7/17/09 4:45 pm: Arrival in Lima
I just got to the hostel after a long day and night of flying. The only really interesting thing so far has been the drive from the airport. You could say the traffic laws here are more like guidelines, but that would be generous. Our taxi went wherever there was room on the road, even if that meant squeezing between a motorcycle and a semi while straddling the dividing line. We made several right hand turns from the left hand lane, ran almost every stop sign, entered intersections on red lights and came within a foot of hitting pedestrians on three separate occasions. One time I’m almost certain the taxi driver intentionally swerved towards two girls in a crosswalk, who knows why…I figure if I can survive the ride back to the airport tomorrow it’ll all be downhill from here.
7/18/09 6:40 pm: Ppacca family farm, outside Puerto Maldonado
After an early wake up and my flight to Puerto, Alex picked me up around 12:30pm. The view as we flew over the snow-capped Andes was spectacular, as was the view of the Amazon broken up by rivers and checkered tracks of deforestation along the roads. Seeing both the Rockies and Andes for the first time in my life rather recently, I think it is very interesting how each range has such a unique character despite the similar forces that act on them.
For those of you who don’t know exactly what we’re working on here. Alex is the US director for a NGO called Fauna Forever Tambopata that, among other things, is working to establish a series of corridors across the new Inter-Oceanica highway that is being built through Puerto Maldonado, and traversing the entire Amazon basin, fragmenting the surrounding rainforest. This highway will effectively bisect two enormous conservation areas making each less biodiverse by disrupting gene flow, creating negative edge effects along the road, and serving as a vector for disease. Additionally large tracks of land 20-30km deep are being sold along the road causing immense deforestation and introducing invasive plant species. Our aim is to identify tracks of land that can be preserved or reforested that will connect the two preserves, and then establish a payment system based on the value of the ecosystems being preserved so that the land owners will have adequate financial incentives to make the conservation areas economically viable. Our daily work consists of running transects through the potential corridors to establish viability and conducting survey work with the land owners to see how interested they are in being a part of the conservation effort.
To put it politely, our current accommodations certainly reflect the rural nature of our work. The road out here from the Inter-Oceanica highway consisted of two dirt tracks heading straight into the jungle. After crawling along two kilometers of makeshift road through jungle and cattle pasture, we arrived at our base camp, which consists of an open-air shed that used to house chickens and sheep only two days ago. Now they all live under the shed and can be heard bleating through the floor boards. One in particular sounds just like the death-rattle of a baritone with emphysema crying out “Ne-eh-eh-eh-ed!” which I imagine may wear on my nerves by about 3 am. We do have a generator though, which provides us with such luxuries as music, computer use, lights, and of course all the bugs in a 1000 yard radius that are attracted to the latter. We are fairly well situated with bed nets and repellant, but everyone has still managed to get bitten by what are either fleas or chiggers. Only time will tell… On the bright side, there is a beautiful tributary next to our camp, which allows something resembling bathing. The biggest luxury though by far is our accompanying cook who puts the local restaurants to shame despite our conditions. This evening we had squash soup, rice with cheese and pumpkin, and a dessert of rice pudding. We can get all the fresh milk we want too, collected daily. We also have an accompanying guide and translator who are both very amiable, making a total crew of nine right now, but we will regularly meet with the other group of two Stanford students and many local volunteers. I’ll try to provide a rough bug bite estimate in the morning…
7/19/09 6:05 pm: First Day of Research (for me at least)
Today we actually fared well in terms of bug bites. The permanone I had left over from Alex’s Africa trip last summer served us well apparently. I helped cut my first transect this morning. It basically entailed hacking our way 600 meters into the jungle with machetes and marking the trail so we can monitor it over the next few days for mammals and birds, and also lay print traps. There is suppose to be a jaguar that has been praying on cattle so if we could prove it is here that would go a long way towards demonstrating this as a very functionally viable ecosystem since apex predators are often the first things to disappear once an ecosystem is compromised.
