MY AMAZON ADVENTURE – Part IV: Nature

The first three posts here on my recent trip to Peru and the upper reaches of the Amazon have been about the wonderful people I met and observed there; the palpable, all-encompassing sense of place exuded by the great river and the surrounding rainforest; and the vibrant art and craft that gives voice to both.

Truth be told, I wasn’t drawn to this experience by either the people or the culture. And, while the sense of place—all those references in literature and film to the mysterious, perilous Amazon—certainly drew me in, what I really wanted to see was the wildlife.

The Amazon Rainforest is home to one in ten of all living species on earth—at last count 427 mammals, 1,294 birds, 428 amphibians, 378 reptiles, 2,200 fishes, 80,000 plants, and an astounding 2.5 million species of insects.* And those are only the ones researchers have found.

   As we ply a jungle path in search of 
   critters, it’s like slogging through a 
   steam bath after a power outage.

PECKING ORDER
Before boasting of the puny sampling of those organisms I was privileged to see and photograph, a little context:

In this, the largest rainforest biosphere on earth, some incredibly powerful forces and their more-or-less predictable cycles animate all life. The river, consistently rising and falling some 30 to 40 feet each year, is like the region’s pulsing artery; the rainforest, its lungs.

A rainforest this size creates its own weather on a massive scale. The steamy exhalations of billions of plants, cooked out by the powerful equatorial sun, rise each day into the atmosphere. There they’re swirled and cooled, wringing out the moisture as rain. And so it goes, day in and day out.

The plant canopy here is more than just a matter of survival of the tallest. It’s a complex, multi-tiered system. Through both competition and cooperation, each layer is claimed by those plant and animal species which have evolved to do best there.

PHOTO: Kevin Cure via WikiMedia Commons

Sunlight, plentiful for the big boys, is all but consumed by the time it reaches the ground. One perfectly sunny afternoon, as we ply a jungle path in search of critters, it’s like slogging through a steam bath after a power outage—I can’t take a decent picture without flash.

      Our guides uncannily mimic the 
      creatures’ voices, hoping to draw 
      them closer.

SKIFFIN’ IT
The river boat La Perla—our comfortable home for the week—tows two large, outboard-powered skiffs. Every day we cast off in them for excursions into the numerous tributaries and backwaters of the upper Amazon and the Marañon. They also take us to trail heads where we embark on hikes through the jungle. There, facilitated by incredibly skillful naturalist guides—two of them our own; others, local to the areas we visit—we’re introduced to a wide variety of living wonders.

Rothschilds moth

From the skiffs, our guides employ an impressive range of tools of their trade. Their incredibly sharp eyes scan the woods, air and water for telling movements or patterns. Then a quick glance through binoculars confirms or denies a hunch.

If a bird or perhaps a monkey is too far away for the rest of us to see, they uncannily mimic the creatures’ voices, hoping to draw them closer. At times, they even broadcast recorded calls through a microphone.

At the outset of our trip, we’d been given a list of several hundred species of birds we might spot during these excursions. With our guides’ help—in some cases actually borrowing a guest’s camera to take the shot she or he couldn’t manage to frame—we manage to see well over half of them, an impressive list for any birder.

Great kiskadee

Yellow-headed caracara

Hoatzin

From the water we observe several types of monkey, sloths, caiman…and the revered Amazon river dolphin, or boto. We even fish for the oft-maligned red-bellied piranha.

Pygmy marmoset

Three-toed sloth

Amazon river dolphin - PHOTO: Allen Sheffield via WikiMedia Commons

Red-bellied piranha

We find breathtaking flowers and inch our way through giant, 6-foot-diameter lily pads which, with their turned-up edges and sturdy fretwork substructure, have been famously photographed supporting a small child.

Frangipani

Coconut palm stem cluster

Kapok bud and flower

    After calmly posing it for photos and 
    casually brushing it off, he looks it up 
    in his spider book and discovers it is 
    highly venomous.

