Big Talks and Big Machetes

Buenas noches! The last few days have been a whirlwind of work and adventures, but I’m glad to finally stop and write a little about all everything that’s been going on.

Mondays and Fridays are busy days down here at Tiputini. That’s because those are the only days that you can leave the station or come to the station. As such, those days are marked by pseudo-French toast for breakfast (I guess it’s the easiest thing to make), hearing the loud humm from the canoe as it leaves the station around 7:30am and comes back around 4:00pm, sometimes saying goodbye to people, and often welcoming a whole bunch of new people. They’re sometimes tough days… but they make things down here a little more interesting.

This past Monday, the group of 8 students from Kalamazoo College left Even though we’d only hung out with them for about a week, I’m really going to miss them. The majority of student groups only stay for 2-3 days; they either come down on a Friday and leave the next Monday, or they come down on a Monday and leave the next Friday. They’re often huge groups of students, and usually those of us that stay here long term don’t make too much effort to hang out with them, since they’ll be leaving shortly.

However, the K-College students were different; they were here for a little over 2 weeks and they had to do their own research projects, and as such they were forced to organize their time and dictate most of what happened during their days. Additionally, when you’re here for more than a week, you usually have time to branch out and talk to people outside of your group. So I got to spend a lot of time talking to some of them about life, relationships, and all that juicy stuff. After dinner one evening, I spent an hour sitting on the beach for what was dubbed the “Meat and Bananas Club”… one of the students would set out one plate with rotting meat and another plate with rotting bananas, and record the number and kind of insects that came to the plates every 5 minutes. Sounds uneventful, but it was a great forum to just sit there and chat it up about whatever was on your mind. On Sunday night, the night before they left, a whole bunch of us played the card game Presidents for some 2 or 3 hours… it was rather amusing. Anyway, I’m going to miss them, they made the trip far more interesting.

However, as is common with Mondays and Fridays down here, Monday also marked the arrival of lots of new people. I met and greeted Tim, the National Geographic photographer that Kim has hired to take some awesome videos of our loveable and slightly insane study group of Manakins. Jostled among the overwhelming group of some 25 or 30 USFQ students, he made it in after braving tons of rain and carrying down and incredible amount of equipment. He’s been here for three days now, and his presence has certainly made our visit more fun and interesting. The first night he was here he showed us an AMAZING video of clips of Birds of Paradise from the various trips that he and Ed Scholes (Kim’s husband) took down in Papua New Guinea. I was incredibly excited to see what kind of awesome footage he would get of the Manakins!

Tuesday was marked by two things: first, I got some INCREDIBLE video of the Wire-Tailed Manakin, and second, TONS of insects. The video was great; a second male visited our study male, so I got lots of video of dances, fly-ins, kloks, and all sorts of the other crazy things they do. Additionally, Tuesday was the first day in my memory where there was GREAT light… so good that I could actually reach our goal shutter speed of 500 frames/second! Awesome!

The insects were… less awesome. During an especially exciting bout  of activity by the Wire-Tailed, I failed to notice that a colony of fire ants had decided to colonize a small area on my tripod. By the time I noticed them, there were some 30-50 of them! However, I quickly saw the stem-and-leaf route they were using to get up to that part of my tripod, cut the leaf and all nearby leaves, and then – very carefully – used a big leaf to swat all of them off. And I didn’t get a single bite The next thing I had to confront was slightly more frightening. As I was idling away the minutes, waiting for the Wire-Tailed to do something, I heard a rather loud and awkward buzzing suddenly erupt from the tangle just to my right. I remember thinking “that’s definitely not a hummingbird… that’s definitely a really big insect.” The next thing I knew, the BIGGEST insect that I have EVER seen chose to land on the leg of the tripod closest to me and pause. It was RIDICULOUSLY HUGE. About as long as my hand and half as wide, with big beady eyes, and great glassy wings, this thing was out of this world. I wasn’t really scared of it, so much as I was near-to-death frightened of the concept that such a thing might chose to land on ME. If it’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that insects have an obnoxiously large curiosity in human-made objects (like tripods)… and also in humans. Can’t tell you why, maybe they just don’t recognize the things and come over to check them out, but regardless, they like to harass people. Anyway, I froze stiff as a rod when I saw that thing, and I stayed frozen until – after about 3 minutes – it decided to leave, at which point I ran about 10 meters in the other direction, bluthering like an idiot and frantically waving my arms. Haha… I’ve weathered much worse than that insect in this forest, but I think that was the most ridiculous I’ve acted since I’ve been down here! Anyway… to top that little guy off, the sweat bees were abnormally bad on Tuesday; I killed probably at least 20 of them as they idiotically crawled INTO my eyes, after which I had to rescue them. Man, I HATE sweat bees.

The day was saved, however, when Kim, Don, Tim and I went to the huge canopy tower that evening. We were joined by some 8 or 10 students that were part of the USFQ group, but we still managed to see some AWESOME stuff: two Many Banded Aracaris (http://antpitta.com/images/photos/toucans/Many-banded-Aracari.jpg) feeding each other, a fruit crow, some Common Piping-Guams, and a beautiful, bright blue honey creeper. So awesome!

Tuesday was also marked by an extremely interesting talk given by Eduardo, one of the people that is leading the group of USFQ students. More on that later.

