Rich and Terry's Peru Adventure Part 1

This past winter when friend and Home Teacher Terry Mecham was helping us install the floor, stairways and some finish work on the Rainbow house, he made the mistake of saying that someday he would like to do a jungle type thing and see the wildlife. I had participated in a trip to Ecuador with a great bird guide, Rudy Gelis last November, and knew that he was interested in doing a trip to Peru. A number of e-mails later, we were on our way! We got our yellow fever shots, stocked up on mosquito repellant, and headed for the Amazon basin!

On June 5 we left Portland early for Houston, Texas where we met birder and friend Ned Hill, and then went on to Lima arriving at nearly midnight. Rudy met us, took us to a hotel in Lima, and the next morning at 5 am we were on our way back to the airport. From Lima we flew to Puerto Maldonado via Cusco. We met our native guides there, and took a motorized canoe upriver on the Tambopata to the first of 3 camps where we would spend the next 8 days. With us were 2 Australian couples, both trained orthinologists. It was really fun!


These camps or lodges are really nice. Although they don't have electricity or hot water, the food is great and the rooms are really interesting with being open to the forest and all of it's sounds. flor a couple of hours a day they fire up a generator so that batteries can be recharged. They provide what we used to use on the farm in the form of rubber boots, as the trails are very muddy.

This is tough birding. The forest is very dense, and it can be very hard to find and identify the birds. In the next picture we are just getting started, and you can see our native guide Rodopho calling in the bird we are looking for with his ipod! Many of the birds would never be seen if you didn't give them a reason to come to you to investigate who is in thier space!


When in Ecuador, I was disapointed in my pictures due to the lack of light under the canopy. Since then I found a 20 year old "prime lens" for my Nikon camera's. It is a 400 mm f2.8. It has great autofocus (good cause my eyes are not so great anymore), but the sucker is heavy. I walked with it on my shoulder for several weeks before we went, but it was still wearing me out on the muddy trails. As future posts will show however, it was worth it for some pretty fun photo's.


We spent hours sometimes searching for a single bird. But, for those who are really interested in seeing the birds, this is the way to do it.


With tools like the tower rising about 200 feet up into the canopy, it was not all understory, but most of it was pretty dark.


Here Rudy, Ned and Terry are discussing with Rodolpho the bird they are in search of.


In future posts, it will primarily be about the birds, but throughout the trip we kept track of many other things that we saw. While we concentrated mostly on flying things, the Jaguar tracks Terry found in the trail reminded us that we certainly had big company in those woods.


Things that flew came in all sizes, colors, and locations.


The variety of butterfly's was amazing.


So here is a couple of the early birds.


White Fronted Nunbird Rare in subcanopy and midstory of tall humid montane forest (most of the Amazon Basin). About 9 inches tall.


Squirrell Cuckoo. (Actually, Rudy just e-mailed me and said this was a Black Tailed Cuckoo. Funny because we didn't record one that day. But, trust me he knows his birds!) Common in the humid forests of eastern Peru, but hard to see. Often heard first, it's sneezing KEEK WAH can be heard from quite a ways off. About 18 inches. The eye ring is distinctive.

Stay Tuned!