ALL CREATURES GREAT AND SMALL
On our ground explorations, while we stick to the path with one guide, the other is constantly tromping off-trail through the jungle, searching for critters large and small. One minute, he presents us with a gorgeous, inch-long poison-dart frog. Ten minutes later, he’s pointing out an eight- or ten-foot palm-like tree he says “walks” across the jungle floor looking for one of the few precious pools of sunshine seeping through the canopy.

Poison dart frog

Kapok (lupana) tree with unidentified blue insect

Later, he emerges from the dark, dense foliage once again, this time obviously lugging something much bigger. It takes us a few seconds to make it out in the dim light; draped over his shoulders is a 12-foot boa constrictor as thick as my calf. On another occasion, a huge spider suddenly appears on a guide’s shirt. Later, after calmly posing it for photos and casually brushing it off, he looks it up in his spider book and tells us it is highly venomous.

Red-tailed boa constrictor

Venomous? Looks like a huntsman spider to me – if so, not so much.

One could come here to Amazonia a dozen times and still not see more than a small fraction of its natural wonders—I imagine even natives discover something new every day. I'm privileged to have been able to come here once in my lifetime, if for no other reason than to catch this glimpse of earth's "lungs" first-hand.

The experience only strengthens my resolve to resist, in whatever ways I can, the short-sighted, self-serving, reckless actions of the current U.S. government—especially its willfully-ignorant dismissal of the consensus among climate scientists that our current treatment of the environment is likely to prove catastrophic.

And the reality-star president? Don't get me going; he wouldn't know a tarantula if it bit him on the ass. And I wish one would.

* Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_rainforest) 

MY AMAZON ADVENTURE – Part III: Art and Craft

INTERSECTIONS
I will not pretend to understand Peru from the very limited duration and reach of my recent visit—and even that from quite a privileged point of
view. But that’s the wonderful thing about art; it allows one a legitimate impression, a feeling, about a place that need not hinge on comprehensive knowledge nor on any dialog but that between artist and beholder.

What I did learn about Peru is that, while its people certainly share the same fundamental aspirations as every other human population on earth, they are also colored by a lineage, a geography, a range of climate, and a collective memory that makes each community absolutely unique. And it is the intersections between those shared human qualities and those singular experiences and challenges where culture is forged.

I spent the first two days of my trip in Lima. I loved the vitality, sophistication and sheer range of artistic expression I saw there—from grand-scale works of architecture and monumental sculpture, to revered works in museums, to edgy graffiti and street performance.

WITH THE FLOW
What a contrast, then, when I flew two hours northeast to the smaller, seedier frontier city of Iquitos, the main point of access to the upper Amazon. There, the influence of that fabled river and the all-encompassing rainforest it sustains seems to color everything, not just in the ubiquitous visual themes of water, wildness and wonder, but in the practical nature of tools, weapons and regalia crafted by hundreds of rainforest tribes over the ages and now on display in museums.
 

Also evident in Iquitos, scattered architectural remnants of the era in which both the rainforest’s natural bounty and the labors of its human inhabitants were first successfully exploited by outsiders on a massive, industrial scale—the rubber boom of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

     These people...seldom enjoy the 
     luxury of creative expression strictly 
     for personal or political ends.

Once I was on the river, the further away from urban life we got, the simpler and more utilitarian the objects of art and craft became. These people, amidst the daily challenges of surviving in this unforgiving place, seldom enjoy the luxury of creative expression strictly for personal or political ends. Most everything has a practical purpose, albeit sometimes with some decorative flair.

At many of the villages we visited, after “show-and-tell” about life in the community was over, artisans would make a modest effort to sell us their wares—generally quite simple but beautiful baskets, wood carvings, various decorative objects and items crafted of gourds or coconut shells.

