Persistence Pays Off

First of all, I'M IN CUSCO! I'm actually on my last night in Cusco. The process of getting here was a bit tricky. Initially we were told that we would be returning to Cusco on December 18, but two months ago that was changed to December 17, and a month ago it became the 16th. The plan was for a van to pick up the people and equipment from Pantiacolla (the lowland station), and drive them a couple hours up to our station where they would unload some people and gear into our van (there were 13 people in Pantiacolla and only 5 in San Pedro). We were told that our van would be arriving at 2pm, but since we're in Peru, I didn't really expect it to show up before 3pm. Turns out it was after 5pm before anything finally showed up.The good news was that instead of two small vans, we actually had a bus! The even better news was that 13 Pantiacollans piled off and immediately scooped up all our gear and piled it onto the bus (amazing how much more quickly things happen with 13 people than with 5, especially when over a third of those Pantiacollans are big, burly guys).

This bus was wonderful. It didn't reek of coca, the aisles were clear up until the last row of seats, nearly everyone had TWO seats to themselves, and no one was shoving you aside, telling you not to step on their chickens, or handing you children to pass to the back. Plus, we got through the coca police checkpoint in about 3 minutes, instead of 2 hours. We always seemed to have the longest inspection on the Gallito de las Rocas bus, perhaps because of the smell of coca, or the fact that the leaves were still settling to the ground after all the women had frantically shoved bags of coca in any hiding place they could find. Life of luxury, that bus.

Anyways, at some point in the middle of the night one of the tires got a hole, but we didn't have a spare so the driver just filled it up with air and kept going. We stopped every hour or so to fill it up again, and each time Laura would get off to check out the situation, then report back that the hole was bigger. Great. We finally rolled into Cusco around 3am, and literally after passing under the "Bienvenidos a Cusco" sign, the driver stopped the bus and told us we were there. Umm... no. Laura tried to argue with the driver that we were still 20-30 minutes from our hostel, but the guy said he didn't want to go any further with the bad tire in case he got stranded. He told us to take a taxi the rest of the way. First of all, there were 18 of us, which is 5 taxis minimum before you even consider that we had two stations worth of equipment with us. Laura insisted that he keep going, he refused, so we all just stayed put and slept on the bus for an hour! Finally he came back, started the bus, picked up a friend or something to help him in case he got stuck, filled up the tire again, and took us to the hostel. Of course, the driver was annoyed with us by that point, so rather than pull over into the little pull-out on the one-lane road in front of our hostel, he stopped in the middle of it and told us to hurry up... even though he was blocking a line of cars. We all hauled ass and tried to empty the bus as fast as we could, but like I said, there were 18 of us, all of our personal gear, and equipment from two stations... so it took a while. It didn't help that all of the cars behind us were honking the entire time (at 4am), and the driver kept shouting at us to hurry. Sheesh! We finally got everything unloaded, and by the time we moved it all into the hostel rooms it was 4:30am! So, if anything, the hour delay on the border of Cusco meant that none of us needed to pay for a hostel room that night...

After that crazy night, the rest of the week has seemed pretty tame. One morning I went with Ian, Felicity, and Jack to Huacarpay (a lake outside of Cusco) to go birding. I saw 32 new species in 7 hours! (Oh, so I think I'm becoming a "birder"...) There were a lot of cool birds there, and it was really beautiful. Another morning I went with Ian, Felicity, and Juli to Tipon (Incan ruins and irrigation system on the way to Huacarpay). That place was amazing because it was one of the lesser visited ruins, so the place was practically empty but it had all the same stuff as the more popular sites! It was another really good morning. This morning I trekked up to Saqsaywaman, which are ruins just above Cusco (one of the popular sites where the huge statue of Jesus is). However, I heard that if you show up before 7am you don't have to pay the 40-70 sole entry fee. I left around 6am and got up there around 6:30, and sure enough there was no one at the ticket counter but the gate was wide open! Turns out that is when locals go jogging or walk their dogs. Seems fair to let them in for free early in the mornings. This was another fantastic morning because, like Tipon, the place was practially empty. I got all my exploring done in the first couple hours, then spent another couple hours sitting on some rocks overlooking the ruins and the city, and writing in my diary (which, by the way, I am nearly caught up on... if you don't count the missing month in the middle :-P ). Such a relaxing place, and way nicer for diary-writing than any of the plazas because you don't get harrassed to buy something every three minutes! It's also interesting thinking back to my trip last year - when my dad and I landed in Cusco we immediately set out on a three-hour city tour, which included Saqsaywaman. I am absolutely terrible at dealing with altitude, so I was like a zombee. I could barely put one foot in front of the other, and it was apparently noticeable because our guide decided to NOT take us through the ruins, but rather give us the tour from the flat lawn area next to the ruins that I was already struggling on. However, this year I freaking hiked 30 minutes UP to the ruins before wandering around inside of them. Take that, altitude!

So, after four and a half months of working in the cloud forest and exploring around Cusco, it's finally my last night in Peru! This turned out to be a fantastic project (I had my doubts at times). I learned a lot, got a lot of great field experience, met some great people, practiced my Spanish... and now I'm looking forward to being home for Christmas! Soft toilet paper, cheese fondue, hot showers that are more than just a dribble, couches... all wonderful things that I can't wait to have. Last year I never thought I'd return, but look what happened! Maybe I'll be back again at some point...

Finally, something you mother probably doesn't want to hear after you've been working in the cloud forest for four months:
"By the way, you might wanna make sure the washer is primed and ready to go..."

Look out, Mom, I'm coming home!!

The Jungle Diet

Something I’ve been thinking about randomly is my attitude toward food. I think I’ve mentioned before that I’m way more lax about what I would normally be considered “bad” food, but I don’t think I’ve elaborated on that. I’ve noticed that I’m a bit more willing to eat questionable food items during field jobs, even more so in the jungle, and even MORE so after four months in the jungle…

At home if I dropped a piece of vegetable – a cucumber slice, for instance – on the floor of my kitchen, I would probably throw it away. Here, so long as it doesn’t land in the mold patch that is spreading across the floor from under our cooking area, then it’s okay to pick up, blow the dirt off of, and toss back in the salad.

Squishy carrots are not bad carrots, they are just more challenging to peel (which you really only need to do if they are moldy).

To drain pasta we prop a colander on a rock outside the kitchen and dump it in. One time someone tipped the colander over and pasta fell into the grass and dirt, right where the dogs and chickens often wander (and shit, presumably). At home, most people would probably not eat that pasta. Here we have a limited supply of food, and more importantly, we were hungry, so we just picked up all of the not-terribly-dirty pasta, rinsed it off, and served it up (with oregano, so you couldn’t tell the good leaves from the bad ones).

Oregano also works when you realize (a bit too late) that one of the four bags of pasta that you just dumped into the pot was filled with tiny little bugs.

We get all of our bread for the week in town on Fridays, so by Wednesday or Thursday our bread supply is dwindling and usually moldy. If it’s the “good” mold (white mold that you can pretend is flour), then you can just rub it off and it’s good as new. If it’s the “bad” mold (green spots), then we have something called “mold remediation”, where you cut off the mold spots and then toast the bread on the stove. That will give it another few days of life before we usually end up tossing it. If we have a lot of extra bread on a given week, or just lots of moldy bread, we make croutons! Some weeks we do end up with heaps and heaps of bread because the nearby lodges will generously give us some of theirs… usually because it’s already going moldy (and we’re hungry field biologists who will eat anything, apparently). That is usually crouton bread. One week we DID end up composting a bunch of it because we had about 30 pieces of (quite moldy) bread per person, and Friday was approaching. We don’t usually waste, but we also like un-moldy bread on occasion.

Lately squirrels have been getting into the kitchen and eating our vegetables. I normally wouldn’t eat a banana with gnaw marks in it, but here it’s fine, so long as you just cut that part off. Same with yucca, plantain, cauliflower, and lettuce. Besides, the outer layer of lettuce was probably turning black anyways, so we would’ve just peeled that layer off.

