04-APR-C-6
DAWN TO DUSK RIVERINE RAINFOREST
EXPLORING:
A ZODIAC CRUISE AMONG DOLPHINS AT DAWN,
A LECTURE OF AN EARLY EXPLORER,
A RIVER BANK WALK, AND THEN A NOCTURNAL
CRUISE BY ZODIAC IN THE FLOODED FOREST:
URUTUBINHO AND JUTAI
April 20, 2004
This has been a full service day. I was up at 4:30 AM and out at the 5:30 AM sunrise in the Zodiacs to get out to see the birds before the sunrise, and had big pink dolphins, the freshwater botas playing around the Zodiacs. We entered a small cut off the “white water River” (actually a muddy brown and filled with floating vegetation) at a site called Urutubinho ( URUT= 2* 39.23 S, 67* 14.. 29 W) which is in the whitewater river system and its “Varzea” (floodplane) before moving up a blackwater river further down the3 main Amazon into a tributary of side by side white and black waters. The blackwater river is named Juatai (Juta= 2* 44. 44S, 66* 48. 39 W) and was the site for both an afternoon interpretive forest walk and village visit, and a night time Zodiac ride.
In the morning we saw a special plant known as Tachi in Portuguese (Triplanus in Latin) which had a long tip and a hollow stem, which should be avoided since it had black ants inside that sting. In the afternoon walk we saw ant nests on trees with small red ants which do not sting but which give off a mild smell when crushed on the skin. That is what Amazonian hunters use when they go hunting, to crush it on their skin to give them a scent cover so that they are not winded by their prey. You must be careful to know which is which.
We spotted a few birds (again, we were not in the official birding boats with the gung-ho, so we had to be careful to look away when the scarlet macaws came bursting over us in pairs, catching the first rays of the bright sun)—a gag which means we are seeing as many birds as the dedicated birders are trying to see, but they ignore all but the species that they have not yet seen.
We saw green parrots, Tuhy parakeets, lesser toucans, black vultures, white winged swallows, yellow rumped caciques, and kingfishers (green.)
We also stepped out on shore to see a magnificent buttressed kapok tree with all its communities of the kind that were both parasites and epiphytes. It had wasp nests (it needs to germinate, and specific ones at that) ant nests, and termite nests. The yellow rumped caciques made their sac kind of oriole-like nests right next to the wasp nests, perhaps to keep monkeys and other predators away.
TWO BREAKFASTS, TWO LECTURES, AND AN
EARLY LUNCH
Over-eating and under-exercising may be occupational hazards of cruising, but this is at a bad timing for me. I did, however, go back a second breakfast, since everyone else was doing so, just before a lecture on the Victorian naturalists who explored the Amazon. First to go down the River was Orellana who was born in the same town as the Pizzaro brothers, Trujillo, in Extremadura Spain. He described Amazons, a Middle East Warrior Women without a right breast to avoid interference with the bow string. Geologic discoveries were continued by Alejandro Van Humboldt, a Prussian polymath who crossed the origins of the Orinoco and was the first to circle back through the Brassa Cassiquirre to connect the two great river systems, Amazon/Orinoco.
The Wallace and Bates were her collecting and formulating the theory of natural selection. Bates came up with the theory of Batesian Mimicry, that meant the tasty speices had to resemble a foul tasting one to give it advantage in survival. Richard Spruce was a botanist who collected cinchona and brought out the red bark to transplant it where the British could use it. Henry Wickham and rubber were tied together, and he made off with 7,000 rubber tree plants to Kew Gardens to spread through the British Empire after Goodyear made vulcanization in 1844.
Our Costa Rican naturalist gave a talk on the survival strategies of the forest, to avoid predation by using chemical messages, and attract and bribe carriers of seed away in nectar or fruits. A number of these interrelationships are fascinating when known, and still many more are unknown, and may not be knowable if the forest does not survive man’s interference in it. Gap fillers, like Cecropia and heliconia are plants that move in to a place vacated by getting up as quickly as possible, thereby remaining vulnerable to predators, whereas big sturdy trees like Kapok try to outwit the predators with signals that are mixed.
The afternoon activity was a walk through the local village to see the cassava processing mill, in which they peeled, ground up, soaked and squeezed the fluid out of the cassava paste in a hanging weave bag which stretched like a Chinese finger trap, and then the fluid that came out of it was called tapioca. The flour that remains is made into a filler for all the basic staples. We saw their village and the stuff that was made here to subsist. Like the fox and the hedgehog, the fox may know many things but the hedgehog knows just one thing—and if these people were not able to do a little bit of a whole lot, they would have the vulnerability of any monoculture. They must be the “jack of all trades” and since they are master of none, they do not have value added export and must subsist—but that they CAN do since they have a little bit of a to of stuff to sustain them—like my professional life in a fast-changing environment.
We made a march through the sodden dark understory of a secondary forest to a patch where they had planted both cassava, and bananas, and a relative of the chocolate plant here called in Portuguese the “Food of the Gods.” We came back to have a dinner, that for me would be hurried, since I was going to do it all today—and that included the night cruise on the Zodiac.
NIGHT RIDER;
UNDER A DENSE CANOPY OF STARS,
AND A SPOTLIGHT OUT IN FRONT,
OUR ZODIAC SPOTS BIRDS, FROGS AND
CATCHES CAIMAN
We set
out for the night cruise, which for me was old hat, since that is how I had
gone “Lapa hunting” in the Orinoco. But
to hear the sound of the night birds, see the bioluminescence below and to spot
the retinal reflex of an occasional caiman—we caught a black caiman to pass
around) is as much a satisfying thrill as to look up through the cloudless sky
and to see the southern Cross and the edge-on disc of the Milky Way glazy of
which we are a minute part. It was a
good day—from before dawn, to well after dusk.