After lunch we took a dip in the stream, which was divine after the heat and humidity, and I finally got a chance to bathe. We also saw an 8 year old girl help kill and skin a sheep which certainly isn’t something you see every day back home. Later in the afternoon the group split up again to cut another transect, interview some local farm owners, and Joel and I went to work on the malaria project. We sampled several streams and stagnant bodies of water for pH, turbidity, cover and the presence of mosquito larvae. Along the way we also searched for animals, discussed the more notable events I had missed from earlier in the trip, and Joel informed me of all the venomous snakes we should be wary of including the bushmaster, which, while not very aggressive unless you step on it, is pretty much one bite, one kill. I was much better about swinging my machete through the grass in front of me after that.
The areas we were walking through were incredibly beautiful, though it was somewhat unnerving when a herd of cattle all starting moving towards us at a good clip since they were used to the people who regularly came out there bringing them salt licks. My favorite areas we saw were the lush fields dotted with young trees and covered with vibrant pink flowers that smelled pleasantly of Indian food, especially at sunset on our way back when the sun was casting warm colors across the clouds on the horizon that would then backlight the jungle ahead of us. I promise I’ll get pictures.
7/21/09, 6:32 pm: Frisbee, sheep and anacondas
The last couple days have been pretty enjoyable. Yesterday we taught our chef, Delicia, her husband and our guide, Larry, and the grandson of the couple whose farm we’re staying at, Cesar, how to play frisbee, which has always been a staple of our travels. I also saw an approximately 8 foot anaconda (or possibly boa) swimming across the river about 40 yards downstream from our bathing spot. Cesar didn’t believe me though.
The research has also been going well, especially the interviews. The two families so far seem very open to the possibility of conservation in return for payment or other benefits like education and infrastructure. Mostly they just want to have some degree of active interaction with their land so they have something to do with their time. Though we found out one of local farming families shot a Harpy Eagle because they thought it was eating their chickens. Considering there were only two (a couple) in the entire Tambopata region, this is pretty devastating for an already endangered species.
In other bad news, Joel sliced up three fingers on his left hand on some bamboo today while he was sampling. The cuts are deep, but it should be ok though. I was also right about the sheep. Last night wasn’t too bad, but the night before the sheep incessantly called back and forth keeping everyone awake until about 3 am. It did, however, give me a reason to look at the stars, which, like the sunsets, are absolutely incredible here.
7/22/09 6:31 pm: More hazards
Today was an early day. We had breakfast at 5 am which required running the generator again since it was still dark. This resulted in the nest of wasps living in the non-descript piece of old farm machinery in our shed thinking it was daybreak and flooding out towards the lights. Fortunately no one was stung, but breakfasting with about 200 wasps flying a couple feet overhead was a rather unnerving experience. We’ve also seen several of the 4 inch spiders, but they’re fairly harmless. Then to add to the excitement, last night our guide Larry saw an electric eel in the river while he was bathing. Like most things here, they aren’t aggressive, but if they feel threatened they can give off a shock capable of stopping a person’s heart given the right ion concentrations in the water.
Despite all this, however, we all admit we’re going to miss it here, once we leave tomorrow. Somehow living with nine people in a bug-ridden, open-air shed surrounded by livestock has grown on us over the week. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if our next field location is equally colorful. What I really miss the most though is real furniture. After a week of my sleeping pad being my bed, desk and chair, my back is very excited for something with lumbar support. I could also do without the fleas, but then again I wouldn’t want to start getting soft.
7/24/09 7:55pm: Tambopata Research Center
So after a night of gorging on pizza and checking email in Puerto Maldonado after leaving the Ppacca farm, we woke up at 4 am today (a truly herculean feat for me for those of you unfamiliar with my regular sleeping habits) to catch our boat up here to TRC. As luck would have it a friaje blew in today off the Andes making the ~7 hr boat ride in the cold rain less pleasant than it could have been. At least the boat had a roof and we got to stop for coffee and hot chocolate at a lodge on the way up the river. It’s also unfortunate because TRC is one of the best natural history sites in the world (not to mention a very nice lodge), but we’re much less likely to see any mega fauna here while it’s so cold, though we did see a capybara, the world’s largest rodent, on the way up. They also have a volleyball court, which has been a pastime of Alex, Joel and mine since we were in the Stanford Australia program, and the researchers apparently really need some help in the regular game against the staff, giving us another reason to hope for sun.
