blog_faegre: 2008-10-23T09:29:02Z Copyright (c) 2008, Sarah Faegre ExpressionEngine tag:parrots.org,2008:10:23 tag:parrots.org,2008:index.php/52.1718 2008-10-23T23:35:00Z 2008-10-23T09:29:02Z Sarah Faegre cocopichon@hotmail.com
I am writing to you from the partially flooded city of Trinidad, Bolivia after a complicated 3-day evacuation (by boat) from the field site where we were working most recently to monitor a Blue-throated Macaw nest. Myself and Steve, a co-worker, were camping at an isolated estancia (rural farm) which, under normal conditions can be accessed by a 2-hour horse ride from a different estancia which, until this flood, could be reached by road. Rain was a complicating factor from the day one at Encanta—it rained almost every day for our 3-week stay, leading up to a grand finale of sorts on the night of February 10th when a tremendous 12-hour thunderstorm turned the already-flooded landscape into a more critical situation. During that very long night we were all flooded out of our living quarters, be it tent or house, despite the raised tent platform the family had helped us build a week earlier and despite the piles of dirt and canals surrounding the house. I suppose “flooded out” isn’t quite the right way to describe that night because there was nowhere to go “out” to—no dry land in site— and the tent wasn’t actually underwater. So we simply shivered in damp sleeping bags and hoped our platform wouldn’t float away. The family of 8 meanwhile, all sat on the beds in the kids’ room, which was the least flooded of the 3 rooms in the dirt-floored home. Steve described our experience in the flood quite well in an e-mail that he sent home to friends upon our arrival in Trinidad. He has given me permission to copy it here:



Hello all -- we just returned to Trinidad, Bolivia yesterday Feb 13 –we’ve been trying to get back here for almost a week, after the Blue-throated Macaw nest box we were watching was invaded by wasps, and the 2 eggs there proved to be infertile anyway.

We’ve been dealing with rising water for several weeks. First it was just the inconvenience of having to move the tent to a new place as the patches of dry ground grew smaller, and of having to scout a new route to the nest where the water levels were lower and would not overflow our boots. (Everything is so wet here that the only suitable footwear is rubber boots that come almost to the knees.) Then it was the inconvenience of getting wet to the knees and flooding our boots no matter which way we walked to the nest, and of having the family we are living with move their cooking and eating space from the outdoor kitchen to the outdoor shelter where we had our hammocks. Because of this, during most of the daylight hours there were about 6 kids and 2 other adults crowded nearby and the animals were trying to share the same space too, so that it was difficult to escape the squeal of pigs and the chatter of kids. Finally, the livestock became truly threatened by the lack of dry ground, and it started to become impractical for the people also.

Over the last week this entire province of Bolivia, called the Beni, has turned into a national disaster area due to widespread flooding. Though the rainy season is an annual event, the flooding this year is the greatest that anyone can remember. We were walking through knee-deep water on our last trips to the nest box and then on the night of Feb 10/11 an intense thunderstorm, lasting all night, inundated the entire farmstead where we were living. Our tent was on a raised platform and stayed semi-dry, although the water came within an inch of the floor at the front of the platform and was level with the water at the back. Waking up in the morning we saw no dry ground in sight, water everywhere, and the top of the outside of the tent was covered with spiders, frogs, crickets, and ants that had gone awash in the floodwaters and then crawled onto our tent platform and then kept climbing till they reached the top of the tent. We had already been trying to leave for several days but had been frustrated by poor radio communications. Finally the farmer managed to get through by radio to a small town, where he asked someone to come evacuate his animals, his family, and us, as the situation was starting to get dangerous for the animals (all the baby chickens and pigs had drowned). That afternoon a motorboat came and ferried the pigs to high ground, then evacuated me, Sarah, and the 3 school age kids to a nearby farm.

The next day, the boat evacuated the farmer’s wife and her three youngest children to their tiny orchard island, about 1 km away from their house, and then took the rest of us on to the tiny town of Loreto. In Loreto, virtually the entire population had been displaced by flooding and most people were living in US-supplied tents—military helicopters and cargo planes were much in evidence as international relief poured into the area. That night we were literally refugees, staying in a place for displaced people, and the next day we were able to hire the same boat for the 80-km trip down the winding river systems to the city of Trinidad.

Below: This is a mural in the center of Trinidad, showing a map of the region. I am pointing to the tiny, flooded town of Loreto, where we spent one night, before traveling to Trinidad (symbolized by the large, orange square to the northwest of Loreto).



The spark plugs were faulty and we stopped several times to clean them and change them, and when we finally arrived the owner said he had thought we were not going to make it. I was keeping a mirror handy to signal a helicopter if the motor really had gone out. Also there were issues with finding the way through the flooded landscape and the boat had to turn around several times after not finding a way through a patch of dense forest or other vegetation. When we finally reached the outskirts of the city of Trinidad we were relieved to find that the main highway was not flooded and we could hitch a ride on a truck into the center of town, which was still high and dry and functioning normally. However on the way we passed large areas of temporary tent cities where people from the lower-lying outskirts of town had evacuated to. So, while things seem normal right here in the center of town, all the surrounding area is a disaster zone.

Virtually all available rooms in town had been rented out but the same room we had used in the past happened to be still available, because the roof leaks and so the hostel owner had not rented it out yet. So a leaky roof was our good fortune.

The simple facilities here seem like first-class accommodations now-- any kind of running water in the bathroom, even if unheated and undrinkable, seems like a real luxury. A few days ago I was waiting for a bat to fly out of the hole in the outhouse seat, and watching a toad swimming around in the murk below, and watching Sarah pull a 5-foot anaconda out of the hole in the outhouse seat. For weeks now, as the water level has been slowly rising and the amount of truly dry ground has been constantly shrinking, snakes were becoming more and more abundant. Fortunately we did not see any of the poisonous vipers, only anacondas, although we heard of one fatality in the nearby region due to snakebite while we were listening to radio messages. Likewise armadillos became very abundant—they take shelter in termite mounds to avoid the rising water.

Although we are safe here our thoughts are with the farmer’s wife and three small kids who remained behind, living in a tent in their "chaco" or orchard, where the ground is higher than in the farmstead. They should be safe for the immediate future, as the water levels at the farmstead were starting to fall again when we left. But this is the rainy season and a few more big thunderstorms could change everything for the worse. Due in large part to their inability to bear the expense of feeding so many mouths in the city, and also due to the need to keep an eye on the livestock and corn, the farmer’s wife and the three small children did not evacuate with us. Only the 3 school-age kids came out, who need to spend the next several months in the city attending school. The farmer came out too to see the older children off, but will return to the chaco in the next few days if possible. By boat of course.



Travel arrangements are difficult-- for example after we arrived in Trinidad we found that another member of the Blue-throated Macaw project had just returned from a 3-day boat trip that he organized to evacuate us. While the heavy thunderstorms were pouring down on our tent, he was in the boat out in the open. Due to the poor radio communications, he was not able to advise us of his plans and we were forced to make other arrangements. So, when he finally arrived at the farmstead everyone had already left. His whole trip should have taken only a single day but no one on the boat knew the way and they got lost repeatedly, and also had some engine trouble.

We probably won't stay in Trinidad for more than a couple of days. The city is still under threat from high water and a few big storms could breach the retaining walls and flood the entire city. We are only here because it is the only city with an airport with scheduled
commuter flights in the area. Hopefully, the airport won’t flood soon! We'll fly to another part of Bolivia that is not in the midst of an emergency, travel for about 2 weeks, and then return to the US.

That's all for now.... Steve



So, as Steve said, we are now safe in the center of Trinidad, and the family is safe on their garden island—the only bit of dry land within a kilometer of the house. The city of Trinidad has turned into a tiny, functional, dry center where the well-off people are lucky enough to live, surrounded on all sides by clusters of tent neighborhoods which line the sides of the road, just out of reach of the floodwaters. The water has stopped rising since our arrival in Trinidad on the 13th, but heavy rains are predicted for the next few days and residents fear that the center may flood, as well as displacing, once again, many of the families in the tent neighborhoods.

Back on the topic of macaws, the 2007-08 season of Blue-throated Macaw conservation work has come to an end and I have a lot of incredible stories to tell about the birds and my experiences working with them. It was a good season for the macaws and for our crew. We had a group of dedicated biologists from 7 different countries, working from August through the present, and in great part due to the widespread effort of the volunteers I am happy to announce that the macaws have had their most successful year in the history of the project.

The series of blog entries which have preceded this final update for the 2007-08 season were typed up from sections of my handwritten journal. I hope you have enjoyed my stories about our success with the intensive handfeeding of neglected chicks, my observations of the successful fledging of several macaw chicks, and their activities during the following weeks, as well as the many other stories of my life as a field biologist in rural Bolivia.

I will be retuning to Bolivia again this winter, to participate in the 2008-09 effort of the Blue-throated Macaw Project. Please check back soon for a current update of the 2008-09 season effort!

Below: Evacuating the field site by boat



]]> tag:parrots.org,2008:index.php/52.1717 2008-10-07T23:04:00Z 2008-10-07T23:17:20Z Sarah Faegre cocopichon@hotmail.com
Today I turn 26. We are stranded in the flooded Bolivian lowlands at the rapidly sinking Encanta, where the family jokes that now they are like armadillos—forced onto the tiny, remaining bits of raised land that are still above water. The galpón is flooded now and the outdoor living area is a tiny bit of raised land next to the pig pen. We have moved the contents of the kitchen outside, since the water in the kitchen is too deep now, and are using the top rail of the pig pen as a counter.

The BTM project finally has a conclusion—yesterday the nest box was invaded by wasps and probably the wasps will have success where the macaws didn’t, creating little wasplings and perpetuating their species. Steve suited up in several layers of clothes and a mosquito net over his head and braved the angry wasps to retrieve the still-intact egg, which we knew was certainly dead since it had been without incubation for over 24 hours.



