Day 8 -- A Smelly Day

Monday, February 11, 2008

Another night of rain. No rain but overcast this morning when we rise. Alan is going to take Alice and me to the colpa and help us get accurate data on first arrival times. It is tricky identifying the birds in the predawn light, but Alan is so familiar with them all that he can tell the species by the slightest squawk. We need to record our arrival time, the time that each species arrives, the first, second and third species on the clay, all the while making 5-minute counts of all species on the clay. It was fast and furious from 5 until 7:45, at which time Alan left. Jinette stayed behind to provide ID assistance if we needed it. After Alan left, however, there was little to do but record the time every five minutes because the birds were taking a break.

Richard called the colpa to see how Alice was; told her that some strange malady was going round characterized by blackened skin. Alice pretended to have no symptoms, but the skin on her arms and hands was black. Richard had pulled a practical joke the night before on a night hike. He gave the three on the hike—Sheila, Diana and Alice—some “extra good nighttime insect repellent.” Fortunately none of them put it on their faces because it turned their skin black.

Jinette filled the lull with insect horror stories. She had been bitten on the head the month before and recounted every disgusting detail. She said that when she first showed the bite to Adrian he dismissed it as nothing, just a pimple. But it kept getting larger and also more painful. The botfly larva grew in her head until she had to stop on the path and hold her breath against the pain. Finally (I’m abbreviating this account for your benefit) she was taken downriver to a shaman, and he smothered the area with nicotine and some other concoction. The following day he managed to excise the site and squeeze the botfly larva out.

We notice many black vultures congregating in the trees to the right of our observation site. Jinette, who holds the male/female record for trees climbed in a day (13), and is a pretty tough cookie, decides to investigate and find out what the vultures are after. After about 20 minutes, she comes back, very excited, and asks if we have any plastic bags. The vultures are after a dead blue-and-gold macaw. Any dead macaws must be autopsied, and Jinette wants to take it back to TRC for that purpose.

 

Black Vulture

We have no plastic bags, so I suggest banana leaves. (Just the day before Jinette and Fino had climbed a banana tree, machetes in hand, and brought down a large bunch of small, green bananas—a very delicious variety.) So, Jinette cuts some banana leaves and goes off, returning in a bit with a very smelly corpse, its head nearly severed from its body and a large hole in it’s chest. She asks Alice if she would like a contraband feather. Alice says yes, but then quickly changes her mind because the feather is so smelly.

Well, the banana leaf-wrapped corpse sat near the lean-to for the rest of our watch, attracting flies and repelling us with its strong odor. Alice and I were glad when our watch was over, though we insisted that Jinette and the bird sit in the back of the boat so we could enjoy uncorrupted cooling breezes on our ride back downriver to the trailhead.

Because one had been in the vicinity for a couple of days, we all thought a Black-and-white Hawk-Eagle (left) had gotten the macaw and then been chased off before it could eat it. But the next day, Lucia and Katty, the Peruvian vets, did an autopsy and found a hole in its skull. They decided that it had been killed by a Red-and-green Macaw. Alan, and those who owned macaws, didn’t agree but kept their silence.

 My notes say that there were only six of us at the lunch table and that the smelly peccaries could be heard (and smelled) chomping near the TRC. They also say that we took a nature hike after lunch with Richard, but I haven’t written down a thing we saw. Sorry. Oh yes, now I remember. This was the day we saw a potoo! What a strange bird, and so clever of Fino to be able to spot this well-camouflaged bird.

Potoo looking like a snag

Richard was very moody because his practical joke was having alarming repercussions. Diana Foster, a  bossy, holier-than-thou type, was furious. She was going to Costa Rica to a Nature Conservancy convention directly after her Earthwatch Expedition. She wailed loud and long that this prank had broken her trust with Richard and the other Peruvian guides and that she was going to report to the Nature Conservancies present at the convention how immature and untrustworthy Peruvian guides were, yadda, yadda, yadda. The other two took the prank in their stride, and all were told that the black stain would wash off in a few days.

That morning at the colpa Alice and I spent some of our time thinking up good, funny revenges. We’d decided to get a hold of Richard’s binoculars and paint the rims of the eyepieces with lipstick so that when he held the binoculars to his eyes he’d come away with red circles around them. (We never did anything. It was more fun to think up the revenges than to enact them. Also, the guides were all in love with Alice, and I think this was a teasing prank on her because she was young and pretty.)

Anyhow, we were all worried for the reputation of the Peruvian guides—after all we were not tourists but research assistants—and Diana blew the whole unwise prank into a major felony. There was a lot of talk and gossip, which did not die back much until our final day. (Oddly, when we got to Lima and hot showers, Alice reported that the stain washed right off.)