Welcome to the second (and final) installment of my Amazonian adventure chronicles! Before diving into the pictures, I’d like to tell you a little bit about Tiputini. It is a highly selective research station run by the Unversidad de San Fransico in Quito. Only students and researchers to stay there. It is in the heart of the Ecuadorian Amazon, across the Tiputini River from Yasuni National Park (potentially the most biodiverse place in the entire world). To get to Tiputini, we took a short bus ride from Limoncocha to the Napo River, crossed the river in boat, went through a Yasuni National Park checkpoint (which is run by an oil company), took an open sided bus for two hours to the Tiputini River, and then took another boat for two hours to arrive at the station.
Right by the dock is a miniature salt lick, where butterflies and moths gather to obtain mineral nutrients.
Fun fact: the brown one is a butterfly, and the black-and-green ones are uraniid moths.
The sheer number of animals and plants we saw was astounding. I’ll stop writing so much and let you enjoy pictures of some of them.
Brownea grandiceps
A living fossil, the velvet worm (Onychophora). This is probably what the ancestor of all arthropods (insects, spiders, lobsters, centipedes) looked liked. They shoot streams of quick-drying glue from their mouth to ensnare prey and give birth to live young. (Source.)This is the only successful photo I have of a blue morpho. Only the upper side of the wings are brilliant blue.I know almost nothing about lizards, so I’m not going to try to identify this guy.An amblypygid, also known as a whip spider or tailless whip scorpion. However, they are not spiders, not scorpions, and not true whip scorpions. But they are arachnids!Big old katydidChestnut woodpeckerMany-banded aracari, a member of the toucan familyBaby dwarf caimanMother bat with young. The mother flies with the baby clinging to her belly.Woolly monkey with a young babyAnother woolly monkey with a babySouth American tapir, one of the large mammals found in Tiputini. This one was tame and not in the reserve (it was in someone’s yard), but it’s still a cool animal.
I could talk for quite a while about Tiputini, but I’ll stop there. Tomorrow I’m off the coast with friends, since the President decided less than three weeks ago that this Friday is to be a national holiday. Hopefully I get a post in about the coast before heading to the Galapagos.
It’s been a little over two weeks since my last post, so it’s due time I put a few photos up. Since I was in the Amazon for a whole week, I decided to break the trip up into two posts. And I’ll start out this post with this guy:
That is San Rafael Falls, the largest waterfall in Ecuador at a whopping 160 m (525 feet for the metric-challenged). An that’s the waterfall at its lowest current level, since I took that photo at the end of the dry season. However, there is a hydroelectric diversion project called Coca Codo Sinclair that will divert water away from the falls, reducing the flow by 40-60%. That means that only during the rainy season will the waterfall be as big as you see in that photo. However, the project is supposed to generate 1500 MW, which is quite a bit of power (Source).
After our pit stop at San Rafael and several hours of bus-riding we arrived a Limoncocha, a small Amazonian town that happens to be one of the only places in world where pale-eyed blackbirds live. I unfortunately did not see any during my visit, but I did see these bizarre beauties:
“Beauty” might not be the first word you would use to describe these birds, but horned screamers are now quite rare due to hunting pressure and so are quite sought after by birders like myself. Despite looking like turkeys, they are distantly related to ducks and geese.
I saw those birds on a boat ride around Laguna Limoncocha, which was probably one of my favorite birding experiences of all time. Here are some other cool birds I saw on that voyage:
Juvenile wattled jacanas. Their long toes allow them to walk on aquatic vegetation without sinking.Limpkin! I spent a whole week in Florida searching for one of these snail-eating birds and saw not a one. I saw three during this one hour-and-a-half boat ride.Amazonian white-tailed trogonA pair of capped herons in the rainA hoatzin, a bizarre leaf-eating bird affectionately known a “stinky turkey.” The young of the hoatzin are the only living birds with claws on their wings.Black-capped donacobius. They sing in pairs and waggle their tails as they do so. Here’s a video of them in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1BUrimoc5k
In addition to birds, monkeys clambered in the trees along the lake shore.
Squirrel monkeyRed howler monkey. Not sure if he’s taking a nap or scratching his back…
We also got the chance to ride around the lake at night, looking for black caimans.
Big ol’ black caiman
In addition to caimans, millions of lightning bug larva line the shores at night, creating what looks like a sliver of the night sky all around the lake. Unfortunately, I was unable to photograph this phenomenon due to lack of a tripod/camera that does really long exposures.
While the lake shore was incredible, the fauna within the village did not disappoint either.
A black-mantled tamarin, called a “bebe leche” (milk drinker) in Spanish due to its perpetual milk mustache.=POrange-backed troupialA great potoo, a very strange nocturnal bird. Their call is somewhere between a roar and someone yelling “mom.”
Limoncocha also has a large quantity of heliconias in its secondary forests. Heliconias are Neotropical cousins of the banana (which are native to the Old World tropics) and smell just like banana peels. The bracts (red part which covers a small cluster of fruits and flowers) can also double as a bird beak.
That’s about all I have to say about Limoncocha! Later this week I’ll tell you about Tiputini Biodiversity Station, a remote location in the heart of the Amazon.
An Iowan on the Equator 