Friday, April 17, fourth day in Perú ( I )

Two pictures of Blue-and-Yellow Macaws (imaginative name, yes?)
(left: big image, small; right: big image, small).

Another BYM (big image, small).

I wish all my shots were this clear
(big image, small).

Today, we got up early. My journal says, «Wake-up call was at 0600, but we were up before that drinking coffee in the bar. Aat 0630, we hopped onto a skiff for a macaw-hunting expedition. Lots of birds.

Big image, small.

Juvenile Black Hawk
(big image, small).

Black vultures (big image, small).

Big image, small.

«Breakfast, and then another ex­pe­di­tion on skiff at 0830. This time we saw sloths, 3 kinds of monkeys, more macaws, “caiman lizards”, Vic­to­ri­a water lilies, and again loads of birds.»

But let’s look at some pic­tures. The first four pic­tures, of ma­caws, were taken be­fore break­fast. The second, third, and fourth are among the few pictures I took in which the clar­i­ty ap­proach­es ac­cept­a­bil­i­ty.

Over on the right, you can see what the skiffs looked like. Seating for eight plus the pilot sitting in the back; often another staffer, usually one of the naturalists, might stand up front as well. The two bird pictures in that group are pretty much self-explanatory. The fourth picture is a glimpse of one of the river ferries that people can take to get around Amazonia. The cost of passage is not great, but the ac­com­mod­a­tions are not as elegant as those on the Delfin II.

Night monkeys (left: big image, small; right: big image, small).

Monk saki (big image, small).

Blue and yellow parrots seen
from below (big image, small)

Caiman lizard (big image, small).

Big image, small.

Victoria lilies: left, in community (big image, small);
right, closeup (big image, small).

I said above that we saw sloths, and we did, but I didn’t get any pictures at all: they’re not the least bit co­op­er­at­ive. Nor did I get any good pictures of the monkeys we saw. The two pictures to the left of night monkeys are neither of them as good as the corresponding picture on Mark’s page, nor is my picture of the monk saki on the tree limb over there. It didn’t look one bit monkeylike from the angle we saw it from; I had thought it might be a kin­ka­jou instead. But we didn’t see any of them at all.

Big image, small.

An extremely interesting animal we got a good view of was a couple of caiman lizards. They’re only superficially like caimans, of which we saw one later on this evening. It’s the horny raised scales on the back that make you think of crocodilians; but one look at the face and the hands and feet tells you Lizard. Their fingers and toes are long and thin, compared to those of crocodiles, which have very stubby digits. That picture begins to show how long the tail is, but the shot of another individual over to the left shows the tail even better.

One thing I missed was any deep bo­tan­i­cal in­for­ma­tion from the na­tur­al­ists. May­be the explanation is simply that while there are hundreds of species of animals here, there are tens of thousands of species of plants. But I was pleased that we made a special detour to see a stand of the famous Victoria water lily, the one with the leaves several feet in diameter. The right-hand shot is a closeup showing how eroded the leaves may get. They are very thin, and there is a complicated support structure, trussed and braced, to keep the leaves from crumpling and wrinkling from the winds. The result evidently is that they may keep their shape even as they get eaten by insects, and otherwise damaged, as here. That’s a Victoria flower above the images of the lily pads. The flower is large, but not in proportion to the foliage.

That’s it for the morning. So many pictures so far, I’ve decided to put the afternoon’s report on a separate page. Lots of pictures, I promise you, even though I start with a sizable lift from my journal.