When rats were getting into our giant sack of rice, we just scooped out the yellow-tinted areas and use the good rice.

Eggs. Oh the eggs. We buy giant flats of eggs at a time, which is something like 180 eggs. We don’t refrigerate them. They are fine for the first several weeks, but at some point they start going bad – very, very bad. At first the yolk just sticks to the inside of the shell – that’s fine. Then you’ll notice a little black spot on the inside of the shell. That’s still okay, assuming it’s small and you don’t notice anything wrong with the egg itself. Large black spots are questionable – eat at your own risk. The definite NO is a black egg. When we notice that black spots have started appearing in the eggs, we crack them into a cup instead of the frying pan so we can dump it out and try again. At first it might just be one bad egg before you get a good one, but soon it will be four eggs, and towards the end of the flat of eggs (like right now) you could end up going through ten a morning. A while ago I got the “lucky” one – I cracked an egg into the egg cup and a black liquid oozed into the cup. BAD egg. Jack and I discovered on our camping trip that hard-boiled eggs are actually a good way to work around the black spots – when they are hard-boiled you can just scoop off the black part and eat the rest of the egg! However, right now most of our eggs are beyond bad. What we used to think were “bad” eggs (a couple black spots) are now the “good” eggs. There are also those with red spots inside, or whose innards have congealed. A couple days ago I finally decided that I was done with the egg roulette, but I made it until the last week!

Cockroaches are nothing. Cockroach on your dinner plate? Yeah, me too. Just swat it off and keep eating.

Finally, anything you drop while wandering in the forest is probably still fine to eat, so long as it didn’t land in a mud puddle or anything visible horrific.

Jungle food… yum!

Unsurprisingly, Pepto Bismol is now a regular part of my breakfast…

Dia de Gracias

I made it back from camping in one very wet and sleep-deprived piece! We had some terrible luck with our first site – a friaje (cold front) hit the day that we hiked up. We did the entire two-hour hike in the rain, we hacked out net lanes and set nets up in the rain, and we pitched our tent in the rain. We were soaked. We couldn’t even open the nets the next day because it rained on and off. Instead we re-pitched our tent in a flatter location that was closer to water, but unfortunately it had a bunch more tree roots covering the ground. The second and third netting days were better – we opened for five and seven hours but had to close early both days due to rain. That site was also horrendous because of the trail – it very quickly turned into a mud slide, so basically every time we went to check nets (every 30 minutes), we would slip, slide, and usually end up on our butts. By the time we finished our third day of netting we were cold, wet, muddy, and sore. Fortunately we got to make a trip back to camp for a night to restock our food and supplies, and also to celebrate Thanksgiving!

We had Thanksgiving dinner a week early, on November 23, because there were no tourists at the lodge and we wanted to cook for the lodge staff and use their kitchen. Jack and I didn’t get back until late that afternoon, but fortunately for us Ian had been busy cooking all day. We had two chickens, mashed potatoes, gravy, stuffing, sweet potatoes, stir fried vegetables, and apple and pumpkin pie. *DROOL* It was so good!! Ian rocked that meal. Before eating, Ian made a speech explaining the significance of Thanksgiving to the Peruvians (and the Brit) and thanking them for their hospitality. It was a fantastic dinner.

The next morning Jack and I packed up everything to go back up to our last banding site. Ian insisted that we take the leftover Thanksgiving food – Jack preferred ramen, which we’d been eating for three days and would continue to eat otherwise, but I will NEVER turn down Thanksgiving food!

Of course, it started drizzling just as we set out on our hike, but it wasn’t bad. Once up there, we hacked out net lanes in our last site and set up the nets, and then I enjoyed my Thanksgiving feast, part 2. The second site was much better than the first – our tent was in the middle of the site so we could just roll out of bed and be right there, whereas we had a 30 minute slog through the mud at the first site. We also never had to close early for rain, so we got three full days of netting in. However, there wasn’t a whole lot of activity, at least compared to some other sites. We still caught some cool birds and I saw several new species. During our very last net check on the last day, we caught a barred forest-falcon! That was the first raptor I’d ever caught, and it was AWESOME! When I was holding it in “raptor grip” (you grab the upper part of their legs since their talons are the most dangerous part), it would occasionally start flapping, and it was incredible how powerful it’s wings were. That was the last bird for the San Pedro banding team in 2013 – good one to end on!

Normally the banding team would start their sites over and cycle through until the end of the season, but because we are now down to only five people (we started with ten), there is no more banding team and everyone is back to nest searching and metabolics. So my time on the banding team was short-lived, but I learned a ton, got a lot of good experience, got a nice change of pace from nest searching, and now I get to finish out the last two weeks with metabolics again. Time here is running out! We all leave for Cusco on December 16, so we’re in the home stretch. Hard to believe after nearly 4 months!

Joining the Banding Team

Recently several people from our station left the project or moved to another station, which means that those of us remaining here have shuffled around jobs a bit. Actually, I'm the one with the biggest change - I moved from the metabolics team to the banding team, which is actually what I wanted to do in the first place! Now, instead of just netting in the afternoons to catch birds for metabolics, I do 8 hours of netting every day starting at dawn.

Here is how the netting is organized - there are 11 net sites at San Pedro, and each site has 10 mist nets. The banding team spends 3 days (8 hrs per day) at each site banding and recording all birds that get caught in the nets. After a site is finished (which may take longer than 3 days if it rains), the nets are taken down and moved to the next site. It usually takes a full day to move the nets because you have to find suitable straight paths for the nets to go, and then hack out the vegetation with a machete. So with the day to move nets, 3 days of banding, plus extra for rain delay, it takes about a week per site. Before I joined, the banding team had completed 7 of the 11 sites, meaning that I get to help out with 4! Today was our (Jack is the other person on the team) last day at the 2nd of the 4 sites, and the last 2 sites are far enough away to require us to camp at them. So, tomorrow we'll take down our nets and pack up our gear for a camping trip! We won't leave until Wednesday, though. The nice thing about these camping sites is that we don't delay for rain, so if it turns out that it rains for 1 of the 3 banding days, too bad - we only band for 2 days. I only say that that is nice because we have to hike up with all of our food, so we've got a limited time to get the work done unless we want to hike back down to restock, which neither of us fancies.

Since these first two sites have been fairly close to camp, we've been waking up at 4:15 to eat, pack, hike, and have the nets open by 5:15ish. after opening the nets, we go around and check them for birds every 30 minutes (not so often that you scare birds off, but often enough that they aren't stuck for ages). The morning is usually the busiest time since that's when birds are most active. I think we've gotten as many as 6 or 8 in one round of checking, which isn't a huge number, but we have to band, measure, and collect samples from everything in time to check the nets again in 30 minutes. On a REALLY busy morning, one person will keep processing birds while the other checks all 10 nets (instead of splitting it 5 and 5). Usually only the morning of the first day is really busy because the birds haven't learned where all the nets are. It's nice when things slow down to only 2 or 3 birds per check because it's plenty of time to process the birds without feeling rushed. However, it's quite boring when you go a couple hours without catching anything.

The cool thing about being on the banding team is that I'm getting more experience extracting birds from mist nets, banding them, describing molt patterns, and taking samples. The descriptions of molt are certainly more indepth than anything from metabolics banding, mostly because I'm now working with someone with a lot of experience who can teach me new things and point out interesting patterns. The samples are completely new. During our first day of banding training back in August we learned to take feather and ectoparasite samples, but we never continued doing that in metabolics banding. Now, however, we take tail and breast feather samples from every bird and collect ectoparasite samples from some birds (by rubbing a special powder into the bird's feathers and collecting parasites that fall off). The new one is blood! Jack taught me to collect blood samples from birds, which is actually really cool. It turns out that I'm pretty decent at it, and since Jack prefers collecting the ectoparasite samples, I'm the one that collects most of the blood samples. Yay, experience!