Last night we opened the egg and got a confirmation for what we had already expected: the egg was infertile, or had died in the early days of incubation, just like the other eggs. The macaws had spent more than 3 weeks incubating 2 infertile eggs, only to have their nest cavity usurped by a colony of wasps. I suppose it would have been much sadder had the wasps taken over a nest with live eggs or chicks. Still, the pair is very distressed and hanging around the vicinity, crying over their loss. It is interesting to note that the last bird to give up on the nest was the male, who Steve saw enter the nest yesterday morning and stay for 40 minutes despite the colony of wasps which carpeted the entrance and the inside of the nest box.

Last night there was a tremendous lightening storm around 1:30 a.m. which pelted us with rain and incredible gusts of wind for 2 or 3 hours before I got back to sleep. It was raining and blowing so hard that I was getting wet, even with the double rainfly-tarp system. But at least the platform held up and the water in the tent was minimal. One of the rooms in the family’s house has water in it, but it is only the food storage room and the food is up on platforms. The two rooms in which they sleep are still dry—but for how much longer?

No word from John since yesterday, when the price of the boat he had contracted to come and get us jumped from 700 to 2000 Bs (about 250 USD). I said yes, despite the price, because I am really in no position to barter. “If someone will come here to Encanta in a boat and get us out, I will pay the price,” I said. John said he would have to see if the boat was willing to come all the way to Encanta and would confirm with me at 3:00 pm. At 3:00—nothing. At 7:00—nothing. Rolando was appalled when he came back from the chaco and learned that I had agreed to pay 2000 Bs. for a boat. He has other, more affordable plans to get out, but since his last plan did not work out and the new one is just as uncertain, I will agree to whichever plan I can confirm first.



February 11th

It has been storming for over 12 hours—the dark, ominous front moved over the already flooded Encanta and opened fire with rain and 30 mph cold wind. At 11:30 pm the strobe-light lightening began. Fat drops of rain began to fall, and soon the thunder was cracking straight overhead with such ear-splitting force that I startled and plugged my ears and cowered deeper into my sleeping bag. As the hours wore on I slept fitfully and the water rose higher and higher around the tent, splashing in through the mesh underneath the rainfly.

Now it is noon the next day and the storm continues with cold wind and rain blowing constantly from the south. The water is level with our tent platform and the bottom ¼ of the tent is soaked. The family’s house is flooded with 1 foot of water and there is not a dry patch of land in sight. We are nothing but a few flimsy structures in the middle of a river which is now running with a forceful current. Animals are dying and there is no way to make a fire to cook food. The situation has become critical: we must get all the people and animals out today or as soon as possible.

Loreto is entirely flooded. Trini is flooding, just from the rain, but the water is coming with such force from the river that there is fear that the retaining wall, which encircles the city, might break. This would be utterly disastrous for the tens of thousands of families living in the center and also for us, as we would loose all of our belongings (currently stored in Hostal Las Palmas, in the center of Trini). If the retaining wall breaks, Trinidad, the capital of El Beni, will become a flooded wasteland with a flooded airport and no way out (except by boat). We are in the middle of it all, a tiny spec among tens of thousands of desperate people and a lot of water.

Already pigs and chickens and one horse have died. Any belonging that falls or is dropped becomes lost in the current. The wind is shaking the tent and blowing so hard that it sounds like we’re on a beach near the pounding surf. Don Basco is on his way from Loreto to rescue us and the animals. John never came through and we haven’t had any contact with him since he said he would confirm our boat trip two days ago.

In theory, Don Basco will arrive any moment with the boat and they will begin taking animals to the chaco (the tiny, garden/island a few kilometers away from the house). If all goes as hoped, all the animals, people and important belongings will be out of Encanta by the end of the day.



8:00 pm

We’re out of Encanta—Steve and I, the family and the remaining pigs and chickens rescued by Don Basco and 2 others guys who helped Rolando move the pigs to the chaco and took us out to Esperanza. So, at the moment we are lying in a wet, broken tent that we just spent half an hour patching together after a horse stepped on it.

The family is spending their last night in the flooded house at Encanta, hoping the earth walls don’t collapse on them in the night. The pigs are probably contentedly munching on the corn and chasing away the capybaras…(or will the capybaras chase away the pigs?) in the chaco. Really, there’s not much of an “away” for any person or animal to go to from the chaco, which is an island of about 300 meters diameter amid a vast, flooded wetlands that is now truly traversable by boat alone.

Tomorrow Don Basco will go back with the boat and move the family and all their belongings to the chaco, and then help Rolando swim all 20 horses to Esperanza. The 3 school-age kids will come to Esperanza in the boat with Don Basco so that they can join on our eventual voyage to Trini, where they will live with family members and attend school (assuming the center of Trini doesn’t flood). John was due to arrive in Loreto today, though we don’t know if he will arrive with the 2000 Bs. rented boat, or simply as a passenger on another boat.

Outside Esperanza things sound pretty grim. It rained for 15 hours straight last night (and into the morning) and Loreto is entirely flooded except for one street and half the church. Trini’s retaining wall has broken in 2 places. Trini, which is the capital of the Beni Province, houses nearly 100,000 people and is slowly going underwater despite the peoples’ efforts to keep the water out with sandbags and pumps. I was told today that Trini is actually lower in elevation than Loreto and up until now has always been protected by the combination of pumps and its circular retaining wall.

The current news is the airport is already partly flooded and we may not be able to leave Trini. We have no idea how bad it will be when we arrive. Will the hostel where our baggage is stored be flooded with water? We can only wait and see.
]]> tag:parrots.org,2008:index.php/52.1715 2008-10-07T04:20:00Z 2008-10-07T00:59:47Z Sarah Faegre cocopichon@hotmail.com
Our time here at Encanta is wrapping up with 99% certainty that the nest is a failure. Two dead eggs. That is what the macaws have been carefully incubating and caring for during the past month. After noticing that one of the eggs was smelling rotten and getting lighter and turning a dark, rotten opaque color, I removed and opened it, expecting to find a dead embryo inside. Putrid, greenish liquid exploded all over me when I put a bit of pressure on the eggshell. Either it was laid infertile or the embryo died after only a few days of incubation.

We will leave the remaining egg of course, because we are not 100% sure that the egg is dead, although even if we were sure, it is probably best to let the macaws finish their nesting cycle naturally. It would also be interesting to know how long the female would continue to incubate a dead egg, though chances are that she’ll still be incubating it when we leave Encanta and no one will know how much longer she stays. I wonder how common it is for Blue-throated Macaws to lay a clutch of infertile eggs, or for young embryos to die during the first few days of incubation. Perhaps inexperienced parents do not always attend their eggs as consistently as necessary. Yet, shouldn’t they be able to tell that something has gone wrong when the eggs fail to hatch?

All we can do at this point is take advantage of our remaining days at Encanta by getting the best photos possible of this pair. The photos will be compared with past BTM photos and also used in future years of the project to track the activities of this particular pair. This is a sad way to end my time with the Blue-throated Macaws, but it is also a reality check—the vast majority of nests fail during incubation, whether that is from predation, flooding, inattentive parents, or a doomed start with infertile eggs.


February 7th

Such complications! Yesterday the boat finally came, bringing the family their long-overdue and much needed food supply. As I climbed the nest one last time, I heard the motor approaching. I candled the remaining egg for the last time and was overcome by a sudden uncertainty. My experience candling parrot eggs was minimal and many years past. What if I was wrong? Could it be that the translucent, rosy pink color I was interpreting as a lack of life was actually a chick, filling the space within and nearly ready to hatch? With this sudden feeling of absolute uncertainty I had to rush back from the nest, through waist deep water, in the broiling heat of the mid-day sun to arrive at Encanta just as the boat arrived. This was our chance to get out, as least as far as Esperanza. “Be ready in 15 minutes,” one of the men told me.

Steve and I took down the tent and readied our bags as fast as we could. With all the rushing, the heat, and my sudden uncertainty about the egg, I was feeling sad and unprepared to leave. I sat at the kitchen table with Lurdes, Rolando and 2 of the 3 guys who came on the boat: El Gordo, Don Basco, and Rolando’s brother. I asked them about getting to Trini from Esperanza.

“Oh, it’s extremely complicated right now,” Don Basco told me. “You have to get to the river, but there is no transportation passing on the road (1 km from Esperanza) because it is entirely flooded, and yet it is not the best route for boats coming from Loreto.” I told them that I could pay them to take us to the river from Esperanza, if they had the time to do so in the next few days. “Not enough gas to get to the river,” I am told. And there is no gas for sale in Loreto right now.

“When might more gas arrive in Loreto?” I asked. My question was met with much laughter. “Maybe August.”
“So, can we get to the river by horse?” I asked.
“Yes, yes, that can be done,” they told me.
“How deep is the water,” I ask. “Will the horse have to swim?”
“Yes, the horse will have to swim quite a lot, so you can only bring one small backpack.”
Okay, cross off that option.
“So, it would be better to leave from Loreto then?” I ask. “Is there enough gas to get us to Loreto?”
“Yes, we can take you to Loreto,” says Basco. “But from there the trip to Trini is also complicated.”
“Are there small planes traveling between Loreto and Trini?” I ask.
“Yes, but in these last few days the runway has flooded.”
“So, from Loreto how might we get to Trini?” I ask. I am given a complicated series of instructions about asking around in Loreto to find space on a boat going to a place called El Lomito (The Lump), where some people are living and boats can not cross because it is still dry. From The Lump we must get another boat to the river, where, on the far side of the Rio Ibaré a truck might be making daily trips to Trini. But Loreto is flooding, they tell me, and lots and lots of people are trying to get to Trini, so you might have to wait a few days to find space on a boat.

