An oxbow lake, just off the Rio Tuichi. Madidi Bolivia
This was on nutrient-poor white sand off a black water river (The Urubu) near Manaus in Brazil
Fig trees like this are ‘stranglers’ that grow around another tree and eventually kill it, having had their seeds deposited originally in the excrement of a fruit eating bird like a toucan or a trogon.
Madidi National Park. Bolivia
Balsa is a secondary-growth tree ‘weed’ that shoots up along river edges, road sides and light gaps where large trees have fallen. Wet-season floods wash hundreds of these down the rivers, and these build up into log jams on the sand bars. The straight super-light logs are excellent for building rafts.
This was near to the Buddhist ruins of Polonaruwa where I did a monkey-follow project in 1994
Despite being so big, Elephants are hard to spot even close-to in the rainforest. My guides’ instructions were to hide in the stilt roots if one charged.
These emergents are called Lighthouse trees as they are huge and easy to see from a long distance. The bird is a many-banded aracari, a small type of toucan. July; it was drizzling and cold like Manchester in winter as a ‘surazo’ cold weather system had blown in from the Antarctic.
Red River Hogs are one of the most easily seen large mammals as they forage the river edges and oxbow lakes in small herds.
Black spider monkeys are the most numerous primate in the high canopy forest and are easy to attract by imitating their hiccupping calls.
This particular tree was close to a savannah clearing where we disturbed a herd of forest buffalo wallowing in a pool. The clearing was criss-crossed with elephant trails and there were gorilla tracks around the edges.
Razor-billed curassows -mutums- flying across the un-named river that we went up before crossing the serranía to the Rio Enatahua. This was the furthest point we reached on the 2012 expedition. The river was lower when we tried again in 2015 and this time, we made it nearly to the river’s source before making a 6 day portage to the Enatahua.
The Rio Undumo, a major tributary of the Madidi, fans out into an inland delta with myriad channels, home to anacondas, giant otters and black caimans. The channels presumably join up back into one river though I never got that far. Our raft got stuck in the narrow channels and when I tried to get through on foot, jumping from island to island, I fell short and sank to my thighs in mud. The water was up to my chest. It was terrifying. I returned to the Undumo the following year with a pak canoe, but still couldn’t get through.
