Soundtrack of Sunrise: Birding at Limoncocha

Reminder: you can browse all the photos in a high resolution slide-show by clicking on one.

Tuesday, February 25

This morning, Fausto woke me up an hour-and-a-half before breakfast for a special early-morning bird-watching boat ride. He said it was reward for all my help in the kitchen, and it probably had something to do with all the bird photos I took yesterday when I was supposed to be fishing.

A family of wattled jacanas - one adult and two juveniles.

At first I thought the juveniles were a different species -- they look so different!

The fleshy face mask and super-long toes give these birds a unique style.

I had no idea I'd photographed this bird until Fausto and I were going through my photos that night. We finally pinned it down as a juvenile purple gallinule -- one of those awesome, straight-from-the-book IDs.

The next day, our ID was validated when we spotted this glossy adult purple gallinule!

A patient striated heron.

Shaking off the morning dew!

The much larger cocoi heron.

A great egret poses next to a striated heron, as if to say, "Let's not forget about scale!"

An Amazon kingfisher, described as "oily green."

An everyday ringed kingfisher.

Cacique nests hanging over the lake.

A disheveled-looking smooth-billed ani, true to character.

A greater ani with her long, glamorous Lady Gaga tail.

A greater kiskadee, I think.

And two lesser kiskadees?

I think this is a rusty-margined flycatcher. My book shows Limoncocha within the range for this species, but notes that there are "no confirmed sightings" east of the Andes. I wonder if this photo counts?

A pair of black-capped donacobius, the melodic singers who provided a wonderful soundtrack for the sunrise.

A green ibis.

A female anhinga dries her wings.

An orange-backed troupial.

A tree of tanagers. I think there is a pair of masked crimson tanagers and a pair of silver-beaked tanagers, but that is very much an educated guess.

A tea-party of five (three shown) white-eared jacamers. I was so excited to recognize the profile of these strange, hummingbird-kingfisher-like birds.

Sorry for the terrible quality -- my camera lens always fogged up in the morning. I don't recall taking this picture, but it looks like it might be a limpkin?

A red-capped cardinal.

A snail kite, or caracolera meaning "snailer" in Spanish.

Hunting the snails which make up the majority of its diet.

My beloved, my favorite, my one and only hoatzin.

They look so at home among the enormous leaves of an alien landscape.

So conspiratorial, always whispering secrets...

... and looking so guilty when they're caught!

Watching the sun rise over the flat Amazonian canopy made the morning one of the best of my life.

While we were out, Fausto had me pull up one of the multitudinous nylon fishing nets secured at either end by a stick. We captured three fish.

Bocachico, raspabalsa, and white piranha.

In the afternoon, we embarked on a four-hour trek to the giant ceibo tree. My camera was running low on battery (since the electricity only comes on in for an hour in the evenings) so I took only the most important photos. Mostly, I photographed this vine, Monstera deliciosa.

It begins as a flat, understory vine plastered to a tree trunk.

When it reaches the canopy, it spreads out big leaves, like these.

I got an up-close look at this canopy epiphyte when we found a fallen branch.

I <3 Monstera!

My camera finally died, so our evening caiman hunting trip is remembered only in my mind. The aquatic reptiles were larger than the one’s I remember from my last caiman expedition at Tiputini [link], and far more numerous. Our weak flashlight revealed hordes of glowing eyes with one quick swipe of the lake shore. Between the ravenous piranhas and giant black caimans, I’m glad there’s no swimming beach in this lake!

Our boat’s propeller snared a couple times on hidden fishing nets beneath the surface. The nearby village of Limoncocha supplies many Kichwa fishermen who set up their nets around the lake. The process is completely legal or strictly illegal, depending on who you ask, but one thing is clear: if the procedure is illegal, there is zero enforcement. It’s always a conundrum when indigenous traditions contradict conservation – who really has more of a right to survive, the native people or the native flora and fauna?

I asked Fausto what the Kichwa people used to make fishing lines and nets before nylon existed. “We didn’t fish with lines or nets back then,” he explained. “Only spear fishing.”

I guess having a lake filled with fishing nets isn’t so natural after all. I wonder what the wildlife around here would be like if the bottom of the food chain wasn’t so heavily harvested.

When we got back to our dock, Nadine, Sascha and I were breathless at the dancing lights we saw. Time stopped for me as I watched white sparkles dance across the lilypads, or slowly flicker on-and-off in the trees. Lightning danced at the corner of the sky, always visible but never audible. The noise was a cacophony of insects and frogs, and occasionally the croak of a hoatzin or the squeak of a bat. At times I blurred my eyes and let the scene mesmerize me. Other times I tried to pick out individual noises or follow specific lightning bugs through the night sky. It might have been an hour before we realized we were alone on the dock. Reluctantly, we left the light show. We walked down the narrow boardwalk and up the muddy wooden steps to another delicious dinner in the rainforest.