And then, just as I picked up my backpack to begin loading our equipment onto the oxcart which would haul it 200 meters through the shallower water to the boat, Rolando came to me with an alternative plan: Steve and I will leave with Rolando and the school-age kids this coming Saturday or Sunday by hiring a boat (through a series of radio communications) to come and get us at Encanta and take us all the way to the river. We’ll see what happens…I sure hope he can find a way to make the plan work. So here I sit, once again, in the blind at Encanta.

Now, a few hours later, I am back at the house, sitting in my hammock, strung up between two palms. Below my hammock—water. Surrounding the house and lapping at the doorstep—running water. We are now part of the river system and the water is rising steadily, despite the change in weather. This is the 4th day in a row without rain, though the towering cumulus clouds blowing in on the strong, cool, north wind are promising that this 4th day will not be completed without showers or perhaps a good drenching.

The kitchen is now part of the river and this morning we got up and made a system of plank walkways from the fire place out the door of the kitchen and across the yard to the galpón, where we have moved the table, since its former location is flooded. The galpón is an open, palm-roofed structure with a raised earth floor that is normally used to store saddles and hang meat or to rest in hammocks. Now, after days of adding countless cartloads of dirt to raise the floor above the flood-level, it is the only dry space outside the house and thus has become the center of daytime activity. And if these last few days are anything to judge by, it is only a matter of time until the water rises into the house, or turns the dirt walls to mud, collapsing the house all together.

Rolando butchered a cow today—an entire cow per two months is the family’s ration of meat—and Rolando is now in the Galpón, busily turning the 600 lb. creature into piles of charque (think beef jerky on a massive scale), which will be smothered in salt and hung in the sun for at least 2 days. With two days of hot sun and lot of salt, the thinly sliced meat will stay good for up to two months. Lurdes is boiling a gigantic pot of the cow’s internal body fat, mostly stripped from the kidneys, which will be turned into blocks of lard and stored for future use: anything and everything can be deep fried in lard. Even rice and noodles are first deep fried before adding water (leaving the boiling grease so that they are cooked in the mixture of boiling lard and water). The food tastes good, but I find that large amounts of lard, especially for breakfast, does not agree terribly well with my normally-strong digestive system. Or maybe it’s just the water. We are now out of rainwater and are forced to drink the brown flood water that is flowing all around us.



February 8th

Rising, rising, rising. We hear messages on the radio about potable drinking water being carried in by Brazilian helicopters to families in Trini and Loreto. Meanwhile, here at Encanta, the outhouse has flooded and all the contents are now mixing with the floodwater that flows through and around it. Steve and I are both sick with diarrhea despite our efforts to drink only boiled water. Miraculously, Rolando, Lurdes and the kids seem unaffected and tell us that the water is fine.

Yesterday (before the outhouse flooded) one of the kids was about to use the outhouse when he suddenly ran out, screaming that the “sicuri” (anaconda) was entering the bathroom. I ran over to see and sure enough, a 2-meter anaconda was slithering slowly through the gap in the boards. Once inside the outhouse the snake proceeded down the hole and I got there just in time to grab its tail and haul it out of the outhouse. It writhed and lurched and quickly freed itself from my uncertain grip. It swam away quickly, across the yard, under the fence, and through the flooded pampas. Luckily it wasn’t aggressive and only had an interest in escaping, not biting me.

]]> tag:parrots.org,2008:index.php/52.1714 2008-10-04T03:46:00Z 2008-10-04T03:50:32Z Sarah Faegre cocopichon@hotmail.com
February 2nd
11:30 a.m.

Rolando and Lurdes spent the non-rainy hours of yesterday gathering loads of dirt from termite mounds and hauling them back to the house in the ox-cart. Then we all shoveled loads of dirt around the flooding corners of the house and onto the flooded floor of the galpón. Tension is running high at Encanta as bit by bit all the family’s food runs out and the rising water puts their house and animals in danger. For almost a week they have had no sugar or flour, which are normally two of the staples out here. Their bi-monthly food delivery was due on January 15th and the “encargado” (man in change, directly below the landowner) is incommunicado at Esperanza. It is the job of the encargado to coordinate the delivery of food and see to the needs of the people working the land. Rolando and Lurdes are frustrated that he didn’t get the food delivered on time, or before the flood made the delivery more complicated than ever before. Now the 2-month supply of food will have to be brought by boat, since the water is too high for the ox cart.

The family has run out of everything except rice, lard and charque (dried meat). But in a day or two the rice and charque will be gone too. We have also used up most of the project food that Steve and I brought. We have enough beans and lentils for one meal of each, but all the rice, noodles, sugar, honey and canned food we brought is gone. We have 6 packs of crackers left. Luckily there is still corn and bananas in the chaco—the family’s garden island, 20 minutes by horse through the flooded pampas. Of course there are plenty of chickens and pigs to kill if necessary.

Bad news for the macaw family as well. When I climbed, the day before yesterday, I found one of the eggs smelling rotten and looking opaque. The macaws seem restless, although the female is certainly still incubating, as if at least one of the eggs were alive. This afternoon I will climb again if the rain stops.

5:45 p.m.

I am at the blind, writing with a headlamp because with the stormy weather it is as dark as night. The water just keeps rising and rising. It is starting to enter the house and Rolando and Lurdes are very worried. The blind, which luckily is on higher ground, is trying to become an island and will succeed if this rain keeps up for a few more days. Today it rained for 8 hours, almost without stopping. The new path that Steve found and hacked through the bromeliads is now boot-flooding high and not much better than the original path. When I was helping Lurdes in the kitchen today she looked outside and sighed deeply. “This rain makes me think things,” she said.
“Like what?” I asked.
“Like the people at Esperanza really don’t care about us. No one has come here to check on us. They know we have no food and that the flood waters are rising and they can’t even be bothered to attend the radio.” She confided that she wished they could leave. “But anyways, there’s no way to get out,” she said. Then, almost as an afterthought she said, “But it will be really sad when the rice is gone. Then it will just be meat, meat, meat.”

]]> tag:parrots.org,2008:index.php/52.1711 2008-09-29T07:20:01Z 2008-09-29T12:24:16Z Sarah Faegre cocopichon@hotmail.com
January 29th
5:45 p.m.-- in the blind

The rain was dumping down all morning and the water rose to within inches of our tent. The vicious red ants are as desperate as we are for a dry spot to set up camp and are trying to colonize the walls and roof of our tent.

Earlier today an anaconda swam into the flooded yard and grabbed a big, white rooster. The kids came running towards their father, screaming “Sicurí! Sicurí!” (Anaconda). Steve got some amazing photos of the 5-foot snake, coiled around the rooster, before Rolando killed it with machete. The rooster survived, though it was squeezed so hard that it looked as though its eyes would pop out. I felt very sad for the snake, however I can not hold it against Rolando and Lurdes that they need to do all they can to protect their animals. They have six children to feed and one rooster is worth a lot.



The mosquitoes are driving me insane inside the blind right now. The eggs still haven’t hatched and I couldn’t feel any movement within the eggs when I checked them today. I am beginning to doubt that I ever did feel movement in one of the eggs. Maybe I was just feeling my own pulse in my fingertips and mistook it for the tiny movements of an embryo. We have been here for 9 days and it is known that the eggs were being incubated for at least one week (and probably 2 weeks) before we arrived. That means that the latest they could hatch would be two weeks from now. I suppose I had better stop being impatient and settle in for the wait.

One of the reasons for my impatient is that Steve and I have to get to town soon and I don’t want to leave the nest during this most vulnerable stage. Upon our arrival at Encanta, we thought it would be easy to travel to town for a day or two, just by riding a horse to Esperanza and then taking the daily public transportation to Trini. Now, boat is the only means of transportation. The current news is that someone from Esperanza will try to get a canoe from Trini. I just hope someone gets a canoe before February 15th, the current date for Steve’s departure flight, which he will change whenever we can get to a phone.



9:00 p.m.

I am now in the tent, having escaped from a ravenous cloud of mosquitoes that appeared and engulfed me when I decided to give myself an extravagant bucket bath on the chapapa. A chapapa is a makeshift, table-like structure, perhaps more accurately translated as “platform”. A chapapa, unlike most tables, often has spaces between the planks, sticks or logs that make up its surface and can be quite partial to falling down, even when used properly.

I dislike standing in the mud while I bathe, especially because there is something that always bites my toes—little painful pinches, as if there were aquatic ants. So, in preparation for my bath, I carried a bucket of water from the pond to the chapapa. The chapapa, near the well, is entirely surrounded by water and perhaps it seems a bit odd that I would carry a bucket of muddy water from across the yard, only to bathe, surrounded by the same, muddy water. However, I think the pond water smells less like cows and so I prefer it. Anyways, when I tried to stand on the chapapa so I could bathe without getting my feet muddy, I discovered that many other creatures had had the same idea and climbed up the chapapa to stay dry: mostly a bizarre variety of ants and spiders. I decided I could share the chapapa with these critters and began to soap up until, halfway through my bucket-bath, the chapapa fell down, dumping me, my clothes and my towel into the water. So I stood in the mud and continued my bath, lamenting my wet clothes and towel…and then the mosquitoes attacked, making me prance around naked, splashing around in the water and slapping at my body. Finally I ran, soaking wet, for cover in the tent. Now I am dry and the tent is damp. I hate bathing.

I hear great-horned owls, hooting faintly in the forest, across the pond. The frogs and bats are croaking and squeaking so loudly all around me and over head that the noise level is almost uncomfortable. I hear soft voices and laughter from the family in the house. A horse snorts. I hear Steve’s soggy footsteps as he returns from his anti-frustration walk. The three guys at Esperanza go to Trini tomorrow and John (a project employee who is working at Esperanza) will supposedly be back on Saturday.