Apparently I joined the team at just the right time because these first two sites were the best ones they've had yet. We caught nearly 70 birds at the first site and over 50 at the second. Plus, they included some really awesome catches, including a chestnut-tipped toucanet, band-tailed fruiteater, plushcap, black-streaked puffbird (so puffy!), and tons of others. Those names obviously don't mean as much without pictures, so I'll post pics when I return to Cusco (in one month). These next two camping sites should be awesome as well because they are at an elevation of 2000m, which is 600m higher than our station (400m higher than the site we just finished). That means we should hopefully get some species with higher ranges that we don't normally see down below. Who knows what we'll catch! It should be a fun trip. :)

The Crappiest of Days

I know I haven’t *really* updated this thing in ages, but I also can’t think about one thing to write extensively about, so this is going to be a couple random things.

During metabolics, we have to take bird temperatures after they’ve been “cooking” at 10 and 34 degrees C (with 20 and 30 degrees thrown in there as well). To do this, we stick a little thermometer up their butt. They don’t seem to like that. Some birds wriggle the entire time while others are paralyzed with fear. (Don’t worry – the thermometer doesn’t hurt them and they are fine afterward.) Of course, some of them like to get back at us for shoving things up their butt by waiting until the best (worst) time to decide to poop. They just sat in a nice little box lined with paper for over an hour, but a number of them decide that they have to go right when the thermometer starts going in. With smaller birds it’s not really a big deal – you get some poop on your hand. It’s the bigger ones that are more terrifying. For instance, one night I had a motmot in metabolics. Motmots are … as big as a breadbox, if you ignore the tail. Maybe marginally smaller? (I’ve forgotten how big loaves of bread are.) Anyways, with bigger birds, they’re not just squeezing out a tiny little turd into your hand… it’s a big one. And they seem to expel it from their bodies with much more force than the little birds. So when I stuck the thermometer up the motmot’s butt right when he decided to drop a deuce, it was like sticking my thumb over a garden hose. I had motmot shit on my forehead, glasses, hand, knee, and the floor. The person who was standing next to me to get her first ever look at a motmot actually took several steps back while saying, “oh jesus”. I would be mad at the motmot, but considering I was keeping it trapped in a box all night and shoving things up his butt, pooping on me was pretty much his only defensive mechanism. I should also say that that was not the first bird to poop on my face, and it probably won’t be the last.

Halloween is one of my favorite holidays, so I was pretty excited to dress up this year. I told people weeks in advance that there would be a costume contest and that they should start planning how to use jungle materials. It turns out that I would be the only contestant. For several days I made mental notes of where certain types and colors of leaves were, which types of grasses were best to use as string, and what tools I would need to construct my Scaly-Naped Parrot masterpiece (I had to get the details right because I’m working with bird-people!). The morning of the 31st I spent several hours gathering materials and weaving everything together so that it was … as perfect as perfect can be when you’re in the jungle and weaving leaves together with more leaves. In other words, it was awesome. It didn’t matter that no one else dressed up because, let’s be honest, they would’ve come in second (in my completely unbiased opinion). That day the lodge staff invited us to have lunch with them, and then to play volleyball. Unfortunately I couldn’t really play, given the wings and all, so I was a designated cheerleader. By that point most everyone was used to the fact that I was dressed up as a parrot for the day… except Senior Demetrio, the guy who lives next to the field we were playing on. He walked past me a couple times and just stared, but kept on walking. I sat on a stool on the sidelines (couldn’t sit on the ground because of the tail) and took pictures and whatnot, until it started raining. We all went to take cover in Senior Demetrio’s place, but there were nearly 15 of us so it was a tight squeeze. That is, 14 people and 1 parrot. Senior Demetrio – and now his wife, too – was still staring at me. When my tail bent funny as I tried to sit on my stool, he asked someone next to him (in Spanish) why I looked like that. I responded enthusiastically that it was my “clothes for Halloween”! One of the Peruvian lodge employees explained that Halloween is really only celebrated in big cities like Cusco and Lima, and usually only the children dress up. Whaaat?! I’d like to think that I brought some culture down the Manu Road that day. That, or I’m just the crazy white girl who wore green long johns and covered herself in leaves.

More later!

City Life vs. Jungle Life

Here's a quick update with the top 5 differences between life in the city and life in the jungle (cloud forest):

1. I freak out if there is a cockroach anywhere in my house, but in the jungle it's normal for them to be hanging out with our food. Just brush them off...

2. When it rains at home I simply stay indoors, but in the jungle I'm *always* outside. Plus our water tank gets clogged after a decent rain (nearly every day), so you have to clean it out if you want to use the sink/toilet/shower.

3. When someone has diarrhea at home they just say they aren't feeling well, but in the jungle they describe exactly what is coming out of them, sometimes with sound effects. It's kind of a way to measure *just* how sick you are.

4. Candy bars are a thing at home, but in the jungle we mix sugar, cocoa powder, and milk powder together and lick it off a spoon. Yum!

5. At home I shower daily, but in the jungle I shower either when it's sunny, or when I can no longer stand my own stench.

All in all, it's fun settling into the normal field life and interesting to see how drastically different it is from life back home. It's an experience unlike any other :)

Driving with Drug Smugglers

I have learned a lot while working on this project, from mist-netting to a whole range of British insults, but perhaps the most unexpected bit of knowledge that I've gained is how much cocaine a drug smuggling old woman can hide on herself. Here is what I do on my days off...

Fridays are our days off because of the bus schedules and the (theoretical) ease of getting to town. The bus passes by our lodge anytime from 11am - 2pm (+/- 1 hour), based on road construction. There are also trucks that pass by all day, many of which you can ride in the back of. The trucks are nice because you can theoretically flag one down earlier in the morning, but you might be riding on a sack of potatoes (or in the case of last week, chickens) for an hour. Unfortunately there has been a ton of roadwork lately, so parts of the road can be closed for several hours, but they usually open up briefly during lunch. As a result, you can spend a few hours (>6 for our friends from the Wayqecha station) waiting on the road without any vehicle passing.

Last Friday, Jack and I wanted to go into town (Pilcopata) to go birding in the lowlands and buy our bus tickets to Cusco for our vacation this week (!). We went out to the road around 10am (where the researchers from Wayqecha had been for 5 hours) and were lucky enough to get a truck by 11:30. This truck was packed. When the driver opened up the back for us to climb in, there were probably 30 people staring back at me, with the only people-less area being a mountain of produce sacks. The driver hurried us in, meaning that we basically toppled over onto the mountain of bags. Immediately some of the women started pointing and speaking rapidly in Spanish. At first I thought they wanted me off of their potatoes, but then I realized that they wanted me off the bag of chickens that was squeezed BETWEEN the bags of potatoes. You're right, my mistake. Jack had the same realization a few seconds later when the bags he was leaning on all started moving. Very fortunately we came to a halt at some roadwork, and when the driver let us all out to wander around, we saw that the actual bus was four trucks behind us and had empty seats. Sure, it was two soles more and a bit slower, but I think the chickens appreciated our sacrifice.

After arriving in Pilco, Jack and I went birding in Villa Carmen, which is a little piece of paradise outside that fairly desolate town. We were delayed slightly by a massive thunderstorm moving through, but once there we saw tons of amazing creatures, including a dozen hoatzin preening in a tree, some kind of jacamar, and an aracari. It was a great day for birds!

After that we started our long journey home. We waited for our bus to leave Pilco, and then we had our typical hour-long stop in Patria, a town only 30 minutes from Pilco, where we usually grab dinner from a little restaurant by the buses. Leave it to Peruvians to serve rice, pasta, and potatoes all in the same meal. But it's good (or at least growing on us)! When we returned to the bus, the driver's assistant (person who rides shot gun and is generally in charge of getting people to take the bus) told us to sit up front in her seat, for whatever reason (we were getting off much sooner than most people?). That was nice because it meant that we didn't have strangers pushing over us or hitting us with all of their bags of coca.

Some details about the coca: dried coca leaves are extremely common in Cusco as a remedy for altitude sickness and to ... stop feeling hungry, whatever the term for that is. The actual coca plant is also used to make cocaine. There are limits to how much coca one person is allowed to bring into Cusco, which has something to do with rural people being able to dramatically multiply their profit at the government's expense. The rural folk also use bags of coca leaves as a cover for the cocaine that they are smuggling into Cusco.

