In August 2013 I flew to Iquitos, Peru to meet a group of
volunteers participating in a project to study biodiversity in the Amazon
Rainforest in northern Peru for fifteen days. The project was headed by
Dr. Richard Bodmer, a conservation biologist, who worked at the University of
Kent in England. Dr. Bodmer has been doing studies in the Amazon since
1984 with a slew of Peruvian biologists and others who were interested in
rainforest ecology, especially related to climate change.
We were there to act as inexpert hands while we lived on a
boat and chose various activities supervised by the biologists. We lived for
the week on the Ayapua, a refurbished
boat built in 1906 during the rubber boom which had been used to transport
rubber out of the area. It fell into disuse as other materials and other
countries became more profitable to use in the rubber trade.
We were very fortunate to be on this last voyage of the Ayapua
which was to be converted into a maritime museum to be docked in Iquitos. Our
group was small, only seven of us, so we each had our own room. There were
three single American women (from Denver, Houston, Portland), a Scottish
couple, and a woman and man from Australia who did not come together.
After meeting in Iquitos and staying at the Casa Morey Hotel, our
group of 7 from around the world took a bus about two hours upstream where we
boarded the Ayapua and then cruised another day and a half upstream on the
Marañon River, a tributary of the Amazon. We eventually anchored at
the mouth of the Samiria River where it flowed into the Marañon. This is
an area very rich in wildlife and especially plentiful in fish that attracted
much of the wildlife. There were several Cocama Indian villages in the area. We
anchored there for about a week and then traveled a short distance upstream and
anchored for another week.
Our living quarters were comfortable, the food was good
(wonderful fish), and the staff was competent and kind. There was even a nurse
on board who tended to a few of us with our colds and various other ailments.
We had air conditioning in our rooms and in the dining room. The generator was
turned off at 11 pm and back on at 6 am. The jungle was hot, humid,
buggy, and we covered up and wore headnets if we were doing any of the land
transects. We used very strong insect repellant which seemed to help.
Maybe.
Our daily activities looked like this:
- 5:30/6:30 am – 9 am: Macaws or water birds which involved counting birds using a GPS unit while traveling in a motorized canoe.
- 7 am-noon: Terrestrial transect in which we took a boat to an area and slowly walked in 1.5 km (about a mile) and then back out, while observing and counting terrestrial animals (mainly monkeys, some birds).
- 9:30 am – noon: Fish survey which involved going setting up a 50m net for one hour and using rods to fish. The fish were gathered, placed in buckets of water, identified, weighed and measured, and then released.
- 2-4 pm: Frog transect which involved walking on land and turning over leaf litter with sticks and watching tiny frogs hop up. These were identified, weighed and measured and then released by the frog biologists.
- 3-5 pm: Dolphin survey in a motorized boat, counting the gray and pink river dolphins. The gray dolphins liked to leap in the air; the pink dolphins didn’t.
- 4-6 pm: Macaw and water bird survey, depending on the one that we didn’t do in the morning.
In the evenings, we had a Happy Hour, dinner, and then met to
discuss the day’s results. There was also an option to participate in night
projects which involved going out in a boat and counting caiman or water frogs using
a giant spotlight to see them.
So…what did we volunteers do? We did what they told us to
do. We recorded, counted, observed, and entered the data in the computer
in the library when we returned to the Ayapua. We talked to each other and
the biologists and looked at the incredible surroundings and wildlife and fell
into bed exhausted every night. Mostly we worked. At the end of the
trip, Richard complimented us on being such a hard-working group.
Highlights of the trip:
The neotropical cormorants were migrating through from July though
September. No one knows where they come from or where they go. One
morning, on a 12 km. boat ride, we counted twenty-two thousand of them roosting
in trees. Yep.
The gray river dolphins hunt in pods and drive the schools of
fish into the shore and then move in a feeding frenzy. The fish explode
into the air…silver in the sun with the dolphins below churning the water,
leaping and gulping. We also saw a pair of giant river otters and their
two babies…the first that have been seen in the area in years. The ban on
hunting them is working. Richard was ecstatic.
We participated in the anniversary celebration of the founding
of Bolivar village fifty-one years before. Twenty-six families lived
there. We watched soccer games and drank a fermented manioc drink from
shells and had simple conversations with the Cocama Indians who were kind to us
and didn’t treat us like anything special, a relief after the many other tours
I have taken We later returned to the village and gave the children school
supplies we had brought for them. It was wonderful sitting with them,
being just one of the troop in the Amazon rainforest.
Doing the early morning bird counts, in the quiet dawn.
There is nothing like Dawn on the Amazon with the mist rising over the water,
the pink sky and the howler monkeys howling. In the afternoon there is
nothing like Afternoon on the Amazon with the heat and bugs. In the
evening there is nothing like Dusk on the Amazon as the heat breaks and the sun
disappears. In the night when standing on the deck looking up, there is
nothing like the stars over the Amazon. Nothing.
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