On Sunday we might know if there will be a canoe to get us out of Encanta. Maybe the series of trucks and boats is up and running, to get people from Loreto to Trini. (Note: Loreto is a tiny town, 15 KM from Esperanza, which normally has daily transportation to the big city of Trinidad.) Or maybe one or all of the parts in this line of transport are not working. Maybe there is a motorboat that can go all the way from Loreto to Trini. Maybe not. Maybe there are planes flying from Loreto to Trini. Maybe Loreto’s airport is already flooded. Maybe it will rain more and boats will be the only option left. Maybe it’s done raining for a while and the water will go down enough that we can use horses.

Rolando says that probably the guy who might be looking for a canoe in Trini won’t find one because canoes are currently in high demand, but Rolando may be able to borrow a canoe from a neighboring estancia. No one knows any more than all of these maybes and probablys and probably nots, and the for sures that are never for sure, but it doesn’t matter—that’s just life in Bolivia.


January 31st

Yesterday we were finally flooded out of our tent— the little island on which the tent was perched is now underwater. I rescued all our stuff from the tent in the middle of the 4-hour downpour (while Steve was watching the nest) so that our sleeping bags were only marginally damp. By the time the rain stopped and we were able to move the tent it was filled with 6 inches of standing water. We are close enough to the river that with this flood we are now part of the river system. The water has a current, flowing along with the river Ibaré from South to North.

Even the water in the forest has a current. What was once a path leading to the nest is now a knee-deep stream with a current. The water I walk through to get to the nest was probably in Loreto a few hours earlier, and will be heading north towards Trini after passing through Encanta.

At 8km, we are far enough from the main river that the current is slow, but we are all grateful for the current because it keeps the water cleaner. It hardly seems like more rain will make much difference anymore, since we already moved our tent to a raised platform (chapapa) on higher ground and the water is so deep that our boots are flooded during the daily walk to the nest. Of course I wouldn’t wish more suffering on the people of Trini, thousands of whom are already flooded out of their houses and living in makeshift tents on higher ground.

The water is already higher than it got during last year’s flood, but Rolando says that it’s not really any worse because this year people had a little more time to prepare and knew just how bad it could get. Last year huge numbers of livestock died, as well as wild animals. Lurdes says that anytime now the armadillos should start arriving by the dozen to the higher ground at the house and yard. They even climbed up into the oven last year, she tells me, especially if it had been used recently because the thick, baked mud walls retain heat for a long time.

On the topic of ovens, the method of baking here is quite interesting. The oven is a mud-walled mound, very similar indeed to a Hornero’s mud nest (horno = oven in Spanish), only differing in that the real oven has 2 openings (one on each side) to facilitate making a fire and cleaning out the ash. To heat the oven, it is stuffed with wood and coals from the kitchen fire and stoked for at least an hour, until its blazing hot, and the entire oven (including the mud walls) are at the proper roasting temperature. Then all the wood and coals are removed, the food is put on a tray in the oven and the heavy doors are replaced and held shut by long wooden poles, braced against the ground. The structure holds heat so well that it will not need to be re-heated and can even cook a tray lined with huge chunks of meat…or an armadillo.


I am sitting in the blind where a cool breeze has just picked up. It feels like it might rain again. The female is on her nest, but I am worried about the fate of her two eggs. When I arrived here at 8:00 she was nowhere to be found and didn’t show up at the nest until 8:45. Now it is 9:30 and she is still in her nest, incubating, but it’s very odd that she would be gone for so long. The pair is definitely acting strange. The male entered twice in one hour, each time for less than a minute.

Our first signals of failure at the Vaca Muerta nest, in early December, was when the male repeatedly approached the nest (with incubating female inside) screaming, went in and out of the nest, and then sat near the entrance, screaming, as if trying to convince the female to abandon the dead, broken eggs. The male here at Encanta is still being silent near the nest, so hopefully everything is fine. Oh, please, please let the eggs hatch!

]]> tag:parrots.org,2008:index.php/52.1710 2008-09-25T10:40:00Z 2008-09-25T11:24:15Z Sarah Faegre cocopichon@hotmail.com
All seems well with the incubating Blue-throats but still, the eggs have not hatched. Steve and I split each day doing morning and afternoon nest-watch at the blind and the rest of the day is free for spending time with the family, helping out with chores, reading and writing, or walking around, looking for birds and other animals. All this water is very confining, and at times I am less than enthusiastic that I must flood my boots and tromp around in the knee-to-waist deep swamp if I want to go for a walk.

The kids giggle at Steve and me as we walk carefully through the mud, trying not to fall when our boots get stuck. Lurdes, Rolando and the kids all go barefoot most of the time, and I must admit it is nice to feel the mud squish between my toes…but somehow I always find myself stepping on thorns or having my feet and legs bitten by the floating ant colonies. The water is rising steadily around the tent and has already surrounded the well, filling it with dirty, swamp water. The family is as bothered by this as I am but, as always, they remain good humored in the face of difficulties.

We are drinking rainwater, collected in buckets as it runs off the tiled roof of the main house. The walls of the house are made of baked mud bricks and the floor is packed dirt. It would be disastrous if the flood waters surrounded the house since the walls could turn to mud and fall down…but God willing, this will not happen.

Diesel-fueled lamps, made with jam jars and cloth wicks, softly illuminate the dinner and late night conversations at the table. The lamps flicker softly and throw reflections across the shallow water that surrounds the open kitchen. Frogs chorus from every direction.


January 28th

We woke up this morning and found that the kitchen has flooded and is full of muddy, standing water. I helped Lurdes set up a bunch of platforms to get into the kitchen from the house (so that kids can come to eat at the table without getting all muddy) and other platforms inside the kitchen so that she doesn’t have to stand in the water while cooking. It has been pouring on and off all morning and the meat from the calf that was butchered the day before yesterday is starting to go bad because there is no way to dry the slabs into charque without at least one day of strong sun. The piglets are grunting and shivering in a pile under my hammock. My hammock is strung up in the grass-roofed galpón, which keeps it dry during the rain. Unfortunately, the galpón also the shelter used to store meat until it can be dried or, if it goes bad, until it is fed it to the dogs.

Still, we are ever waiting for the eggs to hatch. Steve climbed yesterday afternoon and thought he could feel movement of a chick within one of them. They should hatch any day now—a week at the most. We continue watching, watching…recording the activities of the father, to and from the nest, and of the mother, incubating attentively and rarely leaving the nest for more than five minutes. The male spends at least 2 hours per day perched on top of the nest box, preening or sleeping. We’ve been getting a lot of great photos of the male, but the female is harder to get good shots of as she quickly enters and exits the nest box. With good photos of the facial lines on this pair we will be able to confirm with 100% certainty that this is the same pair that made a nesting attempt in this box in August but lost their eggs due to predation.
]]> tag:parrots.org,2008:index.php/52.1697 2008-09-11T02:00:03Z 2008-09-11T22:01:06Z Sarah Faegre cocopichon@hotmail.com January 23rd

It has been raining on and off with bursts of torrential downpour interspersed with an enduring drizzle. The water is already approaching disconcertingly close to our tent, inspiring us to put up an overhead tarp and dig canals to drain the pools that are forming at the back corners of the tent.

Yesterday evening I watched the nest from 5 to 7 p.m., the last hour of which I was worried by the long absence of the female. She seems to be extraordinarily sensitive and is frightened off her eggs by any sudden noise. She seems to particularly hate sneezes.


January 24th

Sitting in the open and derelict escondite (blind) here at Encanta where we haven’t been able to improve the temporary blind (built before they knew that the nest was active) for fear of disturbing Señora Barba Azul, who is extremely sensitive to disruption. The tiger herons are mooing repetitively beyond the nest box, sounding to the inexperienced ear like a jaguar in heat (according to the locals that is—I have not personally heard the calls of a jaguar in heat).

When I arrive, all is still and silent in the nest box and I assume that mom is in there, keeping her eggs warm in the cool, damp morning air. Frogs are chorusing from the flooded pampas and the Thrush-like Wren is making its strange sci-fi shooting noises, which everyone says sounds like the space guns in star wars. This morning, when I put on my rubber boots to get out of the tent, I felt something at the bottom, which luckily moved to the side as I stood up. It wriggled a few times and then, as I stood there, out jumped a little frog and with one hop was back in the water that is now only 2 feet from the tent vestibule, and away it swam. I laughed and said that I supposed that too-big boots served some purpose after all: more room for the frogs to jump out, rather than getting squished. Later, as I was sitting in the outhouse, I felt something else in my boot and I reached in a pulled out a toad—also quite alive. Not surprising, the boot that the frogs and toads prefer is the one with a leak that is always wet inside.

I am very happy to report that all is well in Parabalandía (Macawland). The female is inside her box and only left for 5 minutes since I arrived at 7. I am anxious to climb again and find out if the chicks have hatched, but these days it seems too risky to disturb her.

On the 22nd, on my way back from the evening nest watch, I was amazed and thrilled to see a troop of flying monkeys. Of course they were not quite like the evil, flying monkeys in the Wizard of Oz (luckily) but they jumped from tree to tree just like flying squirrels, with amazing distance and agility, flying through the air with all 4 limbs extended for distances as great as 10 meters. They were extremely quick, agile little creatures, hitting their destination branch and immediately scurrying up the tree, stopping in the high branches to peer down at me briefly: round little faces with big, round, black eyes and striking, white markings above the eyes, giving them their Spanish name: Mono Cuatro-ojos (Four-eyed Monkey). They have dark, soft brown fur on their backs and tails contrasting with rufus bellies that fade to a yellow-white color on their sides. Their tails are about twice the length of their bodies and may or may not have be prehensile (I did not see it used as such). The group consisted of 4-6 individuals, which made funny, birdlike blipping noises as they moved through the trees. Are these the night-monkeys I have wanted to see for so long? Their presence at dusk and the appearance of their big, round, black eyes make me suspect that I did indeed see a troop of nocturnal flying monkeys! Aside from monkeys, there is a baby caiman living next to my tent, plenty of frogs, two foxes and a raccoon that come around at night and giant black and yellow anacondas and false water-pythons that steal half-grown ducklings. The snakes I have not yet seen.