Anyways, before leaving Patria, the driver's assistant said that there were actually two empty seats for us to sit in (not together). There was initially a child in mine, and there was just a mountain of coca bags next to Jack, so we were going to squish, but the woman made the kid get up (and join the horde of other kids in the aisle) so I could sit. I would have preferred to just lean on Jack's arm rest because I had women and children bumping into me from all sides (and crying periodically), but I got used to it. About 15 minutes out of Patria we slowed to a stop (normal because of construction), and as soon as I noticed flashing red lights outside, all of the women on the bus started panicking and whispering and moving things around frantically. I realized that it was probably the police doing a drug bust which was why the women were trying to hide their extra bags of coca. Immediately the driver turned the lights out inside to give the women some cover,  and the woman next to me tried to shove a bag of coca into my hands. I shoved it back saying, "No" several times, and then shouted up to Jack warning him to not take anything. He said that no one tried to get him to take anything, but the women next to him actually swallowed what looked like little baggies of cocaine. As soon as the police boarded the bus and the lights came on, I saw that someone had shoved a bag of coca under Jack's arm and frantically shouted for him to get rid of it. The police walked slowly down the aisle shining flashlights on all the women and collecting passports from the men. Their first problem was the woman who was sitting in the aisle a few feet in front of me on a bag of coca the size of an oil drum. Surprisingly enough, the blanket she threw over the bag did NOT fool the police! She started protesting loudly as one officer escorted her off the bus, while the other kept moving through inspecting and questioning certain passengers. Eventually he left the bus and the woman got back on... with a huge smile on her face... and all of her coca. Good to know Peruvian officers can be corrupted, I guess. Oh yes, and the woman next to Jack promptly regurgitated her baggies.

After that brief encounter we kept going on our way, and all of the women were suddenly smiling and giddy as school girls for having evaded the police check point. However, another hour down the road, RIGHT before our stop, there was another check point. This one had them even more on edge because the driver started shouting, "SAN PEDRO! SAN PEDRO!" and then ushered us off the bus, which we think was so they had slightly more space to hide their stashes. It:also meant that we had a 10 minute walk up the road in the dark through the police check point instead of getting dropped off in front of our camp. Since we weren't actually on the bus for the second raid, I can only assume the first was a decoy for the cops to get some quick money, while the second was the actual bust. The rough life of a drug smuggler!

Well, two nights ago Jack and I got another glimpse at drug smuggling as we road a bus to Cusco for our vacation. We left San Pedro around 9pm and napped on and off for a while, with periodic stops for construction and what not. At one point we were stopped for quite a while, but I didn't think anything of it - just enjoyed the chance to sleep without bouncing all over the place. Eventually I became aware enough to realize that it was 1am-ish and there were police on the bus checking for drugs. They didn't bother us at all, but they started confiscating bags of coca from the woman behind Jack. At first she just kind of whined and halfheartedly protested, but as they started searching her bags, under her seat, and the eight layers of clothing she had on, she got pissed pretty quickly. She was SHOUTING at the officer about how he was taking money she needed for her children, and she refused to let go of the bags she was holding so he had to physically wrestle them out of her arms, and in doing so split the bag so that it rained coca leaves on Jack. Soon three more officers joined in and tried to drag her off the bus, at which point she braced herself against Jack's seat and practically ripped the chair out of the ground as the officers pulled her towards the door. Finally they gave up (figured they got enough coca?), at which point she ran forward and started hitting the closest officer repeatedly and calling him a rat. I was pretty surprised that they didn't beat the crap out of her for that one, because you put a hand on an officer in the UK or US and you go to jail. After the whole thing was finally over, the other women on the bus all started shouting, "VAMOS!" to the driver, probably because they wanted to get te heck out of there before their stuff was all confiscated, too. Meanwhile, the woman behind Jack started sweeping up all the coca leaves she could find on the floor and repackaging them. I should also note that an hour earlier, a kid took a dump in a pot not far from where those leaves fell. I think my coca days are officially over.

Working in the Cloud Forest

As I said before, the internet situation is not great. But I'm learning to manage! Turns out it's not worth it at all to do the 4-hour round-trip bus into town for an internet cafe - that internet is just as bad as ours, but they're charging you money to sit and wait as opposed to playing cards with people. Instead I'm taking advantage of my late nights doing metabolic experiments on birds to use the internet while everyone else is sleeping. It's much faster at 2am! And by "much faster", I mean I can usually load my email, I can use Facebook messenger pretty reliably, and I can upload 5 pictures to Facebook in only four hours! Hooray!

So I guess the work is a good place to start. There are three main jobs here - nest searching, mist-netting, and metabolic experiments. The mist-netting crew is meant to have lots of experience already, and our station has two very skilled mist-netters (Ian and Felicity). Currently they are out mist-netting in some other region for 20 days, so they'll be back in a week or so. Nest searching is exactly what it sounds like - you search for nests. No experience necessary, so anyone can do this. It's one of the main things that I did in Texas this past summer, but this seems more difficult here because I'm not looking for nests of a particular species, I'm looking for ANY nest. Yes, it means that any nest I find counts, but it also means that I get distracted by any species that happens to be in the area. I could just find this particularly difficult at the moment because nesting season hasn't quite begun yet, so we spend six hours nest searching every morning and most of us don't find anything. Gets a bit off-putting even after only a couple weeks. The last job is metabolics, which is actually a combination of the three jobs. Every afternoon we have to catch birds in the mist nets to use for metabolic experiments during the night, so the metabolics people have to run their own nets to catch those birds. Then one person stays up each night to run the experiments, which consists of sticking the birds (up to three) in a mini fridge and changing the temperature from 10 degrees C to 20 to 30 to 34 and recording changes in oxygen consumption, mass, and temperature. Unfortunately the data collection process is really slow (the software can only record oxygen consumption for one bird at a time), so each different temperature takes up to nearly two hours. And that doesn't include the time required to increase the temperature of the fridge, the time to take the birds out and record mass and temperature, or the time to turn everything off in the middle of the night to fill the generator up with gas again. The first night that I did metabolics we ended at 4:15am, and that was even with cutting the last hour of data collection. Tonight seems a lot better - it's looking like I'll be wrapping up around 3am with all of the data.

If it wasn't obvious, I'm on the metabolics team. I jumped at that opportunity because you get to do a little of everything! I'm learning to run a mist net, band and measure all kinds of birds, run metabolic experiments, and I get more reliable internet! What's not to love? There are three of us doing metabolics - Meaghan (American), Juliana (Colombian), and myself. We do all of our tasks on a rotation basis - tonight I'm up doing metabolics and I'll sleep in in the morning while the other two (and everyone else, really) is out nest searching. Everyone comes back for lunch, and then I'll go to open the mist nets with Meaghan, and Juliana can either come with us or nest search, but the idea is that she's back at 4pm to start getting things set up for metabolics (starting the generator, cooling the fridge, etc). Either Meaghan or I will get the birds back to the lab by 5 so Juliana can start metabolics, while the other closes the nets. Then it cycles through again. Right now it's slightly different from what I just explained because Juliana and I need more practice with getting birds out of the net. Fortunately we have Jack (Brit), who also has a lot of mist-netting experience and is helping us with the afternoon netting. Our station is unique in that our two mist-netters want to do some nest searching (typically they would only be netting all day), but Jack is eager to mist-net, so he's going to be rotating out with them (when they're back). Great for everyone! Camilo (Colombian) and Cynthia (Peruvian) are both nest searching, and Julian (Canadian) just showed up yesterday, so we don't yet know what he'll be doing in the long run. Oh, also - the afternoons are generally also when people set up nest cameras and sensors (if they found a nest in the morning) or for weighing and measuring nestlings.

