Fifth Day: Into the Rainforest

July 1

Huge trees have large supports at the roots to keep them upright called buttresses

It is often shady on the ground in a rainforest, tall trees grab all the sunlight.

Up early to do a "terrestrial transect", which means putting on rubber boots and slogging along a trail through the mucky mud to see if we can find any land animals. I'm down to breakfast at 6:30 a.m. and off with Tony, the biologist who knows all about mammals here, Juan, a native, who is good at spotting the animals, and Chris, another volunteer. We have a clipboard with our data sheet and when we find animals we record the time we saw them, how far from the trail they were, what they were doing, and how many there are. We hike 3 kilometers in all.

A family of ring-tailed coati, cousins to raccoon

I am well prepared with a long-sleeved shirt, long pants, rubber boots, a walking stick so I don't slip, lots of bug spray, and lots of water. It is hot and sticky, but that is to be expected as we are almost on the equator. We see several kinds of monkeys and hear some howler monkeys in the distance making strange noises. We hear a noise in some trees and go investigate. One by one, a whole huge family of 20 coatis make their way from high in the canopy to the ground, crashing onto branches and grunting and snorting at each other. I am lucky to see them, not many people do.

Note: the wildlife pictures on this blog were not taken by me since it is hard to photograph wildlife well.

Black-faced spider monkey up high in a tre

In the afternoon I am on a small boat counting macaws as they fly from the fruit trees they have been feeding on all day, back to the trees where they sleep for the night, their roost trees. We have our clip board again, and stop seven times along the river every 500 meters, to count the number of birds that fly overhead in 15 minutes. Along the way we see lots of pink and gray river dolphins, I will be counting them tomorrow.

Macaws are important "indicator species", which means they show how healthy the rainforest is. We know this area is healthy because we counted a lot of macaws every day. If there is not enough fruit on trees for them, they would just fly somewhere else.

Blue and yellow macaws fly overhead, one afternoon we counted 350 macaws in total!