However, if I thought Tuesday was fun, I was in for a real treat on Wednesday! The morning was relatively uninteresting; I sat on the log near one of the Striped Manakin territories and listened to the male call a bit, but nothing happened until I was finally rained out around 11:30. After some soup, a rather odd Ecuadorian version of pizza, and some amusing talk of tigers and sharks with Brandt and Dan, Kim told Don and I that we were going to build a hide for Tim to watch some unbanded Wire-Tailed Manakins 3K or so out on the Harpia trail. Doesn’t sound that interesting, but it was. We hiked for about half an hour to get there, Kim showed us the perch, then she and Tim gathered some saplings to use as poles and started wrapping moss-cloth around them to create the basic structure of the hide. Don and I were assigned to collect big leafy material to cover the hide and make it look less unnatural. And so, Don and I struck off in opposite directions, searching for great palm fronds and leafy material to cover the hide with. It was SO FUN to collect hide material! I loved hiking into the forest and out of earshot, then scouring the land for the best leafy materials! My first trip did a number on my hands… many of the larger palm leaves growing out of the small bushes were aggressively content with their places… and many of the fern-like ones had rather painful spikes However, I returned from my first trip, and Don asked, “Would you like to borrow the machete?” OF COURSE I DID! I happily hiked back out with the machete, and did a number on the first tall, frond-y tree I found. I gathered tons of huge fronds; Kim and Tim were able to build a whole wall out of them! And worry not, dear reader; it sounds like I am cruel to the rainforest, but I took leaves from but a few plants, and as the rainforest is constantly turning over on itself, all is not lost. Everything I plucked will grow back shortly

Today (Wednesday) was a bit less interesting… I was stationed at the hide that Kim built near the display perch of one of our Striped Manakins. The male called a bit, then was quiet for about 3 unbearable hours, then started calling again… and right when he was starting to sound excited, the light dropped suddenly and a HUGE gust of wind swept over the canopy. About as suddenly as the wind came, the Striped Manakin stopped calling… and I instinctively started packing. It doesn’t take much to know when there’s a storm-a-brewin’! Despite the dark clouds and wind, though, not much came through. Sitting in the hide was kind of entertaining though… at one point, the manakin’s calls were overwhelmed by the sounds of White-Breasted Toucans chirping in the canopy, Golden-Mantled Tamarins chattering and eating away around the hide, jungle squirrels scolding me from trees, and at one point the grunting of peccaries as they shuffled past. Unfortunately, the excellent cover of the hide prevented me from seeing most of these things… but it was still pretty exciting to hear them!

Anyway, I wanted to say a little bit about that fascinating talk… Eduardo was doing research on some of the influences that the oil company has the rainforest and on the cultures of the local indigenous people. As you might or might not remember, our trip down to Tiputini takes us on a plane from Quito, over the Andes, and into Coca, a city on the Napo river and in the Napo Province of Ecuador. We take the Napo downstream for 2 hours or so, where we arrive at the dock of an oil company. We then drive down an oil road for another hour or so into the rainforest, where we pick up a canoe and go down the Tiputini River. Eduardo studied the influence of that oil company on the local rainforest.

What was interesting about the talk was that Eduardo spoke very little about the direct impacts of oil drilling on the environment; that is, the impacts of oil spills, the removal of excesses, etc. When oil companies first came to Ecuador, there were very few regulations on how they were allowed to drill, and so many companies used cheap but seriously damaging practices, such as dumping crude excesses into pits and lakes instead of re-injecting them underground (as is law in the US). However, recent pressure from the government and activist groups has caused the oil companies to ascertain that their drilling and other activities are as minimally damaging to the environment as they possible, and so many of those previous problems are no longer major issues.

What Eduardo DID spend a lot of time talking about was how the oil companies influence the indigenous peoples that live within their concessions, and how those people influence the ecology of the rainforest. Studies show that if oil roads are open-access – meaning that people can colonize and do basically whatever they want along the roads – damage and removal of tree cover in the rainforest is sever. However, if oil roads are closed-access, as is the case here, people are not allowed to do basically nothing along the road edges, and so the rainforests are more or less undamaged outside some 300 meters or so away from the roads. However, these rules don’t apply to the native indigenous peoples (here, the Huaorani) of the area. Since the oil company is on the Huorani land, the oil companies have to give the Huaorani basically whatever they want – and the oil companies keep a huge budget to be able to do just that. Among other things – like candies, school houses, health clinics, plane rides, high school tuitions – the Huaorani can get free rides on any oil truck or other vehicle that passes down the road. Because of these, many Huaorani people have moved closer to the road.

Now, there is a very big rainforest meat market in a village directly across the Napo from the place where the oil company is stationed, and Huaorani often go there to sell peccaries, monkeys, large birds, and other rainforest meat for people in villages and cities located far away to eat the “delicacies” of the rainforest. I know, it sounds awful, but that isn’t the bad part. Since the Huaorani can get free truck rides basically from their front steps to the meat market, there is basically no cost (other than time) for them to collect meat and sell it in the market. So, whereas a Huaorani might have taken 1 peccary to feed the family for a week, now they might take 10, and then go sell them at the market. Think of what this does to the ecology of the rainfores in those areas; basically all of the large mammals and birds have been more or less hunted away. Think about how that influences the ecology of the rainforest. Pretty crazy, right? And that says nothing about what all this is doing to the culture of the Huaorani and other local indigenous cultures… but that’s a talk for another day. At any rate, if you ever feel like discussing the many unprecedented and unintentional ways that oil companies influence the rainforest, let me know.

With that, I should get going. I’ve got to really memorize the display calls of the Striped Manakin so I can try to find one of his elusive display arenas tomorrow… and I also need to take a break from the computer Sometimes it’s so hard to sit at the computer and get stuff done when there’s a whole world of adventure waiting outside… but it’ll still be here tomorrow. Miss all of you and hope all is well!

Advertisement