The nice thing about staying up late every now and then in exchange for sleeping in is that you get some free time during the day to do laundry, take a shower, or just do whatever. And let's be honest, my first choice is usually not to shower (I think I mentioned this in my last post, but it's bad enough to mention again). In Tambopata (where I was last year) we had cold showers. That was fine because it was really warm and humid and a cold shower felt great. We were told ahead of time that we'd have cold showers here, but what they actually meant was that we'd have ice water showers, which are extraordinarily unwelcome when it's about 15 degrees C outside with no sun and a whole bunch of cold air and mist blowing in. As a result we've taken to showering every 3-4 days, or when the sun is out. It's been a long time since the sun has been out, so I braved a shower on one of my mornings when it was down to 10 degrees - absolutely miserable. Couldn't even bear to stick my head in the water, so it was just a body wash. The good thing is that the cold forces us to wear layers, so I like to think that by layering up I'm keeping the smell contained. I didn't say that it's true, but it's what I like to think. Amazing that none of us really realized that our station would be the coldest of the three - I surely thought it would be the highest station because, you know, that altitude, but apparently they have hot, sunny days because they're ABOVE the clouds, whereas we're forever trapped below them. Dang! Jack and I have our week off together and are planning on buying all kinds of warm clothes in Cusco. Also accommodations with beds, a hot shower, and fast internet. Plus we're getting pizza, bacon guacamole cheeseburgers, meat, cheese, peanut butter, and beer. And probably lots of other crap. I'm so excited!

Time to wrap up tonight's metabolic stuff - will try posting a picture sometime soon (no promises)!

Internet and My First Week

So it turns out that our internet situation is way worse than I anticipated. We technically have internet at our camp, but it takes at least 20 minutes just to load gmail, and that´s if it decides to load at all. Our other option is an internet cafe in town, which is two hours away by bus. It sounds like we go into town on Fridays to get more fruits and vegetables, so that´s the only day that I´ll have any kind of reliable internet. I use ¨reliable¨ very loosely, because it´s horribly slow, depends on the availability of computers, and the computers may or may not work once you´re on them.

Other than that, so far it´s going well - we´ve started practicing each of the different jobs (nest searching, mist netting / banding, metabolic rate measurements) and I´m using Spanish again! We cook meals on a rotation - breakfast is on your own, but then we each take a day to cook lunch and dinner for everyone else. The meals have been surprisingly delicious! But without meat or dairy, I can see them getting a little repetitive in the coming months. There are two other fluent English speakers here - Meaghan is from New York and Jack is from England. That´s two accents to make fun of! We all get along really well and so far it´s been great hanging out with them. It´s way colder than I anticipated (been freezing my butt off every night), so I bought two blankets in town earlier today. Unfortunately we have cold water showers (more like ice water), but since it´s so cold and we don´t sweat very much, we tend to go a few days before braving the showers. I also wear so many layers that it kind of keeps the smell trapped... or so I hope. We did just found out that the tourists across the road have hot water, so we may be sneaking over to their showers when we can. If that doesn´t work, at least I have a travel sized bottle of Febreeze...

I´ve taken a ton of great pictures of birds, monkeys (stealing food from the tourist kitchen), a snake, and a coati. Don´t know if I´ll be able to upload any of them before I´m in Cusco again (with REAL internet), but the computer that I´m on now doesn´t have working USB ports, so I guess I´ll have to try next week. Oh, but we get a week off in either the first or second week of September, and we´ll have to go back to Cusco no matter where we decide to go after that, so I´ll definitely have better internet then. Now I need to figure out where to go for my time off! It sounds like Meaghan is interesting in going to Colca Canyon (TONS of condors there) with me the few days after we finish in December, so it might be nice to just hang out in Cusco with nice amenities and what not for that week (you know, since I´m sleeping in a tent on a hard wooden platform for four months without much variety in food). I´m thinking a nice hotel with a comfy bed and lots of meat and cheese. And pizza. And beer.

Well I don´t know how long it will take to upload this post, and I only have 40 minutes left on my internet, so I should probably wrap this up :-P My plan for communication is to draft emails at camp without internet and send them out when it´s working well enough there, but if not I´ll just send them out on Fridays. Same with blog updates. By the way, it´s really hard to know which email client will be easier to use on a given day, so if you want to communicate, just send email to both of my addresses (stephl301@comcast.net and stephanie.a.levins@gmail.com). Hoping to go into more detail in my next post, but today I´m just sitting here rambling in the internet "cafe". Ciao!

My Last Month in the Jungle (from 2012)

Yeah yeah yeah… I said I’d have this last post up six months ago, but I got distracted by things like cars, TV, milk, and Texas. Anyways, here are some random awesome things from my last month in the jungle!

One morning I was at the colpa by myself and I heard a puma attack a peccary! I had just watched a herd of peccaries wander into the trees next to the clay lick. Then all of a sudden I heard this incredibly loud cat-like … growl, followed by what sounded like a peccary grunting and then squealing/screaming. Immediately after that there was a loud thundering as (I assume) the rest of the herd ran off, and ALL of the birds flushed from the trees at once. Then it was silent. I sat there with my jaw hanging open trying to comprehend what I just heard, and then I became uncomfortably aware that my radio had died earlier that morning and I was only about 75 meters away from where that commotion took place. I imitated the cat sound for one of the guides back at the lodge and he played a couple of sound bites for me to choose from, and he said I definitely heard a puma!

I’ve been away from home on Thanksgiving before, but this was my first time away from family on Christmas. I helped Gaudy (lodge masseuse who also welcomes new tourists, works at the “gift shop”, and sometimes helps at the bar) decorate the lodge the week before. Back at home we always drive up to the mountains and chop down our own Christmas tree, so considering that I was living in the jungle I was TOTALLY going to just walk 30 seconds from the lodge and chop down a tree with a machete. Unfortunately they had a fake tree in storage that they use every year, but fortunately there were *only* a dozen cockroaches that scurried out of the box when I opened it. After that I was very careful to make sure that I was picking up an ornament and not some ridiculously-oversized insect. Instead of taking a full day off for Christmas, we worked the morning of Christmas Eve and the afternoon of Christmas (it really wasn’t that bad – when you’re in the middle of the jungle and sweating in only shorts and a sports bra, it doesn’t exactly feel like Christmas anyways). Gustavo started the Christmas celebration by blasting Christmas songs in Spanish over the radio just as our morning shifts were ending. There was a big feast for lunch that was served to everyone in the tourist living room (Christmas Eve is the big day in South America – Christmas Day is just the afterthought). Katharine and I weren’t hungry so we stay in the loft chatting for a few hours (of course we’re not hungry when there is a feast…), but that afternoon we made brownies and cookies, and then joined the other researchers in the loft for some games and pisco. There was a party in the bar that night, but I was fading fast and didn’t stay up for very much of it (especially after finding out that our Secret Santa gift exchange was postponed until the next day).

Christmas morning I woke up to a crocheted bird on my floor from Santa (a.k.a. Katharine)!! We chatted for a few hours (one of the guides said we were mealy parrots because we never stopped talking; the next day he changed it to yellow-crowned parrots because they are more chatty than mealy parrots) and just hung out in the loft all morning. My Secret Santa (Maximo – staff member who cleans the lodge and helps transport things to and from the port) gave me a little figurine of a girl made of beads! Gustavo’s Christmas present to me was letting me climb a tree that I hadn’t climbed before! (What a sneaky way to make me look forward to working on Christmas.) Breakfast was leftover dinner, and lunch was leftover breakfast (which by that time was only rice), so Katharine and I stole fruit from the tourist basket. Fortunately it was my turn to eat dinner with the tourists, so I got soup, salad, lasagna, and juice!

Speaking of food, the quality and amount of food seemed to come in waves. For instance, a few days after Christmas I was passing by the dining tourists on my way to the staff dining room when one of the guides offered me his plate of fancy tourist food because he wasn’t hungry (to be fair, they get soup and salad before the main course). The other guide immediately offered up his plate as well, and then one of the tourists told me to take her son’s plate, too, because he wasn’t going to eat it! Somehow I hadn’t even gotten to the kitchen, but I already had 3 plates of delicious food. I kept a plate for myself, and I think I gave a plate each to Katharine and Yessenia. That’s not something you just leave out for anyone to take – food is precious in the jungle and everyone hoards it, so when you have extra you hoard it for the people who will hoard for you later.

