04-APR-C-13

PIXUNA, TAPARU, AND PIRARUCU

ANOTHER FISH STORY AT THE TOP OF THE AMAZON’S

FISH FAUNA; WITH AN EVENING ZODIAC RIDE TO AN OXBOW LAKE IN SEARCH OF [PIRARUCU,

WHICH RESULTS IN THE MOST SPECTACULAR SIGHTINGS

OF HOATZIN, IGUANAS, BIRDS AND AN

AWE-INSPIRING SUNSET

April 27, 2004

Pixuna is the name of a tree that was highly valuable and was the reason for a small village being placed here during the slave trade days when Africans were brought here to begin sugar planting along one of the oxbow lakes adjacent to the main Amazon River connected by a channel that they called Taparu—meaning “about to be closed off.” That is because it was plain to anyone who could see that the channel was drying up and getting clogged and would soon be occluded so there would be no access to the lake from or to the river. Wrong again. Each year the river floods the channel leading to the lake, and some of the fish in the lake migrate down to the river and set up shop somewhere else. And every dry season, the channel goes down and only small fish and few boats can traverse it, and yet it comes up again in the next flood—which is no. Coincidentally, the school term runs from about June to just this week, when the school annual vacation begins since the high water mark may change the pattern of life among the Coboclo. We are anchored off Pixuna and PIXUNA = 2* 25.14 S, 54* 34.04 W.

“Xhe”—a common Brazilian nickname pronounced “Jay” is short for the Portuguese name Jose pronounced Joe Say, not like the Spanish Ho Say. Xhe showed us a plant we had heard of several times, but he cut open one of the fruits to show us the insignificant looking pulp. The pulp has a clear juice in it, and that can be painted on the skin. But, it is translucent, and if you are interrupted in your body painting you may not remember where you had left off. But the design that is tattooed on makes for a very interesting discovery later on. Since, as the plant juices oxidize it turns black, and the skin has a tattoo that lasts for several weeks. It is the kind of thing that one should do at the beginning, not nearing the end, of a two week cruise. This fruit is called “Gevi Papo” which comes from the fruit Gevipa Americana, from the family of the Rubiacere.

One of our Zodiac drivers, who is a naturalist guide on board, a striking loving tall blonde named JD who is from Afrikaans-speaking South Africa as a Tukkie from Pretoria, was painted last night by Xhe, and the developed tattoos of the smiling faces transferred to her cheek when she slept on her hand last night, so she has got two tattoos for the price of one—not exactly where she would have liked to carry it.

I saw the Captain and Mariella at Breakfast—an easy assignment for him. When we are under way, it is the river pilot who calls the course, and when we are at anchor he can flirt with his fiancé He told me that the Orion, as big as it looks to me, displaces only 1,270 tons and draws 12 feet of water. He may give a talk on the boat and its construction and I may yield him some of my time to do so. Mariella was a travel agent when she met him aboard ship in the Adriatic, and since then she has been “looking of a job”, but that was a decade ago. We are surrounded by rather interesting folk, since the crew is German, with all the helpers from Odessa Ukraine, including all of the waitresses and cabin crew. Of the groups on board as passengers, a few are travel photographers one traveling with his auntie who is from London) and the Rob Roy Travel Writer I had mentioned, whose job it is to entice high rollers to spend in such an opulent fashion as to get to the size and condition that she is. Her highly demanding and discriminating tastes are reflected in the fact that she special orders her dinners and send them back for re-doing each time I have been within ear shot of her table. Now, that is class!

There is a small group from Cambridge that are interested in birding, a smaller still group from Andover Academy in Massachusetts, a group with Abercrombie and Kent and the larger group with Travel Dynamics, whose Greek owners from New York has their son aboard, Nico who is heading to Dickinson College in the fall in Carlyle Pennsylvania.

