Tiputini, Ecuador (Rainforest) 2006 TR, Part 1
Some quick background: I was a TF for a study abroad program in Ecuador last spring, and a major part of the field component is a month spent at Tiputini Biodiversity Station, adjacent to Yasuni National Park. The text is taken from my journal, photos will relate to the text temporally but may not be described directly... I didn't pick these photos to go along with my journal when I put them online. Also, this starts about a week into the trip; I had kept a written journal until the 21st and don't have it with me to quote from.
March 21: After dinner I went to the volleyball court to look for frogs, and saw a pair mating in the middle of the court plus a bunch of different frogs calling around the edge and a salamander on a ginger leaf towards the end.
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March 22: Woke up at 6:15 when the alarms went off, then again at 7:15 or so when people came back from breakfast. I talked with Noah until 8:15, went to the lab at 8:30 to get crap together for a twig nest search, and left to look for the elusive new Pheidole species at 9:10. I decided to start looking at Chorongo 150; within an hour I had found five twig nests that looked like they might be Pheidole and came back to the lab at 10:20. I searched through the twigs until lunch but didn’t find anything that looked like the species Amy wanted, though three of the five were Pheidole.
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Dinner was a burrito bar – one of the best dinners they have here. There were home made tortillas, black beans, rice, guacamole, tomatoes, onions, cheese and more. I put two tortillas down on my plate and piled them high with everything but lettuce and green peppers, then put a third tortilla on top of it all. It was sooo good. I went back for seconds and made a burrito I could actually roll up, partly because I was full and partly because there weren’t many black beans left. As we were all sitting around enjoying our burritos, a bat fell onto one of the tables, jumped down and started running across the floor just as a huge (fruit?) bat soared past the lab side of the dining hall. Everyone yelled “BAT!” but I didn’t realize there was one on the floor until a few seconds later when the German woman practically dove from her table over to grab the bat from the floor. Apparently it’s a free-tailed insectivorous bat that is almost never caught in mist nets and she was really excited to have caught one. She decided to keep it until morning so she could get a clear recording of its echolocation calls, since at night there are so many bats flying around that it is difficult to differentiate between them. Once everyone had a good look at the bat we went back to gorging ourselves on burrito fixings. Dessert was tasty as well; babaco flavored with cinnamon and sugar tastes almost exactly like apple pie filling.
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March 23: After lunch I did the Guacamayo-Danta-Lago loop with Alex, which was really nice. We saw lots of cool bugs, including an assassin bug that had long front legs that seemed to look more like a praying mantis.
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We met back at the dining hall at 8 for a night float, and though the stars were amazing we didn’t really see much wildlife. The pickings were so slim, in fact, that Mayer had the boat pull over to look at a tree frog on some riverside vegetation.
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When we returned the bat people were processing animals in the dining hall; I took a few photos and then continued on to avoid the crowd, but then had to stop again at the bridge mist net because Alex was getting yet another bat out and everyone had stopped to watch. I’m sure Alex loved the audience (not really), but I had to push through to get back to the lab.
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March 24: After breakfast I went back to the cabin and saw a group of Wooly monkeys passing directly by our clearing. I ran back to the lab to tell everyone, grabbed my camera and spent 15 minutes or so taking photos of them. They came down pretty low and hung there by their tails, literally just hanging out. As they passed the cabins one ended up in a tree with Oropendola nests, and he went out on the narrow limbs to grab the nests and rip them open looking for baby birds or eggs to eat. It was pretty cool to watch, though he didn’t find anything in the nests.
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After lunch I spent a few hours reading again, and then at 3 Noah and I went out to the lake. About 2 minutes into the walk the torrential rain started, and in short order we were soaked to the bone. It was kind of fun because we’d been planning on the rain, and after a while I just started running flat out through the forest, sliding through muddy sections and leaping over logs. It felt like some crazy 3D hunting game or something and I really felt happy to have good depth perception. Hooray for binocular vision!
After a while, though, our boots started to fill up with water, and after the second stop to empty them out I was done running. We walked quickly for the remaining few hundred meters to the lake, but when we arrived both boats were pretty well swamped and we couldn’t find any paddles. We both searched around for 10 minutes or so but when we really couldn’t find them we decided to go up the tower instead since we’d come all that way and felt we should do something interesting. The tower was definitely nice, we both stripped down to our boxers and hung everything up to dry in the sun and light breeze on the top platform. We saw a pair of green parrots and some other random birds, plus a small green lizard out on a branch of a nearby tree. It was mostly just relaxing to be up on the tower with nothing to do but bask in the sun and dry off. We left around 5 and got back to camp at about 6, showered and hung out until dinner since there was no class with Kelly gone for the next few days.
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Still 40 typed pages left in the journal, but that's the end of my photos for now. I think I'll turn them into thumbnails only when I post the next part since I haven't figured out an appropriate/efficient way to watermark yet. Gah, I really want to go back now.