I hoarded food in good times and bad, and it was always nice having Katharine as my fellow hoarder. When she got back from the early morning work shift before me, she always made sure to grab me a couple bread rolls, and when there was only one left, she gave me half. On one of our last nights in the jungle I walked into the kitchen before she did and saw that they had our favorite soup, but not very much of it. I filled up one bowl and went back to get a second, but in the 20 seconds that I was gone nearly all the rest had been taken, so I poured half of mine into her bowl. I sat there guarding two bowls of soup until Katharine walked in, and she was ecstatic. One of the newest researchers saw me giving her soup and asked why he didn’t get any. We explained that one week into his stay was too early to have food saved for him, and that he should find a best jungle friend to co-hoard with.

Another food story: one morning there was no real breakfast food for Katharine and me to eat, so we spent 45 minutes waiting around for the tourists to finish eating so we could nab their leftovers. Meanwhile everyone else was eating the meat and rice provided for the staff. As soon as we saw them wheeling the leftovers into the kitchen, we hopped up to get first dibs. As we were patiently waiting for the kitchen staff to unload the dishes from the cart, one of the other (usually very nice) staff members ran in front of us and grabbed the only two bread rolls in the basket, saying they were for her and someone else (both of whom had eaten full breakfasts by that point). Katharine and I both turned and called back at her, but she just kept walking. That was one of the more infuriating situations involving food. If you see/have some good food, don’t let it go.

Other notable things during my last month:

·         I lost so much weight that my pants no longer stayed on by themselves. Every time I took my climbing harness off, my pants came off, too. Sharman, a visiting veterinarian from Texas A&M, saw my pants situation and insisted that I take two pairs of her pants and one of her belts. She even told me to keep them after she left because I clearly needed them more than she did!

·         In a typical Peruvian fashion, Carlitos wanted to impress a white girl that he was working with one afternoon by bushwhacking his own path on one of the islands. I was waiting with a couple guys on the other island for him to make his way to the beach so we could pick them up with the boat. After several radio exchanges in Spanish and a whole lot of laughing from the guys on my end, I found out that Carlitos had gotten lost and that the guys with me were going to have to go out with their machetes and find them.

·         I climbed Franz, the nest with the mother who sits inside and attacks when you open the door. I got the chick out just fine (smothered the mother with a towel), but when I went to put it back I realized my arm was on the wrong side of my climbing rope, so I couldn’t reach far enough to place the chick in the nest. The chick was squirming a lot, and I didn’t want to have it squirm out of my grip while moving to the right side of the rope, so my only other option was to pass it to my other hand (the one on the mother). I knew she’d attack me, but it didn’t make it any more pleasant. She chomped down on the back of my hand (the one I had been smothering her with, which now was holding her chick) – broke the skin through TWO pairs of gloves!

·         I finally climbed Tizard, which is our tallest tree at 37m! The view was incredible (and the climb was ridiculous). Unfortunately I could see a storm rolling in, so I couldn’t stay up there long.

·         My last time doing phenology with Gustavo was just after a storm, so the island we were going to had flooded. The boat dropped us off on the shore, but we had to cross a low, narrow section (the part that flooded) to get to the main island. That meant wading waist-deep in croc-infested waters. Gustavo warned me about this, and I think he was expecting me to be miserable, but I had so much fun that I was actually giggling. Gustavo was amused, and we had a really good time! It was my favorite phenology outing by far.

·         My last morning at the colpa was one of my best times at the colpa. There were few clouds and it was sunny and beautiful. Normally we see/hear only a handful of species, and if we see many different species it seems to be at different times. However, that morning I saw a BUNCH of species, and many of them at the same time! I saw scarlet macaws, blue-and-yellow macaws, chestnut-fronted macaws, mealy parrots, orange-cheeked parrots, blue-headed parrots, common piping-guans, razor-billed curassows, and I heard cobalt-winged parakeets and dusky-headed parakeets. Of course, no camera, but it was an amazing sendoff from the jungle!

·         Katharine and I traveled back to Puerto together and stayed at the Tarantula Hostel (WAY better than the one I stayed at before heading into the jungle). We got a very large room, there were screens in the windows so we didn’t need mosquito nets, there was a delicious (and different) breakfast every day, the people there were incredibly nice, and they had a scarlet macaw and red-and-green macaw that hung out on the porch. The downside was that it was a 10-minute drive into the main square, but it was easy enough to hail a mototaxi (guy riding a motorbike) or motocab (guy riding a motorbike with a metal shell covering a bench in the back for multiple riders). Being on the outskirts also meant that we had saddleback tamarins and squirrel monkeys come hang out in the trees by our window, and there were dusky-headed parakeets and cobalt-winged parakeets that flew overhead. We were back in civilization but still had reminders of the jungle.

·         Don was returning to TRC the day after we left, so we managed to meet up with him (and Yessenia, Paula, Carlitos, and a couple guides) in Puerto for pizza. We managed to get everyone together in a fairly reasonable amount of time, considering we had no way of contacting any of them (other than the emails that we sent out that morning). We shared our Chuncho experience with Don, and he told us some far worse stories of his own. After that we all decided to go to a club, which was when I rode my first motorcycle! One of the guides had an actual motorcycle (not one of the mototaxis), so he took me for a spin. What a fun welcome back to civilization!

Pizza in Puerto! Clockwise from back left: Carlitos, me, Don, Yessenia, Richard (guide), Katharine, Paula (from Chuncho), Manuel (guide)

The most exciting, terrifying, and memorable experience of my entire time in South America happened right before Christmas. Sit back – it’s a long story. The project director, Don, came to TRC along with another researcher (Bruce, Sharman’s husband). The main study site for the macaw project is the Colorado clay lick, right by the TRC lodge, but it is getting overgrown with vegetation as the river changes, and so there are fewer birds returning there each year. A couple hours downriver is the Chuncho clay lick, which is at least five times longer than the Colorado clay lick and has THOUSANDS more birds. Don is interested in turning Chuncho into a permanent study site, so he, Bruce, Paula (a guide who has volunteered for the project before), and Andres (boat driver) went there for two weeks to do some preliminary studies. They needed one more person, so they took Katharine initially, saying that I would swap out with her after a week. This part is just awesome: A few days after they all left, a tourist boat arrived that had stopped at Chuncho to take a letter from Don (protected in a Tupperware container). He had written to Gustavo asking for certain supplies and saying that Katharine would be staying a bit longer. I asked when Gustavo was sending the supplies downriver and if I could include a letter to Katharine. I spent the entire next morning writing a letter while at the colpa! I wrote it in one of those mini spiral notebooks that is smaller than an index card, so I had to staple all of the pages together (like a little book!). I gave that to Gustavo to put in the Tupperware, and he looked at the book, looked at me, and said, “it’s only been three days…” I just smiled. The best part was that a few days after that, I GOT A RETURN LETTER! You know how it’s awesome to receive snail mail? It’s way more awesome to get mail via boat on a river in the Amazon. I think we were each able to send two letters. The funny part was that I had heard more from Katharine than Sharman had from her husband.

Eventually Bruce and Don came back from Chuncho, at which point I was informed that I’d be getting to go to there after all, but only for two nights. The awesome part was that Katharine would be staying there during that time, too! The night that those guys came back we had a party in the bar – Sharman and Bruce were leaving the next day, so they were very generous in buying everyone drinks. I actually got to chat with Bruce for a bit and he was really cool. He told me that they really didn’t need me at Chuncho, but he convinced Don to let me go anyways so that I could see the site, get some time away from TRC, and also see Katharine. Thanks, Bruce!