THE ECO-COMMUNITY OF PIXUNA DE TAPARU,

WHO ARE SOCIALIZED AROUND THE OUTSIDE CONTRIBUTIONSW TO PRESERVE THE PIRARACU,

AND WH0OSE SOCIALIZATION AND SONGS ARE

ALL PROGRAMMED TO SUSTAIN FUNDING

We went ashore on a brilliant day to see the small village of fisherfolk that is a demonstration project of the WWF the EUA, and about four other international donors to stimulate the preservation of fish through local organization and control. The pageant put on for us was in the glorification of community organization, in which everyone sang the pleasures of the community and how Pixuna was paradise on earth, with abundant fruits—out would dance a young girl with a platter of local fruits) honey (ditto) and the fish in abundance (still more vivid demonstrations) The songs and dances in the appropriate tee shirts with the environment stressed and community organization spelled out all made everyone of the participants in this compulsory fun aspect of the program perform for us, as the men showed us how thy set the nets for the fruit eating Tambiqueno and the magnificent Pirarucu, which is an air breathing fish that surfaces and is harpooned in the adjacent lake. Except now, since from December to June it is illegal to fish, and the rest of the months, only those inside the system can fish, and that within strict limits. So, it is a n attractive resource that is made even more so by being forbidden to any but those within the proprietary system—that like all NGO organizations goes from advocacy to ownership of the resource and the people involved in it.

Among the most attractive parts of this program was a young blonde girl wearing shorts and the required tee shirt uniform with a recent graduation from

Vassar where she got an ecology fellowship and came down to study the contents of the fish guts to see what fruits the Tambiqueno was eating. From here, she applied to and received a graduate program placement in tropical ecology in University of Florida at

Gainesville, with a future teaching biology somewhere, if she can only stay with thi9s group long enough and with a few more mosquito and chigger bites, she will have done real grad student type field work, having done the drudgery of counting seeds in the gut of the fish she will study. I think I may understand each part of this process, and also see how artificial is the system imposed on this local community culture in the noble determination to preserve it. Each of the folk here are saying whatever the WWF wants them to say to the Tourons who visit and be inspired by this local group of rapacious Coboclos who are now living in beautiful harmony with their environment—so long as their demonstration is pumped with lots of outside funding to carry the flag and wear the tee shirts.

Since we are all supposed to feel inspired and righteous in the review of this happy community all singing the songs and doing the dances in praise of conservation, it may seem churlish to note that it is a synthetic system in which the people are better off to the degree that they dance well, whereas the real Coboclo know that they are better off if they catch one more fish than they need and trade it for something they need, like flashlight batteries or matches—or, truth to tell, a transistor battery operated boom box, or a chance to split this town and get to the bright lights of Santarene, where there hunting skills are useful only in predation of a different type. The big town of Santarene is the biggest city on the Amazon between Manaus and Belem, and was the site of the extravagant plan by Henry Ford to make a rubber plantation called Fordlandia. Like all other massive projects, including the one started by Mad Ludwig from Muskegon Michigan who wanted to float a huge steam power plant and a paper mill around the world from Japan and anchor it here to raise a white pine tree in an area of the Amazon cleared to a size larger than Connecticut to make of it a monoculture, and it lost him about two thirds of the multiple billions he invested before he threw in the towel and sold out to the Brazilian government at huge losses just before his death.

To be fair, all that one can do to survive is try to adapt to the circumstances of the environment around one, and the most dominant part of the environment around some of the Coboclo villages is the WWF the EEU and other Conservation groups, since the government of Brazil itself is weaker than the biologic systems to which these people have been pre-programmed to adapt. So, at the end of the process, the people will have a painted schoolhouse, and the tee shirts, and the fishermen will go back to harpooning as many of the pirarucu as they can find legally or otherwise, and the nice young Cristina will have adapted to a very different world by having toiled over fish guts long enough to have satisfied the requirements of a PhD degree which is the entry-level criterion of a job in the other world of Vassar and the University of Florida from which she comes, and those who survive will all have adapted to a changed environment—except the pirarucu whose environment is under pressures to change that are irresistible by any evasive maneuvers it can take. Like manatees here, they are just not going to make it in a real world given the context of changes in that reality, and an artificial environment like a zoo is the only residual that will escape by taking further energy investment to keep them in a transient steady state during the entropic collapse of their world to which they were adapted—so long as interest persists on the part of humans whose consciences are still sensitized and not distracted by other things. The invasion of Kuwait in the last Gulf War and the fate of the animals in the zoo illustrates that this attention can be interrupted for reasons of concern for one’s own survival.