Perhaps these artistic and cultural expressions will mean less to you, out of context, than they did to me seeing them in the moment and in the flesh. Or perhaps you’ve been to the area and experienced some of them for yourself. At any rate, I hope at least some of them will speak to you, as they have to me, of people, place and purpose.

MY AMAZON ADVENTURE – Part II: Place

THE RIVER
When folks ask me for some of the high points of my recent week-long cruise on the Peruvian Amazon, one of the first things that comes to mind is just the wondrous mystique of that whole vast rainforest expanse. It’s not just the pink dolphins, poison-dart frogs and 15-foot anacondas, or the inscrutable oneness with Nature of its indigenous peoples; it’s also the sheer size and power of the river itself.

(Many of the world’s great rivers count their sources as the confluence of tributaries bearing different names. Our cruise, starting on the Amazon proper, reached upstream into one of its two main feeder rivers, the Marañon.)

Where we were, south and west of Iquitos, the Marañon looked to be fifteen, maybe twenty times as wide as the great Mississippi is back home in Minneapolis. One evening, as we returned to the boat in skiffs after some backwater wildlife spotting, our guide gave us a little perspective on the its contribution to the Amazon’s size.

Pointing to the muddy, flotsam-strewn water swirling around us, he said, “Oh, by the way, right here it’s 250 feet deep.” That, even there at the Amazon’s upper reaches, is 50 feet deeper than the deepest point, near New Orleans, in the entire Mississippi river.

   The Amazon’s total flow volume is 
  greater than that of the next six largest 
  rivers combined.

As I pondered this, the immensity of this river started adding up. The Amazon is fed by some 1,100 other tributaries before it empties into the Atlantic, many bigger than the Marañon—only number 14 among them by length.

This abundance of tributaries and the fact that the area of Amazon’s watershed is twice that of the Mississippi—which itself drains more than 40 percent of the continental US—begins to explain why the Amazon’s total flow volume is greater than that of the world’s next six largest rivers combined.

The Amazon's estuary and silt plume from space. PHOTO: Norman Kuring/NASA

That volume reaches up to 300,000 cubic meters per second (11,000,000 cubic feet per second) in the rainy season, with an annual average of 209,000 cubic meters per second (7,400,000 cubic feet per second). At that rate, the Amazon is responsible for no less than 20% of the fresh water entering the Earth's oceans.

The river pushes a vast plume of fresh water out into the Atlantic Ocean, reaching some 400 kilometers (250 miles) long and between 100 and 200 kilometers (62 and 124 miles) wide.
 
     This place is home to one fifth of 
     all the bird species on Earth, and 
     one third of all plant species.

WRINGING THE SPONGE
As captivating as the Amazon’s sheer immensity may be, there’s more to a sense of place than scale. First off, the Amazon Rainforest is…well…a rainforest. (Okay, it’s hard to avoid the scale thing; at 1.7 billion acres, it’s nearly twice the size of the next largest tropical rainforest, and is appropriately nicknamed the “lungs of the earth.”)

A rainforest this size creates its own weather on a massive scale. The steamy exhalations of billions of plants, cooked out by the powerful equatorial sun, rise each day into the atmosphere. There they’re swirled and cooled, wringing out the moisture as rain. And so it goes, day in and day out.

This daily cycle is mirrored in the region's semiannual rainy/dry cycle of seasons. All life here has adapted to the river's predictable 30-foot annual rise and fall, and the flooding of some 140,000 square miles of forest. Tree trunks and the jungle floor, home for half the year to creatures that walk, crawl and slither, become the realm of fish and marine mammals the rest of the year.

PHOTO: Kevin Cure via Wikimedia Commons

The heat and humidity support an astounding range of plant and animal life. Like a colossal, multi-stage Darwinist coffee maker, the jungle canopy comprises at least four distinct levels, the occupants of each extracting what they need from the light, water and air movement percolating through it.

To one unaccustomed to the combination of heat, humidity and light-devouring density of foliage, the jungle here, even at mid-day, feels like a steam bath during a power outage. (I couldn’t take a decent photo without flash.) One can only admire the species, including homo sapiens, which have managed to adapt so successfully to such a climate.