The next day I took a supply boat downriver with Sharman, Bruce, Gaudy, and a couple other staff members who were heading into Puerto Maldonado. I had a nice time chatting with Sharman and Bruce – they even shared some of their snacks! After a couple hours in the boat, Bruce looked up and shouted, “JAGUAR!” We all looked around and saw a jaguar on the sandy riverbank! He was right there in the open! Of course when he saw our boat, he walked behind a fallen tree where we couldn’t see him. The boat driver turned around and was making his way back to the tree, when all of a sudden a capybara darted out from under the tree’s limbs as the jaguar lunged after him, just narrowly missing a bite of the capybara’s leg. We were all stunned at what we just saw! The jaguar retreated behind the tree, and the boat driver kept getting the boat closer and closer. We got less than five meters from the jaguar, at which point Bruce panicked and told the boat driver that we were too close. With the language divide it took a while for that point to get across, during which time several of us got pretty nervous – I kept imagining this (obviously hungry) jaguar jumping onto our boat. Fortunately nothing like that happened, and Sharman got some great pictures. We resumed our trip downstream and discovered that Chuncho was just around the next bend in the river. Good to know I met the neighbors.

Camp kitchen (photo from Katharine)

Our boat stopped just long enough for me to hop off, and then it continued on to Puerto. Andres, the Chuncho boat driver, was down cleaning his boat, so I met him just as Katharine appeared at the top of the staircase cut into the sandy cliff. She showed me around the camp and then we talked for over three hours. It had only been a week, and we’d been writing letters during that time, but somehow we still had that much to talk about! After the second hour, Andres told us that it sounded like the colpa at camp because we were making as much noise as the birds! After a little while, Andres went to pick up Paula (Peruvian woman helping with the research) from the colpa while Katharine made dinner for everyone. She made super delicious food with only meager food supplies, so we realized that the chefs at TRC just couldn’t cook. After cooking, Katharine and I bathed in the river which was AMAZING because there were no sand flies at Chuncho! We sat downstream of the boat so there was no current, and it was just a wonderfully relaxing experience sitting in the river. We stayed up chatting for a little while and then we all went to bed since we were getting up at 4:30 to monitor the colpa. Paula and Katharine had been sharing a tent, but I was staying in a tent that had been put up by some tourists the week before. I climbed in and was getting ready for bed when I saw a huge tarantula on the wall right above my pillow – the whole thing was larger than my palm, and I have man hands. At first I was going to call for Katharine, but I thought, “No, I’ve been living in the jungle for over a month, I’ve GOT this.” I grabbed one of my massive rubber boots and knocked the thing off the wall and then tried smashing it with the heel. I tried a couple of times but he kept moving out of the way, and then I smashed down hard right where he was and thought “YES! I AM SUCH A BEAST! I JUST KILLED A TARANTULA WITH MY BOOT!” However, when I picked up my boot, the tarantula was nowhere to be found. And that’s when I lost it. I started scrambling around the tent trying to find this thing and make sure that it wasn’t on me, and then I saw it sitting on my pillow. I wasn’t about to take any more chances, so I called for Andres (who was still up), shouting (in Spanish) that I needed help because there was a tarantula in my bed. He started laughing and came over to get the thing out. My hero!

The next morning I woke up crazy early and went to the colpa with Paula. Before then I could already identify all of our birds by sight, and many of them by sound, but Paula did a fantastic job solidifying all of the calls in my head. She was great at pointing out calls in the distance, imitating calls herself, and quizzing me on birds we heard. I probably learned more in the few hours that I spent with her than I did in the first month at TRC! Kind of sad it took that long, though. After four hours (9am), Katharine came to relieve us, so we went back to camp to eat some of the amazing food Katharine had already cooked. During that shift, Andres noticed some really dark clouds far away upstream from us and said we would have to keep an eye on how much the river rose that day. Not long after that we got a little bit of the storm and it started pouring (granted, only briefly). However, it was enough to cause part of the roof over the kitchen to collapse, which apparently wasn’t the first time. Andres worked on cutting new logs for the roof while Paula started packing up camp since we were all moving out the next day. At one point during the storm, Don showed up (he was on a boat back to Puerto) and had a fast conversation with Paula in Spanish, I think about the monitoring schedule on our last day with regards to weather.

At 1pm I went to relieve Katharine, and Paula told me that if I saw the river rise more than a meter I should radio back for Andres to pick me up early. The first 3.5 hours of my 4 hour shift were pretty straightforward – I counted some birds and the river didn’t change. However, in the last 30 minutes the river silently rose a meter without me even noticing. In the last 10 minutes of my shift, Andres got on the radio and started shouting, “STEPHIE! STEPHIE! HURRY! HURRY!” I thought he was already waiting for me at the pick-up spot, so I threw all the gear together and ran to the side of the island. Unfortunately there is a little trench right before the actual shore that had completely filled with water, and there was no visible way around it. I still thought that Andres was waiting for me, and I didn’t want to waste precious time, so I jumped right into the trench filled waist-deep with water while trying to hold all the gear up. Of course, when I got to the pick-up spot, I saw that he was just rounding the corner and that I probably could’ve looked for a way around the trench. Oh well. I threw everything into the boat and jumped in myself, and then Andres took off back to our camp. The river had only risen a meter by that point, but it was moving FAST. There were also things like trees that had gotten stuck under the water that created all of these rises and dips, and we had to navigate through them in order to dock. Normally the rocky shore is visible and we float down past it, turn around, and then cruise back so that the other person can hop off and tie the boat up. However, by this point the shore was gone, so Andres started shouting and whistling for Paula to run down from camp and catch the boat’s rope. As she was running down, Andres had the unfortunate job of turning the boat around. Our boat was really small – much smaller than the boats that we had at TRC, so when we headed straight into those bumps and dips in the water, we started rocking side to side pretty hard, so much in fact that some water started pouring over the side of the boat at the peak of one of our side-to-side rocks. That’s when I immediately kicked off my rubber boots, because if we were going to capsize the last thing you want is to be wearing knee-high boots that will fill with water and weigh you down.

Camp from the outside (photo from Katharine)

Paula tied the boat up and she and Katharine helped get us and the gear out of the boat. Katharine and I chatted while she made some more food, but Paula and Andres were talking a lot in Spanish and were running around camp. We finally found out that Andres was going to take the boat across the river and spend the night on that side to protect it from falling trees on our side. He said that the storm upstream earlier was only just started to make the river rise where we were, and that it would probably rise even more. We made sure that he had a radio, candles, food, and sleeping bag, and then we watched as he made the treacherous trip across the river. I can’t say for sure how wide the river was, but I’m pretty sure it was over 100m across. The three of us girls watched from the shore to make sure Andres made it across – his boat was rocking all over the place, and it took a good couple minutes for him to get to the other side, but fortunately he made it. This was maybe 6pm.

After that Katharine and I ate dinner while Paula continued to pack up the camp. I think a couple hours had passed before we thought to check the height of the river (around 8pm?), and we were shocked to see that it had risen another meter. The first meter of water simply buried the rocky shore, but this second meter started gobbling up our staircase. The river was still two meters below the level of our camp, so we weren’t too concerned. Soon after we checked the river we heard a tree fall down. And then another. And another. And another. The river was eroding the shore and taking down any trees in its path. By the way, a falling tree is LOUD. The scary part was that the sound of falling trees was getting louder, which meant they were getting closer. It was also dark, so we couldn’t see much beyond our camp. We tried contacting Andres, but he said he would only turn on his radio if he needed to contact us. Everyone usually went to bed around 9pm, but we didn’t like the idea of getting into an enclosed tent and being unable to get out of the way of a falling tree. At least the main camp was open so you could get out of the way quickly. Katharine and I just sat around chatting and making jokes about the situation, and eventually Paula gave up trying to pack and joined us. We had turned off the generator and were sitting around a candle in a bottle just waiting to see what would happen. I think around 10pm we went to check the river again and it had risen another meter. Now there was only a meter of cliff between us and this growing river. Over a meter of shore had also eroded so our staircase was gone and trees had fallen in front of our pathway out. We were just hoping that Andres would be able to find us in the morning. Paula put a stick in the ground about 5 meters from the edge of the cliff so that we could monitor erosion. I should also point out that this was December 21, 2012, which was the day that the Mayans predicted the world would end. No, I’m not kidding. Katharine and I were getting pretty nervous at this point, but we were trying to keep the mood light by joking about the whole thing. After a particularly long period of silence, she asked, “Did the Mayans specify a time for the end of the world?” Seemed hilarious, but also kind of important at that point.