After the demonstration by the “community” of Pixuna and the “Environmental Agents” who are employees of IBAM—the outside funded environmental eco-watch team—we returned to the ship at the time the sun was climbing to its hottest point. We had postponed the TV tape made in the 1990’s by National Geographic Society on the Amazon: Life in the Flooded Forest. It made quite an impression upon me at the time I saw it in 1990 and I remembered a good deal about it, which is why I had named the essay I had written on my color linguistics investigation in 1995 “Flashes of Color in the Flooded Forest.” I remembered the hunts for the pirarucu and the seed pod eating fish with the strong jaws the Tambequeno which had ingested the fruits and seeds in the flooded forest which could only germinate after being ingested and spread by the fish. This was a discovery by a naturalist named Michael Goulding, called by the NGS film, the most outstanding naturalist in the Amazon—by the film of which he is scientific director—but he had been talking with fishermen for a long time and had reported the 400 new species of fish that had been brought to him from the market or otherwise, so as to speciate the large number of fish in the Amazon and its tributaries or bayou oxbow lakes. We will take a later cruise through these lakes if the passage is not occluded. This school year has just been suspended since the vacation is the time of the high water mark which is just now beginning so we may be able to get into the small lake where much of the controlled pirarucu fishing would take place when it is permissible by the small, largely self-proclaimed group entitled to catch them, I saw one of the pirarucu ( which the fisherman was quick to say had died of natural causes!) which hade been slit open, and the large lungs along the backbone were the organs that took the place of the swim bladder that this fish does not have. It is a good demonstration of an unusual fish that looks pre-historic, and may soon be part of history only.

AFTERNOON DELIGHT:

WE CRUISE TO THE OXBOW LAKE THE FISHERMEN HAVE BEEN DESCRIBING AS A CHANCE TO SEE THE PIRARUCU,

AND AN EXPLOSION OF RARE BIRDS, IGUANAS AND

SPECTACULAR LIGHT BREKAS OUT IN A TRULY

AWE-INSPIRING SUNSET

What a magnificent evening! As taken as I was with the sunset the other evening when we were parked in the Zodiac after fishing amid the giant water lilies and saw the sunset in its glorious splendor, nothing could compare with this evening on the placid oxbow lake entered by a channel off the river. And we were not even suppose3d to be looking up into the trees, but were hunting the pirarucu which we never saw—nor looked for! Carol, the veterinarian turned naturalist whose father was chief of orthopedic surgery at Gorgas and has just moved to Balboa Panama from Houston Texas, has been coming down here for twenty four years and reported that she had never seen more splendid sunset nor had a more exhilarating evening in the slanting light of the tropical sunset.

We were told that it would be dicey getting into the lake through a fenced cattle pasture from the little village we had just visited. Local guides would be in the Zodiacs to direct us in how to enter the lake along channels cut by currents as the river waters are rising. We brushed along the banks, seeing a few birds and the occasional canon ball tree, relative of the Brazil nut tree. Almost immediately we knew something was different. We entered the placid waters of the lake as the sun crested the trees along the river bank. Immediately everyone began spotting things on their “must see” list—including a Hoatzin, the primitive e bird we have discussed a lot but seen only on the first day with Dennis in my raft and that only for a glimpse. IT became a standing joke, about looking for something next to the hoatzins over there.

The story can be summarized in the crazy bird as a title on a quote “Flying Cow: It’s Alimentary my Dear Hoatzin.” The Hoatzin is a strange crested bird that does not like to fly. It would rather climb up trees from the flooded forest and for that reason it nests just now over the flooded forest, so that the youngsters drop directly into water like the wood ducks from the nest. But then they climb up the trees using a very strange set of wing claws that make them look like archaeopteryx close relatives. They use their legs and wings to climb like sloths up the trees and begin to eat—What? Leaves! They are the only leaf eating birds I know of, and they have a crop full of mashed leaves which has a fermentation flora like a cow, and actually sit around during the day digesting somewhat like the sloths. They have other unusual characteristics as well, including the strange crest on their heads making them called Opisthoconus” = "Spine headed." What should we see, but the hoatzin upon entering the lake and paddling around its perimeter. Yeah, right! No, there is another, and another! I then saw a pair flapping up to a branch and posing. As I limbered out the 210 mm zoom lens loading the N-8008 Nikon with print film, I focused on the hoatzin with its crest elevated, and a strange apparition posed behind it. A giant tree iguana! And near it was a smaller but bright emerald green iguana. And, so it went. We cruised from one wonder to another. The slanting rays of the sun then illumined capuchin monkeys. Adjacent were the usual wattled jacanas, and then a series of bright small birds—the red-capped cardinal, the yellow sided finch the pied the tropic king bird and a whole series of the swallow tailed fly catchers with ciscidees buzzing the boat. A large flock of festive parrots crossed over head, followed by the peach fronted parakeets nosily singing their way above us. And we stared at the bright red passion flower, just waiting for the next wonder to materialize and it did. The sun. It was golden and lit up the cloud that had piled up in large cumulus backdrop turning peachy, mauve, and then fiery red. As we turned to see the sun itself in setting, the almost painfully beautiful apparition was of the pillars of silvery cumulus thunderheads with red streaked shafts splayed out all around it duplicated in the reflections from the still waters. We never even looked down! We might have been sitting over nesting pairs of dozens of pirarucu and never know them coming up for air like the pink dolphins all around us and we were totally distracted. One bright beacon in the sky, without a start to be seen, shone brightly upon us, an untwinkling Venus—the name, coincidentally of the Zodiac raft we were in. I shot pictures of JD at the 36 hp diesel engine against the backdrop of the fiery cloud screen behind her with foreground lit by the sunset’s incredible gold. Blonde JD is the South African who had dropped out of law school in Pretoria to pursue this kind of experience. She took pictures of me in turn against the spectacular background of the sunset across the lake with the tropical foliage and the fluttering bird cover around us. We were all giddy, shooting as much film or memory disc as we had batteries to support, with the idea that we might not see such a phenomenon again, at least so uniquely poignantly transient in its intensity. I will not even have to wait for the pictures to return to say that this was something special, and everyone in the raft seemed to realize it, posing for there epitaph portrait—“We were once here!’

