04-APR-C-15

LAST DAY OF ZODIAC CRUISING:

CURUA UNA AND GUAJARA,

AND MY INTERACTIVE LECTURE ON

“BOOMS, BUSTS AND SURVIVAL IN FRAGILE ECOSYSTEMS”

AND DISEMBARKATION BRIEFING

April 29, 2004

Last night’s special gourmet treat was held on the aft deck fantail with a barbecue grilling. The cuisine was grilled lamb chops, shrimp skewers, chicken, butterfish, steak, but the real treat was a wide array of tropical fruits which I had in lieu of dessert. We were supposed to have a gathering of those interested in sing along, but I took off to my cabin for a reason—at midnight, the clocks are again jumped forward an hour, so that the 5:00 AM takeoff in the Zodiacs would be really like 5:00 AM for us, and we would have a full day with two Zodiac excursions, besides two lectures, one of them by me.

I learned the meaning of the name of the stop yesterday at Alter do Chao, which means “Altar of Earth” either because the local people thought that the hill that I climbed was a special altar, or because there is the same name for a place in Portugal.

I will find out the meaning of the first stop later, but I can give the marking of the Curua Una now that we have dropped anchor at pre-dawn at 2* 22.15 S, 54* 04.46 W. It is the name of the dam on the side river that has created a flooded plain with a somewhat higher ground along the river edge, with what once were pastures and some cleared spaces with secondary growth. I am about to go for the early tea or small snack breakfast to get ready for the first excursion of the early day, at which I expect to find quite a number of folk missing this morning, but we will see through each of these excursions and experiences what further can be learned in extracting a maximum Amazonian experience from these last excursions by Zodiac.

MORNING ZODIAC CRUISE IN DAMMED CURUA UNA FLOODPLAIN WITH A MYRIAD OF PLANTS,

RED-HANDED HOWLER MONKEYS,

WHITE WOODPECKER,

THEN A FINAL FLURRY OF HOATZINS

In moving about the flooded area where once there had been farms and cattle that now had secondary tree growth, we saw Gustavia and Kapok flowers. As we stopped to pull a sample of that, we had a pair of white woodpeckers over us in a tree, at which I took one of the last photos in the telephoto tipped Nikon N8008 before I had packed it away. This is a first-time bird for most of the birders on this trip. There were chestnut fronted parrots by the thousands. Green ibis floated overhead. Dozens of ringed kingfishers coursed over the waters. I shot a particularly close photo of a bird that is an oxymoron—a yellow blackbird. The red-handed howler monkeys were sitting and dosing in the trees, one with a baby.

As we moved off, I photographed a cast-netting fisherman throwing his cast net from a tipsy dugout canoe. We entered a backwater and we heard the raucous call of the hoatzin. It must be here somewhere, so we stopped to look. Eventually we saw it—a bird with a crest, and I just looked at it through the binoculars. As I did so, a pair of them jumped on to a branched over the water and sat with the first. This was remarkable—a clear view of three hoatzins. But, more remarkable was yet to come. Just as we were talking about it being time to leave and get back to the ship for a pair of lectures, one of them mine, we agreed at least we would be leaving on a high point. Another pair of hoatzins jumped over to the same branch, so that my last memory from this morning Zodiac cruise as we were leaving the unpopulated jungle and getting back toward “civilization” was of a series of five hoatzins—a bird some groups go out exclusively to see and never encounter—were preening, hanging by one foot, and cavorting along the branch as I watched each individually and collectively as a wild life tableau that appeared almost prehistoric, as it (on page 2656 of Out of Assa) I had encountered that archaeopteryx that the pygmies had said they had seen “nine sleeps under the nandas.”

MY LECTURE AS A GIVE AND TAKE DISCUSSION

AND A SERIES OF QUESTIONS FROM THE GROUP

The first lecture was from Michael Brooke from Cambridge. IN the finest of British traditions, he began what should have been a fascinating lecture on poison dart frogs by disclaiming he had any information or expertise, apologizing for borrowed slides, accrediting “someone named Daly” with whom I had just been lecturing and touring in Taiwan as he retired from NIH after a lifetime studying just this series of species, and then endlessly rearranging his notes on a lectern to give us very British neologisms like “Hey Presto!” This must be accurate scholarship since it was so reticent, and with every syllable swallowed and qualified. I did not comment or question during the talk, saying when he answered a question by saying he would look up the answer, only afterwards saying I had brought John Daly’s original work if he wished to check it out—which he did not.

