Life in the Amazon, cont’d

Posted on 20 Jan, 2016 in Uncategorized

Maintaining health and safety around base camp is part of the job. This includes kicking deadly animals off of base, including this deadly fer-de-lance I came across while sweeping an access route. Though small, this baby can pack a potentially deadly punch and will at the very least leave you with a baseball-sized hole in your skin from the necrosis. Local guides say babies are born around November so a lot more are seen during these times, we came across three in a week at one point.

Slips, trips, and falls are a constant part of working in the rainforest. Although you eventually get pretty good “jungle feet” and manage to gain an ability to walk over all sorts of mud, streams, and cliffs without falling you still can never get too comfortable. This slip nearly left me with a sharp stick in a place that the sun don’t shine. Yikes.

When you live in a base camp that even rural guides who visit call rustic, you learn to enjoy the little things in life. With no electricity (save a generator and solar panels to charge our electronics for data collecting/safety), we have no hot water, no cold drinks, no meat, no proper laundry, a lot of mosquito nets, and basically no real luxuries. For breakfast, every day is porridge. So, when you get up at 5am to mistnet and do birdbanding at a remote site, making porridge isn’t possible so you instead make granola the night before and have it with powder milk. This, my friends, is luxury for us. That delicious granola always adds an extra impetus for us to get up and set up the nets and get them awesome manakins, antibirds, hummingbirds, and flycatchers. Aircon Servicing Singapore

This is all part of life as a conservation biologist, and it is a blast.