. Unlike these areas, Las Piedras is not yet protected. The idea is that our research can be presented to conservation groups in an effort to protect this pristine tract of rainforest, one of the largest and most biodiverse in the world.
Seven-and-a-half hours and zero piranha bites later, we reached HQ. Scrambling up a muddy bank, dragging rucksacks, sleeping bags and numb bums into the bush, we emerged into a freshly clear-cut gap in the jungle, dotted with simple thatched wood huts – home for the next ten days. Divided into pairs, we set about claiming rooms. Linda and Stephen Abraham, a well-travelled 50-something couple from Surrey, naturally claimed a double room. I shared with a young Irish girl called Gail. Bob Hussey, an aviation worker from Luton in his 40s (and self-confessed Olympic-standard snorer) claimed a room to himself. Not that this would help.
Each room was gloriously open on two sides to the buzzing, humming, squawking jungle orchestra.
The following morning, after a dawn breakfast of porridge, locally harvested papaya and some chicha morada (a popular Peruvian squash drink made from purple maize and cinnamon), we were divided into teams and set to work. As trailblazers on this new project, before we could get to the wildlife monitoring we had to help complete the means by which to do it. Our first task was to finish cutting and marking transects – narrow, ram-rod straight jungle paths leading to the colpa hides, along which RAPs were carried out. After a limb-challenging lesson in how to handle a machete, we were off.
Our team of budding ‘scientists’ couldn’t have been more varied, aged from 18 to nearly 70, with varying degrees of travel experience and conservation interests. On the first morning, still not quite up to speed with machete wielding, I teamed up with Linda and with Kathleen Harrison, a globetrotting sexagenarian bird enthusiast. We waymarked transects, measuring metres between tree markers in paces. It was laborious work, navigating hip-high buttress roots and avoiding placing hands on the vicious fire ants making chain-gang trails along tree trunks. My camera stayed in my bag all morning.
As the week progressed, when it came to a choice between carrying extra water or a camera, we all plumped for the former. This was not a photo safari. “One of the best aspects of this kind of trip is that you’re learning every day,” said Linda. “You’re an essential part of an expedition. You feel like you’re actually doing something that matters.” Linda was just about to complete a part-time environmental conservation degree and considered her Biosphere experience as important as a CV credit as it was a unique holiday.
Quiet hours spent working deep in the forest are the best way to get acquainted with its exotic soundtrack. After a few days even the jungle novices among us could fathom previously indecipherable sounds – the call of the mealy parrot, the squeak of the tamarin (a squirrel-faced relative of the monkey) and the rooting snort of the peccary (wild pig). Species identification tallies were pretty high, too. Bob notched up armadillo and jaguar in one transect walk alone. After the first week, Emma congratulated us. “We’re getting incredible quotas,” she said. “We even noted two species that have never before been recorded in Las Piedras.”
In between machete duty and transect marking, colpa watches were going well. The most productive of these were at dawn and dusk, where in one sitting we spotted red and grey brocket deer, Spix’s guan (a noisy bird named after an early Amazon explorer) and dwarf squirrels feeding at the mammal colpa (mammals, too, feed from these clay banks). Above us the orange coats of a howler monkey family could be glimpsed doing a noisy trapeze act in the canopy.
Night watch here, while less productive (even with infrared night-vision glasses), was an experience not to be missed or forgotten. Where else would you get the chance to sleep (in two-hour shifts) in a mid-canopy tree house, with only a mozzie net between you and every creak, crack and squawk the rainforest has to offer?
Reports from the macaw colpa said that the birds had yet to feed: too much river traffic from passing loggers and their peki-pekis (boats named after the racket made by their clamorous motors). Meanwhile, transect cutting was progressing – slowly. This backbreaking work involved trekking three kilometres to the trailhead where the waiting wall of jungle was combated with single machete blades. For the uninitiated this is like attacking a bramble patch with nail clippers.
Enjoying every hack was William Warburton, a 25-year-old ex-new-media consultant from London. After quitting his job he wanted to do something inspiring. “This pretty much hits the spot,” he declared, dripping with sweat. Next to him my roommate Gail was equally slash happy. “I was shown how to use one of these during a Raleigh expedition,” she explained. “But I never really put it to good use.”
My final shift at the macaw hide proved rewarding. After the seemingly endless procession of rowdy peki-pekis along the river ceased, the birds that were gathered in the trees above the clay bank came down to feed. We counted tens of red and green macaws, blue-headed parrots and around 30 exquisite scarlet macaws. The scarlets came down in twos and threes, chattering, feeding and fighting for a pitch on the clay face. Next to me, Kathleen’s smile suggested she’d been handed the twitchers’ equivalent of a winning lottery ticket.
Mozzie bites humming, machete blisters festering and noses peeling like the local ‘tourist trees’ (capirona, a tall tree that goes red in the sun and peels), we were in ludicrously good spirits. Freshly showered and clutching a well-thumbed field guide from the modest lodge library, I retired to a hammock.
Hammocks, like massages, are always a welcome end to a day when travelling. And after trekking, squatting under bird hides, climbing into tree-houses and hacking back the undergrowth, never had a hammock felt so good. Strangely, as far as ‘holidays’ go, neither had I.