Back at the house, I am sharing mate with Lucy and Lurdes and watching as they make a crunchy bread called bizcocho: equal parts flour and lard, eggs, yeast, water, salt. Ten-year-old Rolando just finished plucking all the tail feathers out of a young chicken. When I asked why, he and Lurdes (his mom) explained that you have to puck the tail so that its body will grow bigger. The tail stunts its growth otherwise, they claim, and it will grow to be a tiny, skinny chicken with no meat on its bones, and a long, useless tail.
“But the tail will just grow back,” I said.
“And we’ll pluck it again,” said Lurdes. They laughed at my raised eyebrows and laughed even harder when I said I didn’t believe it was true. “It’s true,” they assured me. "Haven't you seen those tiny little chickens with huge tails? The tail doesn’t let the meat grow." I then jokingly suggested, perhaps a bit unkindly, that the reason Yusara was fat was because she has short hair. Lurdes, Rolando and Lucy laughed uproariously at this comment. “Yes, it’s true!” said Lucy. "If you let her hair grow long she will get thin, like me and Sarah.” Yusara was good-natured about the joke, since being chubby in Bolivia isn’t seen as something to be terribly ashamed of the way it often is here in the U.S.

]]> tag:parrots.org,2008:index.php/52.1696 2008-08-27T23:03:00Z 2008-08-28T04:53:44Z Sarah Faegre cocopichon@hotmail.com
Yesterday Steve and I arrived at Encanta, an isolated estancia which will be our home for the remainder of our time with the project. Encanta is 5 km from Esperanza (the closest estancia which can be accessed by road), although with the current flooded condition, a 7-8 km roundabout route must be taken when traveling between to two estancias. Even the roundabout route has enough water that I had to lift my legs up, above the horse’s back, when navigating the deeper parts. With another foot of water, the horses would have been swimming. Much of our path wove through the jungle, bordering the flooded wetlands (savannah in the dry season)—and even here, in the lush, dense forest there are several feet of standing water in most places, giving our journey a particularly adventurous feel. We spent much time flattened against our horses’ necks to slip beneath low hanging branches. Steve was nearly hung from a tree by his backpack when the top of the pack hooked onto a branch and the horse panicked at the sudden resistance and tried to bolt. Then there was a hornet nest we had to run the horses away from and more branches to duck under and plenty palo diablo (a poisonous tree) to avoid brushing against.

The jungle here is beautiful—very distinct from the forest islands of Tres Palmeras and the Campamento, about 250 km from here. I love the place and the family we’re living with. Steve and I both feel lucky, getting to spend time here, at the isolated Encanta. The only other active nest (and the 2 other project employees) are at Esperanza, where the nest is so close to the house and the chicks so big that there is no quiet time in the forest and very little work.



Above photos: The kids of Encanta looking at our bird book and me serving mate to the kids from my hammock

Yesterday afternoon Steve and I set out to climb the Encanta nest tree, to assure ourselves of the status of the nest. Nine and ten-year-old Yusara and Rolando, the two oldest kids, tagged along to watch us climb the nest. Unfortunately this meant that the three dogs trotted along behind us as well. We were about 100 meters into the jungle when the dogs ran ahead, yipping and squealing and thrashing about in a way that I knew could only mean they were killing something. We ran to where they were gathered in a frenzy in time to see one of the dogs violently shaking a tiny, baby coati (tejón) as the mother and her other baby watch helplessly from a tree. I screamed at the dogs and kicked them, yelling “Fuera, fuera de aqui, perro basura” (Out, get out of here, bad dog). This incited riotous giggles from the children, for whom the killing scene was quite normal. “I hate it when dogs kill wild animals,” I explained to them. “Because there are lots and lots of dogs in the world and very few tejón. If the dogs are always killing, killing, killing, someday there will be no more tejón.”

The dogs were certainly shocked by my reaction and it took a few more hard kicks before they went back home. That is the last time I will let the dogs follow me into the forest. After successfully chasing away the dogs and taking a few photos of the distressed mother coati we continued to the nest tree, where the female BTM flew out of the box upon our arrival. Just as Steve began to climb the rain began—big fat drops that soaked us immediately and we had to abort the mission.

This morning we went again to the nest, this time without dogs or rain, and were very pleased to find that all is well in the nest box. I reached in and set two fingers gently over one of the warm eggs, trying to feel any movement within. How exciting it will be to see the tiny, newly hatched barba azul chicks and to look out for them during this most sensitive stage.

I am now sitting at the table in the open-air, grass-roofed kitchen and 4 of the 6 kids are watching me write while they eat/play with the guineo bananas that are tiny and very sweet—picked fresh from the chaco (Bolivian word for orchard or garden) about 1 km from here. In the chaco they grow guineo, corn, watermelon, squash, and yuca.



Above images: Riding back from the chaco with guineo and Senor Rolando with his son, also named Rolando


January 22nd

The road between Loreto and Trini is flooded and unusable until the dry season, despite Igor’s assurances that the road stays dry year round, regardless of rain and flooding in surrounding areas. His assurances were based on the average rainy season here, assuming that last year's flood would not make a re-appearance and wreck havok on the Beni yet again. Unfortunately it looks to be a big flood year again and Trini is filling with water and dengue fever—the radio made an announcement this morning, cautioning residents to keep their windows and doors closed to protect themselves from the potential upcoming epidemic. The classes in Trini, which are supposed to start on February 11, will be delayed, as they were last year, because when the outer neighborhoods of Trini flood, the people from the flooded houses move into the schools until the water goes down.


]]> tag:parrots.org,2008:index.php/52.1681 2008-08-13T16:53:00Z 2008-08-13T21:44:47Z Sarah Faegre cocopichon@hotmail.com
Torrential rain, tent-crushing wind and thunder and lightening. I am sitting, damp, smelly, and with a bad case of stomach bugs in a little tent at the estancia of Esperanza. Shortly after I wrote from Nueva Hora, three days ago, about the rain that would prevent us from leaving, a series of miscommunications led to a near disaster when plane came despite the weather conditions and had to take off from a short, muddy runway. The plane was also well over max gross weight, pushing a bad situation into something could have become more critical. What follows is my short account of our survival, against what I perceived at the time as rather unfavorable odds:

After lunch the rain had slowed and then finally stopped and at 1:00 pm. Señora Teresa got a hold of the property owner by radio and yelled repeatedly (to my dismay) that it had not rained here…it only sprinkled, she said, but did not rain and the bad weather had passed. The plane is already on its way, we were told. By one account it had left 12 minutes before hearing from us…by others it was waiting for confirmation on the condition of the runway. Either way, out of the cloudy sky came our little Cessna 206 and Steve and I (both pilots) watched apprehensively as it landed and mud sprayed up onto the wings. As the plane taxied through mud puddles I wondered a bit about our takeoff.

We were loading the plane when the pilot began swearing under his breath about the terrible runway conditions. “Why did they tell me it hadn’t rained here? The runway is a disaster!” he fumed. “Why didn’t they tell me not to come when the runway is in such horrible condition? And now, the plane is heavily loaded—they told me it would be light. Why did they send an extra passenger along if he’s not even going to stay here?” I couldn’t answer any of these questions, which were rhetorical anyways.

When the four passengers, the very large pilot and all of our gear (well over the maximum weight of 500 kg) were in the plane and taxiing to the far end of the runway that the pilot began to speak heatedly, almost yelling, about the horrible runway—“Four-hundred and fifty meters of mud!” he screamed. He had to use full power just to get the plane to move forward, at a creeping pace, sliding towards the end of the runway. This concerned me and apparently the pilot as well who exclaimed, “We’re too heavy—it’s not going to work. This plane is not going to take off.”

If we failed lift off before the end of the runway, Carmen, John and I, sitting on a improvised wooden bench in the back, would almost surely fly through the windshield and be crushed by the plane as it tumbled to a stop in the hummocky, flooded savannah.

“I don’t want to die,” I said loudly as the plane approached the far end of the runway. “I would rather leave my stuff here if the plane is too heavy.” Carmen, tried to reason with the pilot, saying that if he didn’t think it was safe we could leave some stuff behind. I was scared enough that I was about ready to volunteer that I would stay behind when the pilot turned a sudden 180 at the end of the runway, fairly spat out the words, “A ver como sale.” (Let’s see how it turns out), and gave the plane full power ahead. As we sped, faster and faster toward the end of the runway, mud spraying up onto the windows and dripping down the wings, I felt my heart pounding in just the same way as it had when I stepped only one foot away form a huge, venomous snake.

The hummocky, flooded pampa was rapidly approaching and the plane showing no signs of lifting off and oddly enough one of my thoughts was about the bucket of limes on my lap: If we don’t lift off in time and the plane goes tumbling through the pampas, I don’t want one of my last thoughts (before flying through the windshield) to be about dropping the bucket of limes. So I set it between my feet and braced myself. “I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die,” I thought desperately as the runway ended, the stall horn sounded and miraculously we took off, with not more than a meter of runway to spare. I looked over at the pilot, rivulets of sweat pouring down his face and his neck. With the plane in the air he relaxed visibly and certainly Steve and I breathed big sighs of relief.



