Question: What can you read from the picture below?
Can’t see anything? Have a guess: it’s a jaguar track. Grace & Gary took the picture on Friday at the trail grid and its identity was confirmed by our field assistant Roger. Amongst the camera trap pictures was another good find: a tyra carrying something in its mouth. We’re still not sure what it is.
On Saturday we said goodbye to team one – no, not all of them … Conny, Sven & Thomas are staying on for another week.
Kathy & Stuart joined them on Sunday. While the experienced team members continued with survey walks, Kathy & Stuart were trained up and joined the work schedule on Tuesday.
Rain started to fall Saturday night and continued all night and into Sunday morning. Puddles in the forest grew to lakes, before cascading into the creeks that feed the Tahuayo river. Within a few hours, the main river’s water level had risen – at the moment we are about 1.5 – 2 meters above normal. This is good news for our canoe surveys. Silently paddling along the river edges, we glide past bushes and trees standing in the water. And as water ripples gently along the hull, we glimpse and record monkeys here, an ant eater there, a sloth, a multitude of birds, caimans and other forest life. Even pink river dolphins made their way upriver and were seen not far from base.
And as we return back to base as night settles over the jungle, we enjoy the daily review sessions – no team ever returns without an interesting story to tell, a tale of an exceptional sighting or an encounter made in the forest. And at last we truly understand why this is called a “biodiversity hotspot”.
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