We passed the time with more jokes, silence, stories, and warm milk, and then Paula decided to check the river again around 11:30pm. She came back with a solemn look on her face and just said that things weren’t looking good. That is not what we wanted to hear. We asked if there was a plan for what to do if the river kept rising, but there wasn’t. We continued to sit and wait. Paula was exhausted and napped on and off, but Katharine and I were running on adrenaline and sat figuring out what we were going to do. I think we all decided to check the river again around 12:30 or 1am, and we were horrified to see that the water had eroded another meter of shore and that it was just one meager foot from flooding the land. I really can’t accurate describe just how terrifying that image was. Just try to imagine a massive, rushing river stretching into the darkness, just about to spill over the land and flood your only safe place. Something I will never forget.

Waiting to run into the jungle (photo from Katharine)

The river had risen nearly 4 meters in 7 hours, and now there was 1 foot before complete disaster. We all decided it was time to get ready to run, so we packed up our backpacks with water, a couple of snacks, candles and lighters, flashlights, machetes, Katharine had a compass, I had a whistle, and Paula and I each took radios. Paula quickly taught Katharine and me how to make a climbing “harness” out of only a few feet of rope, so that if we had to we could climb trees and wait out the flood. Paula also gave everyone rolls of bright pink flagging tape so that we could mark our trail if we had to run into the jungle (the only trail system followed the river, so that wasn’t really an option). We had the crappiest possible map to work with, but we made a plan to head west into the jungle to escape the river, and then cut north by daylight and follow the river downstream to the next ranger station, which we estimated would be a day’s hike. Then we sat with our bags next to us and waited. Every now and then someone would shine a flashlight out towards the river to make sure that water wasn’t silently creeping into camp (we were about 20m from the river). And then we kept waiting. I’m sure that facing a flood in the middle of the Amazon jungle is terrifying in any situation, but I couldn’t stop thinking that it was just the three of us with no boat, no way of letting anyone know where we were or were planning on escaping, and it was pitch black. Plus, if we happened to die that night, there’s no WAY anyone would ever find our bodies. Speaking of dying, I’ve never been more convinced that dying was a real possibility. I thought there was at least a 25% chance we would die that night. I have to say, we were all pretty calm for thinking that we might not make it to morning.

 

We kept on waiting with the sound of the river and falling trees in the background. We waited until about 3am and were relieved to see that the river had not risen anymore, so the others decided to try and get some sleep in the tent (we were all sleeping in my tent that night because they packed theirs up). I don’t think I slept more than 30 minutes because I hated being trapped in the tent when there were still trees falling down. I got up and resumed my spot at the center of camp and just waited for the sun to rise. You have no idea how absolutely amazing it was to see dawn approaching. Katharine joined me about 30 minutes later and we just sat waiting for Paula to wake up and to hear what the plan was.

This used to be a clear path to the river (photo from Katharine)

I’m a little fuzzy on the details, but at some point Andres showed up with the boat and started hacking a path through the fallen trees so that we could get out. Meanwhile Paula finished packing up camp and Katharine and I started moving everything to the boat. The river had dropped a couple meters from the high point, but it was still at least 2 meters higher than it was when I arrived 2 days prior. Andres was understandably stressed – there were entire trees floating down the river (a lot of them) – and he had to navigate us to the ranger station an hour downstream. The boat was completely full of all the gear and equipment from the camp. We strapped on life vests as tight as we could and kicked off our boots in case we capsized. We also knew that the ranger station was on the west side of the river, so if we *did* capsize, the plan was to swim to that side and keep walking downstream. Fortunately we made that trek without any problems. I had never been so happy to be at a “secure” wooden hut before! Paula and Andres dropped us and some gear off, and then Katharine and I had to wait for what ended up being a few hours for a supply boat heading upstream to pick us up. The guys at the station let us cook in their kitchen and take showers, and then it was just more waiting.

Eventually the supply boat showed up and we loaded it with our gear and prepared for another treacherous boat ride. This time it was 3 or so hours upstream to get to TRC. Katharine and I were alert for most of the ride – life vests on, boots off, scanning the water for trees. The other passengers were much less concerned – many napped for most of the ride. Katharine and I were both getting pretty nervous because there were a couple of small children on board who refused to wear their life vests and were hanging off the side of the boat. We both sat ready to grab them if we hit a log or something and they fell in (their parents were sleeping).

At last we reached the TRC landing area, or what was left of it. The river was still pretty high and had covered the entire slope up to the main land. The lodge manager and several of the other staff members were waiting for us so they could help everyone out of the boat (we had to walk along the top of a fallen tree with all of our equipment). Katharine and I spent another hour or so transporting things from the boat to the lodge and finally collapsed in our loft. The other researchers got back from their work in the field and tried to tell us how we missed a crazy flood (one of the trails not even remotely near the lodge was submerged in a foot or two of water). We just looked at each other and said they had no idea what they missed out on. That night was one that I’ll never forget. Even if I described every detail perfectly, there’s no way you’ll ever understand the pure fear of facing a flood in the Amazon, and everything that it means, unless you’ve actually experienced it. What an adventure!

Now, if you don’t want to hear about my stomach illnesses, you should stop here. Thanks for reading!

For those of you still here, let me ask you a question – have you ever vomited while simultaneously crapping in your pants? No? Well under normal circumstances it’s probably a horrible experience, but put yourself in the jungle and it’s 50 times worse. Make it New Year’s Eve and it’s 10 times worse on top of that. In my case, my stomach started feeling funny a little before the first round of drinks. I figured I just had a little diarrhea but would wait until we toasted that first round. Unfortunately the drink-pouring happened in typical Peruvian-fashion, a.k.a. slow as molasses. I think I lasted 15 minutes before deciding I couldn’t wait and headed across the lodge to the bathroom. Fortunately I got there just in time (running the last dozen meters), but I completely surprised myself when I started throwing up (I don’t even know the last time I threw up due to some kind of stomach bug). If *that* was surprising, you can imagine my utter horror when I realized that I was defecating at the same time. It was then that I thought, “Sure, I survived the flood at Chuncho but I’m going to die in this bathroom stall with shit in my pants in the middle of the freaking jungle”. At home I would’ve assumed food poisoning, but in the jungle you have no idea what the problem is – it could be the food, the water, a bite, or a dozen other things.

After recovering from that incident, I went back out to the bar area to tell Katharine I’d be resting in the hammocks and to let me know if there was any kind of soup for dinner. When I got there, she immediately said, “Woah, what happened to you?” – Apparently I was sweaty, pale, and had a panicked look on my face. I told her I wasn’t feeling great (I couldn’t let *everyone* know I had just crapped in my pants… which is why I’m posting it on the internet 6 months later). Katharine came over to check on me when dinner was served (no soup, of course). She really was my best jungle friend because she helped me move to the couches that were closer to the bathrooms, brought me a bucket (just in case), rummaged around the kitchen for some crackers for me to eat, and spent the rest of the night hanging out with me on the couches instead of enjoying the festivities. Jordan (one of the newest volunteers and also a mountain search and rescue volunteer back in the US) and Mabe (Peruvian volunteer training to be a vet) came by to check on me periodically throughout the night – really nice of them to do that. When they realized I had been going to the bathroom every 15 minutes for over 2 hours, they started talking about the cutoff for when to send me downriver to a hospital in Puerto Maldonado. I heard that and just looked around the lodge to understand the full meaning – it was nighttime on New Year’s Eve, so the 8-hour boat ride in a river with entire trees floating downstream would be in pitch blackness, and everyone capable of driving the boats was drunk. If the stomach illness didn’t kill me then that boat ride sure would have. FORTUNATELY my bathroom trips became less frequent, and I was able to make it through the night without any problems. It’s amazing how I had no appetite for two days after that – all I ate were crackers and I was never hungry for anything more. Debilitating stomach illness – the jungle diet!