Images: Left--looking into the back seat of the plane Right--looking out the window, as we fly towards Trinidad (capital city of Beni, Bolivia)

]]> tag:parrots.org,2008:index.php/52.1680 2008-08-08T16:30:00Z 2008-08-08T16:49:06Z Sarah Faegre cocopichon@hotmail.com
And now, two days later, I am back in the blind at Isla Grande for the last time. Igor called by radio and told Carmen that the plan has changed and we will need to take advantage of the next bit of dry weather to fly to Trini. What is the new plan? No one knows. I find myself once again in the realm of complete uncertainty.

Carmen, knowing since her return from Trini that our length of stay at Tres Palmeras was uncertain, has been trying desperately and unsuccessfully to get in touch with Igor since his intended arrival date (in Trini) more than ten days ago. Finally, the day before yesterday, she talked to him, or, more accurately, heard bits and pieces of phrases through the static that sufficed to tell her we needed to gather all the project stuff and get ourselves to an estancia with an airstrip…but we could not hear through the static well enough to understand where, when, or, more importantly, how to move all our stuff from Tres Palmeras the 10 or 20 kilometers across the flooded savannah, through any number of deep, swampy streams and, depending on the departure location, a rather wide river. And to complicate things further, there were no horses available to help transport our heavy loads of project equipment and personal baggage. “Worse case scenario,” said Carmen, “—we have to walk, making as many trips as necessary to get all our stuff to Nueva Hora.” (Nueva Hora is the closest and more preferred departure site).

It is hot in the blind and the mosquitoes are relentless today. Steve is sitting next to me, grabbing his camera every time we hear the quiet croak of a BTM—one of the parents sitting nearby. The parents did finally show up and feed the other day that I was here, writing, and I took dozens of photos. Sadly, only a few turned out to be worth anything and none were great because my camera was acting up and chose a very slow shutter speed despite the good lighting conditions. We were taking turns in the blind at that point and Steve was disappointed to have missed the action, especially since he hasn’t seen the macaws attend a nest yet. We have spent so many hours building the blind, sitting in it, and hiking back and forth to Isla Grande with photos in mind, but this pair of parabas (Bolivian word for macaws) has proven to be unusually shy and difficult to photograph. This difficulty is amplified by the fact that the chick is going through his pre-fledging weight loss stage, during which the parents only feed him twice a day.


January 14th 2008

I can’t believe it was only yesterday that we were taking pictures of the macaws at Isla Grande—it seems like several days ago at least. But it was a successful morning—we got pictures of the male and female parabas before mid-day and then wandered around by the lagoona, birdwatching until early afternoon when we returned to Tres Palmeras. And now, I am writing from Nueva Hora, where I sit on a crooked, sagging bed, under my mosquito net, gloating over the fact that the bloodthirsty little monsters will buzz uselessly all night, trying in vain to get my blood. Tomorrow, if it doesn’t rain, the plane will come and take us to Trini. We are here with all our stuff and all the project equipment, thanks to the wonderful folks here at Nueva Hora, who came to get us with their oxcart and some horses. I am exhausted and medio sick. I’ll sleep now and write later.


January 16th 2008

Rainy day, quiet, soft grey clouds hanging heavy. The rain too is soft…but steady—the worst kind because it will slowly soak into the dirt runway, turning it to muck, while a harder, shorter rain might run off to the lower grass on the sides. Our giant pile of baggage is sitting under a tarp by the runway, hopefully not flooding from beneath. If the plane had come at 9 a.m., like they claimed it would when we spoke on the radio at 8 a.m., the runway would have been perfect—just recently dried from the last big rain. It could have even come at 10 or 11…but now it is raining harder, has been raining steadily for an hour, and the dirt is already turning to mud, generously pocked with puddles of course. As I write the rain is increasing its force bit by bit, yet again. How many times did we jump up this morning upon hearing a plane? At least 3 times we rushed outside, once all the way to the runway, 200 meters from the house, as a little Cessna flew low over Nueva Hora—surely our plane, we thought, as it flew straight over our heads. “It will turn around and land from the other side,” said Señora Teresa as it passed over the runway. But it did not. And now we cannot contact Trini—surprise surprise, who can believe that the fabulous and reliable radio is failing us yet again? When I heard that the plane would be here at 9 a.m., of course I didn’t really expect it to be here at 9. I thought 10 at the earliest, today if we’re lucky, but just as likely it won’t come at all. I shouldn’t have brought all my bags to the runway because now I am a bit worried that my giant blue “coffin” bag will get wet—and that is where my camera with months worth of photos is stored.

So, we have been trying to leave since Monday. Today is Wednesday. Maybe tomorrow, if the rain lets up soon. Or maybe several days, or even a week, if San Pedro decides that its time for daily rain showers. But really, it doesn’t matter. Sure, it’s a bit annoying to be waiting, waiting, running outside to meet the plane that continues on its way to somewhere else, never knowing when we might leave, but in the end, what schedule do I have to keep? What commitment will be broken? What person will be inconvenienced? Luckily, the answer to all of those questions is: none. So I wait and read and write and feel a bit bored and restless and eventually the plane will probably show up, or else we will make the 2-day walk to a wide branch of the river and hope a boat comes by.

The only thing I worry about or feel constrained by is my concern for the safety of my photos and my journals, my two most valuable, irreplaceable items. It will be nice when they are safely backed-up and I can go about my travels without a worry in the world. All the rest of my stuff is just that—stuff. But my writing and my photos are like parts of my memories, things I want to use to re-live my time here again and again, and even more importantly, to share it with the rest of the world so that it is not just me (and the macaws!) who benefits from the adventures that I am lucky enough to experience.

The Southern Screamers are yelling, “Cha-HA,” living up to their Spanish name (Chaja). Their call is a funny, high-pitched fluting sound that jumps up in pitch at the end, cracking like the voice of an adolescent boy. I smell limes and I know that Señora Teresa and her teenage girls are making limeade in the kitchen—this is the season for lemons and limes. The ripe, green fruits weigh down the slender branches of the trees with their abundance.



Above: left--Steve and Carmen, standing at a river near Nueva Hora (we walked there to look for river dophins) Right--Carmen wading through the swamp to get back to Nueva Hora
]]> tag:parrots.org,2008:index.php/52.1676 2008-07-24T03:16:00Z 2008-07-24T03:34:24Z Sarah Faegre cocopichon@hotmail.com
Nemo, the macaw chick with a congenital spine deformation, has successfully fledged!!! Actually, he fledged about a week ago, during a period of time when I was so excited, both by the arrival of friends and by following the family of 5 Blue-throated Macaws through the forest, that I didn’t write a thing in my journal for six days.



Above photos: Left--Nemo in nest box. He was able to walk but often flipped onto his back when startled. Right: Nemo fledged--able to fly, just like his sibs!

The day after Steve and Carmen arrived, our nest watch efforts revealed that Nemo was no longer popping his head out of the box. I climbed the tree and confirmed that the next was empty. We feared the worst and even looked around on the ground. Luckily there was no sign of him there. The next morning, Carmen, Steve and I conducted a systematic search of the forest near the nest box, looking for the BTM pair and the 3 (hopefully!) fledged chicks. Only fourty minutes later we were standing together, staring in silent awe at the 3 fledglings, huddled together, high in a tree. Even Nemo was there! One could see that he was slightly crooked, even from this distance, but it was clear that he was able to fly and indeed had done quite a respectable job of fledging compared to Manu and Goliath.

During all of our subsuquent days at Tres Palmeras we were able to locate all three fledgings, often with their parents, at least once per day. This afforded all sorts of photographic opportunities, which Steve and I took advantage of for hours on end, taking shot after shot of the birds. They were usually hidden behind foliage at the tops of the highest trees, but our efforts were rewarded with some great views into the lives of newly fledged Blue-throated Macaw chicks.

Steve’s efforts particularly, were rewarded with the first photos of a wild family of five blue-throated Macaws. Below I will share some of the best photos that Steve and I took of the Tres Palmeras macaw family:







]]> tag:parrots.org,2008:index.php/52.1675 2008-07-23T00:06:00Z 2008-07-23T00:12:00Z Sarah Faegre cocopichon@hotmail.com January 11th 2008

A letter to my brother:
(My brother, at this time, was in India, studying a percussion instrument called tabla).

My Dearest Brother Brendan,

I am thinking of you today, as I sit in a little palm-leaf blind, watching a blue-throated macaw nest, because of some absolutely incredible bird songs I’ve been hearing—These funny little ground-dwelling swamp birds called Grey-necked Wood Rails seem to have a dancing ground by the lagoona here on the uninhabited and totally wild Isla Grande. From what I have seen so far, they seem to gather together is small groups of 4 or 5 birds, and then go marching around in circles with short, stiff little steps, singing a veritable orchestra of sounds, the majority of which are very percussive, while others are like rhythmic, staccato notes on a flute. You know I hate dancing, but the rhythm that these birds weave, while strutting on their swampy patch of ground gives me the most bizarre urge to get up and start dancing to the rhythm that they so forcefully flute into the uninhabited swamp. The most recent of their singing bouts was so enticing that I just had to dance my way towards the swamp, my rubber boots clunking and slurping awkwardly in the mud, while the rest of my body moved in time with the quick staccato beat. Can’t you imagine if I actually managed to join the birds: me strutting and bobbing through the swamp with a group of funny-looking, green-billed birds who were acting as my band and dancing, much more gracefully than me, all around my tall, rubber boots?

Luckily I have made a decent recording of the rails quartet, using the video mode on my camera and I can’t wait to play it for you! Maybe you can use it as inspiration for a future composition—or maybe you will just have to get up and dance…Hey—we could make my recording into a loop and then invite all our friends to a dance party. And maybe we could all dress up like birds and dance in circles in the swampy ditches beside the road. So many good ideas!