THE SCOURGE OF HUMAN ENDEAVOR
In an environment this unique, this exotic, the notion of place eclipses that of time. How immediate it seems, the fact that this place was once attached to Africa.

Geologically, the pieces—today’s continents—fit like those of a jigsaw puzzle, and, though I know the supposition has been debated by science, many of Amazonia’s species—from certain types of rodents, to monkeys, to large cats, to aquatic mammals and fish—would appear tellingly similar to antecedents found only in Africa.

Paralleling the geology is the amazing hydrological history of the Amazon. At one time, the river actually flowed from east to west. But with the splitting of the South American and African continents some 120 million years ago, and the subsequent upheaval of the Andes, the flow was blocked, creating first a vast inland sea. Then, fed by snow melt from the new mountain range, the sea eventually burst through to the Atlantic, and the Amazon resumed its flow, this time west to east.

In more recent history, Amazonia has been ruthlessly exploited for monetary gain, from the collecting, processing and transporting rubber, to the messy mining of gold, nitrates and guano, to harvesting the rainforest’s rare woods and medicinal plants, to the clearing of more than eight square miles per day for cattle grazing, coca production and other commercial development.

Iquitos's Iron House - Gustave Eiffel, 1889

The effects of the rubber boom—from roughly 1880 to 1915, and again briefly during World War II—can still be seen in Iquitos, Manaus and Belém, where vestiges of European wealth and sensibility still adorn the architecture. The era's ruinous effects on the population and cultures of the region’s indigenous peoples will do doubt outlast the most durable of those buildings.

Today, the brutality inflicted on this land, on these people, remains raw as the world continues demanding more and more of Amazonia’s natural riches. And it is impossible to marvel at the place’s natural beauty without acknowledging—without feeling—that reality.

YOUR PLACE OR MINE?
Of the many unforgettable experiences of this trip, one stands out for its eloquence in articulating this ineffable sense of place.

So, one evening just as the sun is setting, we’re on our way back to the cruise boat in the skiffs. We’re in the middle of a rather wide part of the river, near where the Marañon and Ucayali join to form the Amazon proper. There’s a spectacular sunset. No, wait, there are two…no three.

PHOTO: FrankMoreno.com.mx

Looking around the 360-degree panorama, I see three distinct areas of bright horizon and Turner-worthy peach-pink clouds. And, swear to God, I can’t tell which of them is the one, real sunset. Never have I seen anything like it, and our guide, perhaps inured to the phenomenon, casually points out the genuine article, but cannot explain the imposters.

We head over to within 50 yards of the eastern bank, where a spectacular stand of 12- to 15-foot pampas grass sways in the barely perceptible breeze. Our guide suggests we be quiet, listen and wait. Within a few minutes, a flock of a dozen or so green parrots, jabbering excitedly—flying all the way across the river and right over our heads—alights atop the elegant plumes of the pampas grass.

Then, from a slightly different direction, comes another flight. And then another…and another…and another. For the next fifteen minutes, from all over the surrounding rainforest, for miles around, they come by the scores, the hundreds, to roost for the night. By the time we leave, we have to shout to one another to be heard over the din.

PRIVILEGE AND POWER
The parrots have found their place here in this tall-grass microcosm of Earth’s greatest rainforest. A few billion other critters, having evolved over eons to thrive here, have found their places too. And so, one would hope, have I.

This precious week has shown me both how insignificant and how powerful I am: insignificant for the rarified millisecond in evolutionary time that I've spent here, hoping to better understand one or two things about this incredibly vast and complex biosphere.

Powerful in the fact that my species, in the way we live, the personal and political choices we make thousands of miles from here, may well hold the key to continuing survival for this timeless place and all its inhabitants.

I am deeply grateful for the chance to better realize the connection...and the difference.