With that as the lecture before coffee, I elected to open it up and ask what they would like to discuss, rather than giving a whole hour of a lecture illustrated with slides, and gave a ten minute introduction to which they were invited to ask what interested them. I answered a number of questions with respect to tropical disease and the questions of the population pressures that might afflict this area if control of some of the contagions were achieved, using the example of African AIDS as their single most urgent question. Plagues and Pestilences in history was the paper to which I referred them and made copies which I handed out. It seemed to be satisfying to all but one person who heard it—the young girl Rosie who is the “accompanying person” with Michael Brooke, who comes from Cambridge as an undergraduate and had the temerity to say later “It’s all rubbish really, since I find the whole topic quite ropey, with the usual collection of doctors and anthropologists who know nothing about biology talking in terms of evolutionary theory of which they know less.” I responded that this was one opinion, not shared by a number of my thesis advisors whom I would have to discard in order to take her unqualified opinion as superior, and that it might also be characterized in its stuffy stilted British dismissal of anything with which she disagreed as arrogant. It is rather unusual to hear someone who has yet to complete any kind of degree program coming to someone with at least a couple of universities’ acknowledgement of expertise, and dismiss it all on the basis of the opinion that it is not couched in her terms. But, she was the only dissenting voice I heard on the whole trip, and for that reason I listened to her more closely than I had the other more flattering comments, but only when I had heard her dismiss the careful work of very good experts whose smallest works outweighed her own entire lifespan to date did I decide to dismiss her also, with a little less of the airy huffiness she was able to affect in her finest of Cambridge accents.

GUAJARA:

THE LAST ZODIAC CRUISE OF THE TRIP

On the last ride, we followed Xhe Artur as our driver and got into a flooded bay where water buffalo were kept on a platform that was used for milking them to produce the mozzarella cheese. All around us were blowing and dancing dolphins—maddening in their brief glimpses, since they lack the strength to clear the water entirely to get a good fleeting photo. There are many myths around the BOTO, many of which revolve around their fathering illegitimate babies.

Guajara is 1* 46.97 S, 52* 59.14 W. We cruised up to an area where lots of terns were perched on the fence row of posts flooded by the rising water, and all along the terns made a rank order like the jets parked wing tip to wing tip at military airports. Beyond that were flooded trees that were white with egrets. This was a large rookery of egrets with perhaps ten thousands of birds.

We stopped to admire the Cambrita, monkey bush flower, and just had said it was bright red and had a landing platform for a hummingbird that would be attracted to pollinate it by the nectar inside, when a hummingbird appeared as if on command. Then we looked at a wonderful plant entitled the “Montikardia” a flower with a big stamen that was hotter than the air around it. Since the flower has carbohydrates to burn, it could expend this energy in heating up the white flower at night to spread the scent that would attract the beetles (like the giant water lilies with the same system) and the beetles sought out that heart and scent to get the starchy food they sought in the process pollinating the plant.

Overhead wheeled a snail kite as well as a black collared hawk. Two toucans perched in a tree with their bright orange bills being ungainly in size. WE stopped at the stilt hut of a community elder named Francisco and left school supplies for the children. I spotted “Pedro” the pet parrot, acting as a weather vane on top of their hut. We waved a farewell to him and his family, including a young man with a risqué tee shirt from the famed Brazilian beaches with the “floss dentale” string bikinis, and a woman proudly showing her smiling baby of ten months old who was trying to stand independently on a wooden dock over water—as most of the kids appear to be amphibious at birth.

We returned for the usual re-cap and then gourmet dinner, which I had with an interesting couple who come from Elk Neck Maryland, and then I have retreated to say—OK, the cruise is over, despite the extra day we have cruising on the Orion to Belem, but, of now, I am content to put away the three dozen rolls of film and say it has been a good one.

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