I’ve been in the wild savannahs of Bolivia for just over 2 months now. I love it here, though sometimes I’m a bit lonely. I miss you and mom and dad and Flynn and Limey a lot. About a week ago a friend of mind from the HawkWatch job came down and joined the Blue-throated Macaw project, so of course I have been much less lonely since then. But still, it’s not the same as family.

Wow- a Crane Hawk just landed in the nest tree, right next to the cavity that I am watching. The Crane Hawk is a large, grey and black bird with extremely long, bright orange legs, which it uses to reach into tree cavities and pull out baby birds (including Blue-throated Macaws!). Luckily, the macaw chick in this nest is huge (about 2 lbs.) and would probably be too difficult a meal for the hawk…but you never know.

Steve and I got up early today to make the hour and 15 minute trek through the flooded savannah to Isla Grande, where our goal is to hide in the blind until the parents come to feed their chick, so that we can take close-up photos of their faces, which will be compared to photos from past years. The BTMs have feathered lines running across bare, white skin on their faces, which can essentially be used like a fingerprint to ID individuals.

--End of letter--

This letter, written in my field journal, ends abruptly because I heard the BTM adults approaching the nest. I grabbed my camera, kept as still and silent as possible, and waited, hoping to finally get those face shots…



]]> tag:parrots.org,2008:index.php/52.1672 2008-07-22T01:56:00Z 2008-07-22T02:28:23Z Sarah Faegre cocopichon@hotmail.com December 29th 2007

Last night at 7 pm (our daily radio contact hour) we finally were able to talk to Carmen…well, Marco talked to her because I couldn’t understand a thing through all the static. All I learned that Carmen is still in Trini. Still, I have no news of Steve, a friend from home who I have been expecting to arrive for more than a week now. Is he wandering, lost is Bolivia? Is he in Trini with Carmen? Is he still in the U.S.? I was asked to attend the radio today at 8 a.m., 12 noon, and 1 pm, to be sure to talk to her and arrange a meeting time at the river.

I anxiously awaited the specified 8 a.m. conference. And then again at noon…and one. As I should have expected there was no sign of Carmen or anyone at Veintiuno on the radio at any of the three times specified. Luz and Pedro are infuriatingly optimistic, saying after each failed attempt, “Oh well, I’m sure she’ll come through loud and clear at ___o’clock.” I am inclined to believe that I won’t hear from anyone at all and that she (with or without Steve) will eventually just show up at Tres Palmeras with loaned horses from Veintiuno. Marco said that he heard a plane arrive at Veintiuno around 7 a.m., but later admitted that he wasn’t sure after all, and that “who knows—maybe plans will change and they will arrive at Chiméra instead of Veintiuno.

It is tiring sometimes, being the lone “Parabera” (literally, Macaw-er) at the estancia, living with Marco, Luz, and their 2 and 4 year-old children and menagerie of barking dogs and yodeling roosters. Whoever thinks that roosters crow only in the morning has never lived on a farm!

I am sitting in the blind, watching the nest box. The BTM adults give their whiney, screeching call nearby and Nemo, the deformed chick, pokes his head out of the nest box, looking around contentedly from his penthouse suite (the nest box is huge for just one chick!). A single dark cloud is passing overhead, dumping rain on the little blind, but soon it will pass. There are lots of mosquitoes. I feel like I am getting sick.

9:30 pm
I am feeling much happier now—my sudden improvement as mysterious as my apparent illness. Or perhaps the mascora (cacao fruit) juice cured me. Between my bouts of stress-induced mania, yelling at the static on the radio, I had a wonderful time learning how to make chocolate from the mascora fruit (per instruction from Luz). I spent the morning opening 25 kilos of masorca (cacao fruit), removing the flesh-covered seeds, and wringing the flesh off the seeds after soaking them in water, to make a delicious juice and to prepare the seeds for the next step in the cacao-making process: baking in the sun for 2-4 days. The masorca juice is one of the most delicious juices I have ever tasted and after an hour and a half of work a huge pitcher was ready for the whole family to enjoy. So sweet and refreshing with an indescribably subtle, complex flavor that is unlike any other fruit. I must have drank about 3 liters of the refreshing “refresco” before I had to restrain myself, lest there be none left to have with dinner. Tomorrow morning I will get up early and do the 6:30 to 8:30 nest watch and then come back to harvest the abundant, ripe masorca with Luz to make more refresco and prepare more seeds for cacao. Since tomorrow is Sunday and there are no formal chores, Luz has proposed that we roast the cacao seeds that are currently sun baked and she will show me how to make the cacao paste, from which bars of pure chocolate can be formed.

The chocolate tree is a wonderful thing. I have my hammock strung up in an idyllic location, behind my tent, in the shade between two chocolate trees. As I lie in my hammock and look up, I see the large, star fruit-shaped, yellow and orange masorca fruits, hanging from branches above. And it is not uncommon to be able to get a close-up view of blue-fronted parrots that come to eat the fruits and fail to notice me, lying quietly in my green hammock below.

Not too surprisingly, I learned this evening (yes, the radio did function for once) that Carmen is still in Trini. I didn’t actually talk to Carmen, but the woman who attends the radio in Trini came on briefly to tell me that Carmen will be leaving Trini tomorrow at 9 a.m. and that I should attend the radio at 11 a.m. for the latest news. So, at 11 a.m. will I hear from Carmen? Probably not. In the mean time, I have chocolate and macaws to look after.


January 5th 2008

On the evening of the 30th I returned from my afternoon watch at the blind—Nemo still in the nest box. Adults nearby. Wondering more and more if Nemo will be able to fly when he does eventually try to leave the nest (note: he has a congenital spine deformation). I was feeling grumpy and slightly ill, looking forward to another long afternoon of waiting. And as I walked up to the house, my whole body feeling heavy, there was Steve. I couldn’t believe it—I was absolutely shocked. Steve and Carmen had arrived by foot with all their bags after being helped to the river with horses from Veintiuno. Steve had finally arrived. Not just in Trini with Carmen, or at Veintiuno…here, at Tres Palmeras. And so I was totally thrown for a loop and did not write a thing in my journal for 6 days.


January 8th 2008

A hot, mosquito-filled night. The great-horned owl fledglings are screeching breathily near by tent and two tropical screech owls are trilling from the forest. I have the rain fly off my tent but I am dripping sweat anyways. The stars are out. It’s a beautiful night, but hard to enjoy from anywhere except a well-ventilated tent. A potoo just wailed, joining the chorus of night songs. I just killed yet another “last mosquito” inside my tent.

Steve is next to me, writing in his own journal and flipping through the bird book. We walked to Isla Grande today to make use of our newly built blind. The goal: get photos of the faces of the adults. We constructed the new blind very close to the nest cavity with this goal in mind, and spend a lot of time camouflaging it so not to unduly alarm the parabas. With a full day in the blind, I was sure we would succeed in our mission…but alas, the adults didn’t ever enter the cavity. They arrived very nearby twice, but seemed nervous and shortly began screaming and left the area. Did they see us through our peep hole in the blind? Or is something wrong in the nest? We didn’t hear a peep out of Blecs for the entire 6 hours (Note: Blecs is the single BTM chick of the Isla Grande nest, named after Brent, using the locals’ pronunciation of his name). Could it be normal for him to be so quiet? We are all a little worried but only tomorrows nest check will tell. I think (and hope!) that chubby little Blecs is fine. He is so fat—maybe his parents decided to put him on a pre-fledging diet.


Above Photos: Left--Steve with Blecs. Right--Steve's photo of the Isla Grande male at the nest (taken from our blind)

In other news, we have mostly ruled out malaria as the cause of Carmen’s strange illness and are now suspecting that it’s just a little dengue fever. All of her joints have been aching for 3 weeks and she is tired and has lots of headaches. Poor Carmencita with her denguito. I am exhausted from so much walking during the past 2 days: to the Crowned Eagle nest and back on the 7th, then to Isla Grande. And with all the water flooding my Wellies and the sun beating down oppressively and the mud sucking and slurping at my 3-sizes too large boots…I am very, very tired.


January 9th 2008

It is a sunny, breezy afternoon and I am sitting comfortably in my hammock, rocking in the shade by the house. The family from Buena Hora is visiting and Don Cuto is yelling into the radio, trying to communicate through the static. Children are running around laughing and the guira cuckoo is moaning its melancholy lament from the top of the tamarind tree. Señora Teresa (from Buena Hora) and Señora Luz are sitting on the bench outside the door, talking quietly and Teresa’s two teenage girls alternately sit quietly with the women and play with their tiny, 5-year-old sister and Luz’s two kids. Cows are milling about on the other side of the fence and the herd of mares and yearlings have finally calmed down and are standing quietly in the shade, rather than charging around the yard like half-ton, headless chickens. Steve and Carmen are at Isla Grande with two of the tamer mares, checking on Blecs. They left around 10 a.m., planning just to climb and then come straight back, so they should be back any time now. Actually I am a little worried about them…maybe I should have gone along to help out in case something went wrong with the horses. The other day one of Marco’s mares reared up and flipped over backwards the after stepping on an caiman (small alligator) that was resting, hidden in the flooded savannah.

Okay, now it’s an hour later and Carmen and Steve are back. Of course everything is fine—with the horses and with Blecs too—todo bien. Carmen says Blecs is as fat as ever, so I guess he’s just a quieter chick than the ones I’m used to.


