Joe and Françoise's excellent adventures!: Fishing for piranhas! (Plus birds, sloths, etc.....)

Wednesday, March 11, 2020. Today started again with a pre-breakfast boat ride. The river we are on (the Maranon) - like all the tributaries to the Amazon and the Amazon itself- is very wide. In order to see most of the plants and the wildlife, we need to get on the smaller skiffs, and get into the smaller creeks that empty into the main river. This morning, we went into another of the “black water” creeks, which was very narrow, and where we could really experience the jungle.

This picture shows the line between the black and brown water. It is very sharp and when the boat goes by and mixes the waters, it looks just like milk added to coffee.

We rode slowly through the creek, experiencing the sounds of the jungle, and admiring the typical rain forest vegetation. Our guide is really a remarkable bird “listener”: while he does recognize every bird by sight, he can also pick up specific sounds, and then match them to call a specific bird.

He got very excited this morning, because he heard a pygmy owl. And then he called it, so that it would nicely pose on a branch for us to see! It is tiny - maybe 4 inches tall and has a lovely call.

We saw many other birds (see end of blog), whose names I don't recall (except for these adorable parakeets), but the point of this ride was really about being in the middle of this amazing ecosystem and just being part of it.

As a treat, we also saw an active sloth - that is, as active as sloths get.... It moved- very slowly - a few feet down the tree, and ate a leaf We were very excited!

After breakfast on the boat, we went fishing for Piranhas! We used the same equipment as the local people: a stick of wood, a line and a metal hook. Bait it with a piece of meat, drop it in the water and snap it up quickly when you feel a bite. It was fun, and we caught quite a few- can you tell from the pictures that Joe is better at dealing with live fish than I am?

It is really easy to catch a lot of them, and we brought them back for the ship cook to prepare for lunch (I did not however try it, because they freak me out a bit (also, I think the malaria pills are upsetting my stomach a bit......).

After a well deserved nap, we had a lecture about the different types of monkeys and their intelligence (and also about the fact that “the Lorax” is based on a type of monkey found in Kenya, where Dr. Seuss was travelling.....). The most remarkable thing I learned is that Capuchin monkeys can plan a harvest, store and ripen fruits and use tools to open nuts, as well as to scare off predators.

This was a good introduction to our dusk boat ride, where we saw a whole bunch of little squirrel monkeys,

and two adorable owl monkeys (so named because they are nocturnal and have huge eyes that make then look like owls. Interestingly, they are an example in biology where evolution went backwards: Somehow they “forgot” how to see colors, which their ancestors could do, and now only see in black and white.

The light was very beautiful at dusk, and the sky had cleared making it much easier for Joe to capture pictures of all the colorful birds with the super-duper lens. As the night grew darker, the frogs and crickets grew louder. We turned off the engine for a few minutes to enjoy the sounds of the Amazon. We did not however manage to see any frogs, in spite of the racket they were making!

A caiman, right at the water level, could only be seen because it’s eyes reflected red in our spot light!