Welcome to the Jungle

It is extremely difficult to know where to start when trying to describe my month in the Peruvian Amazon. I will first explain where I was and give background on what I was doing.

The place I stayed at is a field station called CICRA. CICRA is a Spanish acronym, but many people just call it Los Amigos. It is located in the Madre de Dios region in southeastern Peru. The station lies between the Rio Madre de Dios and the Rio Los Amigos. To get to CICRA you must first get to Puerto Maldonado, either on a long bus ride or a short flight from Cusco. Then it is a short taxi ride to tiny Laberinto, from which you take a 5-6 hour boat ride on the Rio Madre de Dios in what is basically a large canoe with a small motor attached. The station is in a pretty remote location.

I came to CICRA to volunteer for a herpetological project, which my friend Kelsey (see previous blog post) told me about. They needed people to conduct a reptile and amphibian species inventory, and maybe help out with an anaconda project. I did my research beforehand and found that the station is in an area known for its tremendous biodiversity, especially as it pertains to herps (reptiles and amphibians). Yeah, I HAD to do this.

Soon after I got off the boat I was on my first night hike with my new friends Patrick, Tim, and Rachel. In just a couple hours we saw 10-15 species of herps. There were big tree frogs, small leaf litter frogs, and a snail-eating snake. I was immediately in awe of my surroundings!

After that first night I expected things to calm down quite a bit. There cannot be too many more species of herps to see out there, right? Wrong. Over the course of a month I managed to see new species just about every day. Hiking in the jungle was exciting - I never knew what I might see. Still, it is not what you are probably picturing in your head: birds sitting regally on visible branches, monkeys posing for pictures while eating bananas, sloths being the sloths of TV/YouTube, etc. Nope. Just about everything does its best to hide. There are too many predators around for animals to survive in the open. You have to walk quietly, listen carefully, look hard, and be a little lucky to see many of the animals of the rainforest. Sometimes going out alone is the best way to see wildlife.

Before I go into detail about the work I did, or all the frogs and snakes and such, I will give a brief overview of other Amazon wildlife I saw. Monkey-wise, I encountered troops of Squirrel monkeys, Saddleback tamarins, Dusky titis, Emperor tamarins (the ones with the mustaches), Spider monkeys, and Brown capuchins. Seeing wild primates never got old, though getting woken up at 6AM by noisy Dusky titis was terribly annoying. Other cool mammals I saw included agoutis, capybaras, peccaries, and a big red squirrel. Unfortunately I never caught sight of a cat at CICRA. I did find the tracks of a big cat (maybe a puma) on the beach of the Rio Los Amigos during one of my many solo day hikes. That was an exciting find! There were also two occasions where I heard cat-like groans and roars on the trails. I wrote about one of those experiences for the CICRA blog, which I will share once the post is published.

Of course one cannot have a proper rainforest adventure without seeing some birds too. The best were macaws, toucans, parrots, hoatzins, tinimous, king vultures, and kingfishers. My favorite bird of all was a forest hawk (it was tough to identify), which was following a big group of chattering Squirrel monkeys. The hawk was presumably eating insects the monkeys were stirring up in the canopy. My eyes struggled to follow the hawk as it darted from branch to branch, until it landed right above me. The whole scene was pretty fantastic. David Attenborough could have easily been sitting next to me, describing the spectacle for one of his wildlife documentaries.

Other interesting fauna I saw fell into the arthropod category. There were stick insects, dung beetles, katydids, tarantulas, scorpions, whip scorpions (also called vinegaroons), crabs, various butterflies, mantids, tons of ants (even Bullet ants), and a mystery bug with a big nose. Whip scorpions were easily my favorite. They look like something out of a horror film, with their long spindly legs, massive jaws, and herky-jerky movements. They were always out at night, hunting under the cover of darkness.

