by Liam Howley “No one suspects that the days are gods”. So wrote the transcendentalist writer Emerson. Such a statement needs no context other than the day within which we all live. In truth I cannot remember what text that statement appears in, for it is some time since I have read any of his works, and I have none of them at hand here in the forest, yet I am not preoccupied with that fact.
Alan Lee, February 2007. A few months ago I was explaining some of the finer details of why parrots and macaws visit the clay licks along the Tambopata with great regularity to a well travelled German tourist who perhaps felt an affinity for a form of wildlife with as strict a habit of time keeping as himself.
Alan Lee With Peru a distant memory after 2 months back in gloomy Manchester, England, the echoes of macaws and monkeys now only haunt me in foggy dreams. The dreams are more often starting to feature telephone calls and the call centre environment I now find myself in. With university during the day, I have to find some way of paying the bills, and so find myself working on a part-time basis for the Cooperative Bank.
Alan Lee
Alan Lee Of the big cats in rainforests of Peru – the jaguar (Panthera onca) and the puma, the Puma is the harder one to see usually as it is displaced from areas where jaguar are found as there is a degree of competition between the two species. The jaguar, the heavier and stronger cat, can easily chase a puma from its territory. During my many hundreds of kilometres of transects and walks through the forest, I have encountered 4 jaguar, but only 2 puma.
By Susan Walker
One of the guides asked me the other day what a group of frogs is called, as in Spanish it translates to a congress. To be honest, I didn’t even know a group of parrots had their own collective name. Here are a few others:
Introduction. The results presented here are from field work conducted by the Tambopata Macaw Project at the Amazonian jungle lodge Refugio Amazonas, owned and operated by Rainforest Expeditions SAC (RFE).
The importance of Peruvian researchers to parrot conservation Alan Lee The parrot family is one of the most enigmatic of all the bird families in the world. Yet it is surprising how little is known about them. When I first came to Peru in 2002 I had seen only the parrot that are found in South Africa, which are brown and boring and not used on marketing material in the same way as nearly every travel company and many other companies besides, use parrots or macaws as logos. In southern Africa there are only 4 species of parrot out of a total of 900 species of birds.
Bats at clay licks.
Alan Lee
Amazingly, having never read about bats at clay licks, within the last 2 months there have been two publications on the topic from South America - one from Ecuador and one from Peru. The latter is by Adriana Bravo, who used to work at TRC as a guide and on the macaw project. She is currently doing her doctorate at Louisiana State University. Interestingly, the findings are very similar, but conclusions a bit different as we shall see.
I was happy to read the most recent publication explaining variation in Brazil nut fruit production, which does not blame macaws and parrots for predation. Although a previous publication states that up to 10% of a crop can be lost due to predation by macaws on young fruit, the latest modelling states that production is more influenced by lianas and Phosphorus. Results suggest that fruit productivity at the individual tree level could be increased, possibly through experimental liana cutting and/or P amendments.