Share:

Read More

Sleeping Alone in the Amazon

Monday, February 24

This morning was surreal. I wrote this entry in my journal the next morning:

“We arrived on the bus at 4:30am when it was still dark. I think I slept for a little over half the 6-hour drive. Our guide, Fausto, helped us unload our backpacks, rubber boots, water jugs, and boxes of meat, fruits and vegetables. We used our flashlights (which attracted swarms of bugs) to make our way down a boardwalk and wooden staircase to the lake, where a man in a motorized canoe was waiting for us.

The lake was inky black and completely still. Dawn was just beginning to lighten the sky, so we could make out the horizon of rainforest trees on both sides. The light from the bus stop was soon hidden behind the trees, but every few minutes a bright white flash lit up the sky. Distant lightning? When we got near the marshy shore, I saw that the lake was rimmed with glowing bluish-white bubbles. Natural oil? Fausto told us they were bioluminescent water bugs – millions of them! Then, I noticed that the trees held a light show, too. If I unfocused my eyes, I could see dancing white spots blinking on and off in each tall tree bordering the lake. Magical.

Fausto shone his flashlight on a huge caiman in the water right in front us of, but the boat driver didn’t see it. The caiman moved with a sudden splash just as we were almost on top of it. When we pulled up to a small wooden dock, we carried our cargo up the wooden steps and along a narrow, elevated boardwalk. We left the food in the kitchen, used the concrete outhouses with flushing white porcelain toilets, and immediately settled in to our beds in adjoining, wooden-plank, non-screened rooms. I adjusted my mosquito net and set my cell phone alarm to go off in three hours, at 8:45am, for breakfast. I was so tired I fell right to sleep – too tired to be scared for my first night sleeping alone in the Amazon.”

The welcome platform (seen in the daylight).

When I woke for the second time, I was greeted by Fausto’s delicious breakfast of fried eggs, toast, and fresh fruit. Incredible food would be a staple of the days to come.

We donned our uniforms of zip-off hiking pants, long-sleeved technical fabric shirts, and a gallon of bug spray each. I wasn’t about to mess around with malaria mosquitoes. Fausto gave us an hour-long tour of medicinal plants, including several in the family’s own garden.

A transparent butterfly in the wild.

A bat clinging to the trunk between the buttress roots of a huge ficus tree.

"Tallarin falso," false spaghetti. There's one version you can eat like noodles, and another you can use as perfume.

Baby toadstools. 

Sacho manduro, a favorite food of monkeys. 

"Planta de la penicilina," an antibiotic plant.

Papayuelo, a bright orange fruit. 

Atamuyo. Crack open the hard shell to find the soft, flat, thin seeds. You can light these on fire and use them like candles!

A "cien pie," or centipede.

The "vertebrae" of a secropia tree, which grows so quickly it fills its own trunk with water instead of wood.

Now for a little background on the location. Limoncocha, which means “lime lake” in Kichwa, is  an oxbow lake of the Napo River, It’s encompassed within a nature reserve, but one Kichwa family which lived on the lake before the establishment of the park still lives here. The family runs a “resort” for tourists which consists of a wood-plank cabin on stilts, a basic kitchen in the same style, two white porcelain toilets, and two concrete showers. Guides who bring tourists here must provide food, drinking water, and toilet paper. They must also cook. The cost is $8 per person per night.

The family's home, as seen from my identical abode.

Vecino, the starving mama dog.

The dogs finished our leftovers voraciously, then begged for more with the best puppy-dog eyes I've ever seen.

The family's kitchen, where fish from the lake are smoking under a piece of tin.

Chickens like to dust bathe all around the world.

Look, an exotic Gallus gallus appearing from the forest!

As Nadine, Sascha and I hung up our sweaty pants to dry and relaxed at the picnic table, Fausto rushed around the kitchen like a maniac, squeezing fresh juice for our lemonade, stewing chicken in “jungle cilantro” sauce, peeling and boiling potatoes. I peered into the kitchen and asked if I could help.

“Yes!” came the emphatic reply. I chopped carrots, peppers, tomatoes and carrots in my careful, inexperienced way. Fausto didn’t sweat the details – he was happy as long as the vegetables got chopped. I became so inspired by his quick, delicious, filling meals prepared from a few basic, whole ingredients that I decided to help prepare every meal. I hoped to befriend Fausto and learn a few Ecuadorian culinary skills to bring home with me.

After lunch, we headed out on the lake in a narrow, wooden, motorized canoe to fish our dinner: piranhas. We pulled over in the shady shallows and learned the trick: bait the hook with a chunk of raw beef, thrash the rod around a few times in the water to signal a fallen animal (piranhas prey on birds and mammals that fall into the water), and pull up quickly at the slightest tug.

Fausto caught six of our seven piranhas; Sascha caught the seventh. I was content that I had pulled a few fish out of the water on my hook, even though they had dropped back into the water before I could grab them.

The Catch.

The Kitchen.

Dinner was half fish, half bones, but it was muy rico!

Share:

Read More