Now to describe my work at CICRA. I was part of a small group that included fellow volunteer (and Bay Area native) Rachel, volunteer coordinator and herpetology enthusiast Patrick, and our captain: Peruvian herpetologist Roy Santa Cruz. We had a lot of fun together, whether in the lab during the day, or out walking transects late at night. Rachel and I got a lot of practice speaking Spanish, since Roy is Peruvian and all. We learned lots of animal-related words, like araña (spider), mono (monkey), rana (frog), and lagartija (lizard). We also learned a ton of new species names, all in Latin of course. Some of our favorite names were Chiasmocleis ventrimaculata (the Greek warrior), and the recently changed Phyllonastes terribilis.

For Rachel and I, most of our time working on the project was spent at night in the field. With Patrick and Roy we walked 50m transects and scoured 5m x 5m parcels for reptiles and amphibians. There were 40 of each, split into upper terrace forest habitat, and "bajio," where the forest is seasonally flooded. In both habitats we saw tons and tons of animals! Some in the transects and parcels, and others on the trails between work sites. Individuals were weighed, measured, and sometimes swabbed for disease. Rare species were brought back to the lab for field guide pictures. We stayed out late into the night, sometimes from 6PM to 2AM. Mosquitoes were a bit of an issue at times. My mosquito net and bug spray became my closest friends.

During the day we often had work to do in the lab. Roy had us collect individuals of particular frog species to bring back with us each night. Those frogs were tested for their "maximum critical temperature" (MCT). Basically, we were heating up water and exposing frogs to it, constantly monitoring the rise in temperature. We were "cocinando las ranas" (cooking the frogs). Each frog reached its MCT when it could no longer right itself after being flipped over. It sounds terribly cruel, but very few frogs died in this experiment, and survivors were let back into the wild. Such research is important because of anticipated temperature increases in the Amazon Basin in the near future. It is imperative that we know how sensitive animals, such as frogs, will react to warmer temperatures. Fortunately some of the species had a high MCT. Others appear to be in serious trouble...

On to a less depressing subject. Here is a brief list of my favorite amphibians and reptiles I saw in the field, starting with frogs: brightly colored poison dart frogs, alien-like monkey frogs, zillions of tree frogs, bulky toads, pointy microhylid frogs, and the perfectly camouflaged Surinam horned frog. We saw over 50 frog species, but I am not going to list them all. Some we saw every day, others only once. On the reptile side there were geckos, Plica lizards, river turtles, caiman (think alligator), boas (including the irridescent Rainbow boa!), little fer-de-lance vipers, colorful/deadly coral snakes, slender snail-eating snakes, and the mighty Bushmaster. The Bushmaster was the highlight of the trip for me. They are very rarely encountered, and are unbelievably large: longest viper in the world! The one we found was 2-meters or so, making it the largest venomous snake I have ever seen. I was lucky to be around when some Peruvian workers found it on a trail. The expletives started flowing when a big group of us got to the spot where a "boa or anaconda" was said to be. It was a beautiful snake, and it had a hell of a presence. A person can spend years in the rainforest and never see a Bushmaster.

When I wasn't doing work-related activities I was out hiking the trails on my own, playing volleyball with the CICRA staff, or voraciously downing these terrible wannabe Saltine crackers that lacked the key ingredient: salt. I spent my meals securing claims on other people's leftovers and chatting with CICRA's graduate researchers. Other temporary residents at the station were the students enrolled in field courses. There was also a pack of people filming a "documentary" on anacondas for the Discovery Channel. Their presence was a strange addition, and it seemed like their project was geared more toward entertainment than education. They did catch some big anacondas, which the rest of us were allowed to handle a bit. Adult anacondas are BIG, and pretty scary, in all honesty. When it takes 5-6 people sitting on a snake to keep it from moving too much, that is when you know you are dealing with a monster! We were feeding it a transmitter (for science), hence the whole "sitting on an anaconda" bit. It goes without saying that you absolutely do not want to be holding on near the tail-end of a big anaconda when it is frightened.

Well, I think that is all. I know this was not my most well-written blog post. The organization could have been better. Please understand that I had no idea how to describe my first rainforest experience in a well-thought-out, concise manner. I had an amazing experience at CICRA, and at times it was as overwhelming as it probably was to read this post. What I hope I got across is that the animals, the people, the work I did, all combined for an incredibly rewarding month in the Amazon. It was totally surreal from start to finish. I only hope I can return someday, perhaps to conduct research of my own...