Jungle Adventures

As my time in the jungle comes close to an end, there are some memories that stand out from the rest. These incredible experiences are the adventures of the Amazon rainforest, adventures from the research station in the depths jungle. I have just concluded my time at Kawsay Biological Station on the Madre de Dios river and am begining an excursion into the Tambopata National Reserve.

One of the most amazing encounters I have had here was with a mama three-toed sloth with a tiny baby in her arms. We were eating lunch at a restaurant by the river in town, surrounded by trees, when suddenly my friend looked up and pointed to the sloth climbing along the underside of the roof! She had climbed over from a nearby tree and was climbing upside down along a beam less than 15 feet away from us. She was massive, the size of my entire upper body and with strong, long limbs. The baby was wrapped around her chest, its little arms clinging onto her back and its head moving around to look at the scenery. Sloths look like they are always smiling and it was the most incredible feeling when the baby looked at us with its adorable tiny face. Since sloths are so slow moving and she seemed entirely unbothered by us we were able to watch her for a long time as she made her way along the beam, reached over to some stalks of bamboo, and then reached from the bamboo to the branches of nearby tree to climb. She was so incredibly graceful in her movements, while she moved slowly she also appeared to never fully stop moving, always keeping this subtle motion and fluidity. This sighting was so incredibly rare for so many reasons – she was so close to us, right at eye level (sloths usually stay quite high up in their trees, making it very difficult to see their faces or any details), she was awake and moving (sloths sleep for 20-22 hours a day and their waking time is usually spent stationarily snacking or climbing down their trees to go to the bathroom and then going right back up), and she had a baby with her (their gestation period is 11 months and they often take many years between babies). 

One of my favorite activities here, especially on hot days, is swimming in the river. The station is on the banks of the Madre de Dios river, a large river shared by Peru and Bolivia. The banks are made of thick clay and mud and when you climb into the water it squishes between your toes and up to your ankles. At first the sensation is a bit wild but the wet earth is cool and refreshing. Swimming in the river is about the only time I wear sunscreen here, in the jungle the canopy is so thick that direct sunlight rarely reaches your skin. While the wide river looks calm, the current gets strong as soon as you venture far beyond the banks so we stay close by the shore and do laps upstream and drift our way back down. This weekend while swimming we had a challenge to see how long we could throw a ball of clay back and forth, as each time we threw or caught it bits would be lost splattering into the water or on our faces. We tossed it until all that was left was a chunk as small as a marble and we laughed as we tried to continue passing it around. Climbing out of the water all of our faces and arms were speckled with clay.

On my second to last day at the Kawsay Biological Station I saw the incredible Tamandua anteater. I was in the forest for the morning monitoring the monkeys – it had been an incredibly interesting shift, the monkeys were moving out of their home range and developing their social relationships through vocalizations. We were nearing the end of our shift when the monkeys settled down to rest high in the trees and I was scanning the forest understory and canopy when I saw a yellow-blonde figure moving in the upper branches of a large tree. I was very confused, our monkeys are pure black and my mind couldn’t picture what animal had that color that would be found in trees. Luckily I had brought my camera and used the zoom to get a closer look at the strange creature. At first I thought it could be some kind of cat but when I showed it to Stephanie and zoomed in a bit more we saw it was actually a small anteater called a Tamandua! It was sniffling in a termite nest, periodically pausing to itch himself, as I’m sure they were crawling all over him and biting like crazy.