As we cruised out the channel as the sun had already set, a “signature image” occurred, with no photograph to remind me, of an unforgettable event. We were almost approaching the point of the cattle that had been confined by the flooded fence along the inundated pasture cut on one side of the village before connecting to the river itself. As we entered in the afternoon, we had seen hybrid cattle that looked like “beefalo” to me. This was later confirmed, that they are crosses between water buffalo and cattle. They were standing in the very limited and very poor pasture along the fence, with a large part of the field flooded to a considerable depth. As the sun went down and we cranked up the diesel Yamaha outboard, we began to hit clouds of mosquitoes, so thick that sine I was running as the bow figure head with the small Petzl headlamp put on me but not yet turned on, I had mosquitoes plastered over my eyelids and face. As we rounded one bend where the cattle should heave been, we did not see their silhouettes in the darkened pasture. Then we saw them. Scores of heads were poking above the surface of the flooded channel, where the cattle had taken refuge from the hordes of blood-sucking mosquitoes and only their nostrils protruded above the surface. No fools, they! As we turned ahead, a bird flew clumsily across the channel, and was outlined in clear silhouette, just feet above and in front of us. Its silhouette with the elevated crest was unmistakable—it looked like an archaeopteryx in flight.

Only one word was spoken, and that by the naturalist bird guide Dennis, to whom no one else echoed or responded: Hoatzin!

BACK FOR REPORT AND RECAP

ABOARD THE ORION

At the report session most people had little to say except to applaud. There were little gags—like asking me about chiggers and jiggers at the next stop when there will be a beach trip for another chance to swim, from which those who had explored the grass got quite a few souvenir bites under belt or bra lines. I told them they had less to fear from the chiggers this time than the candiru catfish, but then only people who really had to worry a lot were the people with exceptionally long urethras!

We will be at a small port of a fishing village on the Tapajos River tomorrow, called Alter de Chao, adjacent to a 300 foot high hill which can be approached by a one mile hike and a strenuous climb. Since I have done nearly nothing strenuous since I have been gorging on too frequent gourmet meals, I plan to make the hill climb a mandatory event, and will pack along cameras, but fully expect that this evening was the photographic “high water mark” of my excursion. As I pack away film this evening I am told that tomorrow they would like to hear the next lecture I will give for which I have furnished them the title “Booms, Busts, and Survival in Fragile Eco-Systems.” Today the extensive series of handouts I had forwarded to Travel Dynamics has been Xeroxed in a few copies and those who had requested it are going to see the supporting materials from the last talk, and I will prepare a few for the next talk, but use the unusual approach of asking them what they would like to discuss, and devote at least half of the discussion to dialog exchange—a high risk maneuver that most speakers do not hazard—but this is a group that might like it. We will see.

So, from the sunset of my Amazing Amazon, I wish to share this small slice of a vast life out there with its brief intersection with my own, and enjoy the glorious intersection of the two and even the delimited ability to record and pass along this experience to be appreciated more widely. Ah, the wonder!

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