January 10th 2008

A dark, windy day. The first drops of the rainstorm beginning to fall. Me in my hammock, strung between two Cacao trees, feet dangling. A lazy day and finally, for the moment a bit of peace and quiet—the children are not screaming and running in circles anymore, thank God. My hammock has been hanging next to the house, under the overhang roof, but the screaming children drove me so insane as I was trying to read that I moved my hammock to the far corner of the yard to get a bit of peace. Now it looks like the rain might run me right back to the house. I love the sound of the wind in the trees, the parrots chirping and screeching, the monkeys snorting and roaring…but the children and the dogs make me insane sometimes. Why is it the screeching parrots are music to my ears, but howling children not so much….? The family here at Palmeras is wonderful, but sometimes I miss the peace of the campamento.

Bird notes: Isla Grande January 11th
Sunbittern: Soft, melodious trill, 1-2 seconds, all one note?

]]> tag:parrots.org,2008:index.php/52.1660 2008-07-03T03:51:00Z 2008-07-21T23:56:33Z Sarah Faegre cocopichon@hotmail.com
December 27th 2007

And so begins a new chapter in the adventure: I am now at the estancia Trés Palmeras, sitting at this moment in blind at the nest box near the house, where three large chicks should fledge any day now. Actually, I only know for sure that one of three is still there, as he is poking his head out as I write.



It is hot and humid and very still. Dark clouds are gathering and it looks like its getting ready to rain…a lot. I wonder when Steve and Carmen will arrive at Veintiuno. If it rains, they will be majorly delayed. They were supposed to arrive today or tomorrow, last I heard (on the 24th) but plans change so much that I really have no expectations—except that I expect for nothing to go as planned. Steve was scheduled to arrive in Trini on the 26th, so probably he will arrive on the 27th, meaning that Carmen would want to travel from Trini to Veintiuno on the 28th (tomorrow), but if it rains tonight…It could really be up to a week before they are able to safely land at Veintiuno.

The final day in camp turned out to be quite an ordeal. It was fraught with misunderstandings, complications, and general stress and disorganization that would accompany any such move of large amounts of stuff through flooded savannahs of Bolivia, using the neighbors’ ox cart. I did my own fair share of adding to the complications and changed my own plans at the last minute, in my stress and despair at so suddenly having to leave the campamento: Just as Vicente was about to grab my huge, 60 lb. backpack and heave it onto the ox cart with the rest of the camp equipment, I said, “Or I could walk to Tres Palmeras.” (Note that Palmeras was to be my ultimate destination after the plane bringing Steve and Carmen arrived).

“But you will have no one to come get you with the horses at the other side of the river,” he said.

“I know,” I replied. “But since it’s just the one backpack I can carry it all the way by myself. Vicente, in his stress at hurrying to pack up everything and not make the Veintiuno folks wait on us any longer, agreed that it was a good idea because that way I could stay and do an extra clean-up of camp (i.e. remove any remaining signs that we had lived there and leave Isla Chiquita as pristine as we had found it). So we said a hurried goodbye and off he rushed to the ox cart.

I was alone in the empty camp I breathed a huge sigh of relief. I would be able to leave the camp just as clean as I felt it should be and take my time to say goodbye to my home of the past month and a half, to which I have become deeply attached. I could also finally rest a bit from my earlier 3-hour trek/swim to the river, across the river, and back, to hand off some of my stuff to Marco, who was supposed to bring John to the river from Tres Palmeras. John would continue to the camp and then to Veintiuno with the oxcart, where he (and Vicente) would await the plane to Trini.

Of course, the hand-off of my stuff didn’t go as planned either, because nothing ever does. Vicente had asked John by radio if Marco
would bring be bringing John to the river by horse, because if he was then I would meet them at the river with some of my stuff so as not to have so much with me at Veintiuno, when my ultimate destination was Tres Palmeras anyways. Somehow, John thought that I was coming to the river with all my stuff and heading straight back to Tres Palmeras, so he came alone with one extra horse. Marco was sick and could not accompany him anyways, he explained.

Upon explaining that I had not brought all my stuff and did not intend to go to Tres Palmeras, I swam across the river, gave him my bag and took his bag and swam back across the river with his sinking, lead-weight bag and then walked the hour back to the camp to tell Vicente that John had to go back to Palmeras with my bag and the horses and would then try to convince the very ill Marco to take him to the river so that he could arrive at the camp before too long and catch the oxcart to Veintiuno. Of course, just then, as I was about to take a break and eat something, thinking that since the oxcart was supposed to come that day, then it surely wouldn’t come until tomorrow…here comes the cart and a guy on a horse. And here we are, only half prepared, with 5 months of camp life strewn about in piles, and I haven’t even begun to prepare any of my own stuff, which is exploded in my tent and strewn around camp. The mad rush began.

The hours of the day went like this: 6:30-10:00 I hike to the river with a small but heavy backpack, swim across and back, and then hike back to camp. 10:05—here comes the oxcart, Vicente and I become super stressed and there is no time to eat or relax. 11:40—everything is packed but garbage has not been dealt with and John still has not arrived. I decide to stay. The oxcart begins to head back to Veintiuno and 2 minutes later John arrives and then goes running to catch up with them after listening with a very puzzled look on his face while I tell him that I’ve decided to go to Tres Palmeras after all. Finally I am alone and happy to relax for a bit. But I am also sad. I wish I could spend one last night here—just me, alone, listening to the howl of the rare-maned wolf, rocking in my hammock under the gibbous moon, finding Goliath and Manu one last time. But realistically, since I need to reach Palmeras before 7:00 pm so I can communicate by radio, I have only a few hours in which I will clean up and say goodbye to my home on Isla Chiquita. I plan out the rest of my day: Noon to 2:00 pm—clean up camp. Two to 6:00 pm—hike/swim to Tres Palmeras.



Changuito, the armadillo, comes trotting past me on his way to a new excavation site. Madidi, the aplomado falcon, flies twisting and swooping through the palm trees and lands on her favorite perch. I walk to Isla 2 to say goodbye to Manu who, on the night on the 25th, was still in the tree where Vicente had placed him. But now, on the afternoon of the 26th he is gone, presumably getting stronger and braver and moving about on his own. When I finally heave the bulky, 60 lb. pack onto my back and walk into the savannah, I feel alright about leaving the campamento.

The 4-hour hike to Tres Palmeras was incredibly difficult, but actually not quite as bad as I had expected. The worst of it was trying to carry my backpack all wrapped up in the poncho for 10 minutes through the swamp on either side of the river. I could barely lift the hulking thing over the barbwire fence, let along walk through the mud, carrying it in my arms. In the end, I tied up the poncho, ready for the river-crossing, and then dragged the huge bundle with a rope through the mud and knee-deep swamp on either side on the river. Swimming was great—for 3 minutes I was freed from the crushing death-grip of a backpack half my weight.


December 28th

So, the poor, deformed Nemo is the only chick left in the box nest—I climbed just now to check because after the nest watch yesterday I suspected there were no longer 3 chicks in the nest. And when I looked into the box, there was poor, crooked little Nemo, lying on his back, screeching at me. But his parents aren’t neglecting him at least because he isn’t too skinny and he can waddle around the nest box well enough to poke his head out of the entrance hole. But the big question is: will he be able to fly? And if not, what will happen to him? Lots of interesting questions which will be answered in the next few weeks.

Today during mid-morning I saddled up Mataperro and rode to Isla Grande after discovering that the chick there hadn’t been checked on for quite a few days. He is very much transformed from the last time I saw him, a month and a half ago, when he was a fat, pink dumpling with wings, somewhat resembling a tiny, plucked chicken. He is still extremely fat—(he weighs almost 2 lbs!) but is now gorgeously feathered with all the brilliant ultra-marine, indigo and gold of an adult Blue-throated Macaw.

Below: The Isla Grande chick, Blecs, on November 14th and again on December 28th




]]> tag:parrots.org,2008:index.php/52.1651 2008-06-20T02:24:00Z 2008-07-02T22:07:26Z Sarah Faegre cocopichon@hotmail.com December 25th

What a perfect Christmas (and final night) at the campamento. Vicente and I were sitting at the little, bound-stick table, listening to surprisingly non-staticy music from the high-frequency radio that we use for communication purposes. The music was interrupted, to my great joy, by the shriek of the rare-maned wolf. Vicente jumped up and turned off the radio and we sat in silence listening. The flickering fire-light, left over from when we cooked dinner, sent soft shadows over his face as we looked at each other, listening, both thinking the same thing: lets go look for it.

We grabbed flashlights, stepped into our damp rubber boots and walked toward the call of the rare-maned wolf. I turned off my bright LED headlamp and we walked in darkness, occasionally using Vicente’s low power incandescent flashlight. “The white light is too bright,” he told me. “It scares away the animals.” And so we walked to Isla 2 in darkness and silence, the rare-maned wolf yelping from the savannahs somewhere beyond Island 2. We waded along the short path through the flooded savannah between the two islands and then stood at the edge of Island 2, looking out into the darkness of the savannahs, listening. Neither of us spoke. The wolf shrieked again. I shrieked back. The wolf seemed to respond, calling again more quickly than before. As the wolf and I called back and forth my imitation of its voice improved. It came closer. Vicente and I conferred in excited whispers—it’s working. He believes me. And then abruptly the replies ended. I howled and howled in vain.

“You scared him away,” joked Vicente. “He probably got closer and thought, ‘what kind of freaky she-wolf is that’ and decided to leave”. As we gave up and walked back towards camp the wolf howled again…from the island we had just left. And we rushed back towards it, as quietly as possible.

After giving up our search for a second time we waded back to camp. I suggested that we celebrate Christmas by making a fire near to our hammocks, which were strung between palm trees at right angles to one another. Vicente went about making the fire and I heated up some water for mate. The night was warm and peaceful. I felt a little bit melancholy, knowing that it was my last night at the campamento, but also content, knowing that Goliath and Manu were safe in trees and able to fly. We rocked in our hammocks for hours, talking and staring into the fire.

]]>