Blog Three
A hearty breakfast and off we headed for a three hour jungle trek to see more monkeys, birds and sloths. Then a canoe trip to focus on life on the river for a couple of hours. José directed us to places on the canoe and suggested that from then on every time we went on a trip we mixed up the seating arrangements so we all got a chance to sit at the front. No Teutonic towel placement on seats, thank you very much. The afternoon was dedicated to birds, and off we went to see them. I’d never really seen the appeal of birdwatching and the enthusiasm of the few twitchers I’d met always left me a bit bemused. However, being on the river and watching amazing brightly coloured birds made it so much more understandable why people got so excited about our feathered friends. I could have spent days just lieing in the canoe listening and watching the jungly world go by.
One of my favourites were the oropendolas. Black and brown birds with poster-yellow tails, hence the ‘oro’ in the name, meaning gold. ‘Pendola’ from the nests. Pendulous great furry testes dangling from the branches of the trees in the lakes, which the birds purposely wove far away from the thieving hands of the monkeys. Along with those, other impressive sights were the macaws and parrots soaring above us. Another sunset swim and then a nighttime canoe trip to see caimans. Caimans’ closest relatives are American alligators and are common in the Amazon basin, the two prevailing species in that area being the spectacled and black. We only got a couple of glimpses of adult caiman but José, having left his hands in the water for a few minutes, proceeded to gently bring a young specimen onto the boat. He explained that he never used any bug repellent and had left his hands in the water to wash off any nasties or surface irritants from his skin. No one was allowed to touch the beast and after a bit he gently popped him back in the water. Probably a lot more gently than an adult black caiman would have treated humans were he hungry. We knew it was a black caiman as it wasn’t wearing glasses. We saw boas in the trees and back for a light fish supper, a recap of the day, a couple of beers and to bed.
One of the other birds that seemed to be everywhere the hoatzin. Also known as stinky pheasant, skunk bird and stink bird. José called them stinky turkeys. They smell so bad because they eat a lot of vegetation, which ferments in their stomachs, a bit like cows. Some people eat the eggs. Someone asked if you can eat the birds, to which they were told you can if you want, but, he reiterated, they stink. I thought they were pretty ugly as well; the yellow ballsack dwellers were still my number one fowl.