Peru: Day 16 – Manu Wildlife Center Canopy Platform and Day of Mammals and Frogs

Today was amazing. Tons of birds, a few pretty cool butterflies, outstanding mammals and an incredible day for frogs. I’ll try to recount it slowly, as it tends to want to come out all at once.

First thing after breakfast, we all hiked the 6 minutes to the canopy platform that belongs to this lodge. We had to reserve this day, as there were several other couples and small groups staying here, and it’s best if you don’t have to share the limited space with others, especially non-birders. As it was, the nine of us were plenty, though a few more could fit.

It’s very much like the Tambo Blanquillo tower, built into a giant Kapok tree, but perhaps not quite as high. That one is about 150 feet high (still quite a bit shorter than the Cristalino Jungle Lodge tower), while this one is maybe 130 feet. This one is also perhaps a bit better for birding, as you have closer rainforest canopy in all directions, while the other is bordered on one side by a cocha, and therefore a large expanse of open sky.

This is Paul Cozza, and below is the small stream that courses through the lodge property.

We had an amazing mixed flock pass through here, with such great birds as Yellow-shouldered Grosbeak and Chestnut-shouldered Antwren, as well as Paradise, Green-and-gold, Opal-crowned, and Yellow-crested Tanagers, Sclater’s Antwrens, Rufous-tailed Foliage-gleaner, and too many others to remember. It was mayhem trying to get everyone on every species, and in the end, it’s just not possible. The whole troop moves through too quickly, each bird flitting and scrambling through the foliage.

One bird that was on territory here was this Lawrence’s Thrush.

Rather than sing a song of its own invention, it’s a master mimic. Its song consists of short phrases (of ½ to 1 ¾ seconds) that it has borrowed from birds throughout the rainforest, from Slate-colored Grosbeak to Slate-colored Hawk. I recorded the bird in our tree for 5 minutes, during which it averaged 15 mimicked phrases per minute. And by the time five minutes was up, it was still doing birds that it hadn’t done during that time, though some it had repeated 2 or 3 times. One Lawrence’s Thrush in Bolivia was recorded and documented to have learned the vocalizations of 75 species. Here’s a short cut of our bird.

A very distant, but clearly colorful bird was this Spangled Cotinga.

This is a Turtle Ant, genus Cephalotes, totally harmless. I don’t think they even have a biting apparatus. They just bumble around like turtles, and nothing bothers them.

A real nuisance up in the canopy were these stingless bees (this one on my wrist), in the genus Trigona.

There are several species of stingless bees, and the smaller ones have the annoying tendency to fly into your eyes. They are totally harmless, even though they are in the same family as honey bees, Apidae (but different subfamily, Meliponinae). People often call them “sweat bees” because they are after your sweat, but that names is already occupied a totally different family of bees, Halictidae. It’s like calling a Fan-tailed Warbler an antbird because it attends army ant swarms. Yes, it’s a pet peeve of mine. Just ask me about sand flies…

After the huge mixed flock moved through, I decided I had more to learn by wandering the trails I hadn’t been on yet, rather than continue with the group led by Gary.

First I returned to the lodge to freshen up (its seems to be getting hotter and more humid, though that could barely be possible).

Here’s a photo of the front door of the cabin that Tom and Sharon had, Carachupa. All cabins were named after trees or animals, and this one means Armadillo (a transliteration would be “suckface”).

I chatted with one of the very friendly groundskeepers, Egdaver, and then wandered over to the river to see what was around. Below was this Drab Water-Tyrant.

Looking for salt, this Eurota Purplewing, Eunica eurota moved from our hanging laundry to my spotting scope.

When it flew, it looked like a purple orb darting back and forth.

Later in the afternoon, I hit the trails again and made my way to the Fig Pass Trail, and followed it out to the Lookout. I knew it might take a while, so I brought my headlamp.

In some areas, the trail passes through some swampy forest. It’s relatively flat and the soil not very permeable, so it doesn’t take much for stretches of the trail to become very muddy. While here we always wore rubber boots.

In other areas, it was nice and dry. Different birds could be found in each area.

This lovely, delicate palm is one of my favorites, Euterpe praecatoria. The fruits of a closely related species are the source of the Brazilian drink açai.

There were some butterflies in the forest understory, such as this metalmark under a leaf, Nymphidium acherois.

This metalmark is Periander Swordtail, Rhetus periander.

And this is the Malea Sister, Adelpha malea.

No kidding, my favorite event today up to now was this Pachitea Robber Frog, Pristimantis toftae.

Here’s why: At first, I was simply trying to record the call notes of this frog. In case you haven’t tried to find a calling frog in the forest understory, it’s almost impossible. Their call notes call from here, there, and everywhere, and triangulation is only possible from close range. But when you get that close, they stop calling. So I recorded it, played it back with the weak speaker on my Olympus LS-10 digital recorder, and the thing eventually jumped out at me. This tiny frog, less than an inch (maybe 15 mm) was ready to attack. So getting a good recording and a photo of the same critter, clinching the id (just short of getting a DNA sample analyzed) was a major coup. Totally awesome. Here’s a clip of one of the very distinctive songs (must be a record in length for this genus, as most are monotonous tinks).

Just before I began recording the frog, and not wanting to make any sudden movements, I heard some grunting from behind me. I turned around slowly to see this Tayra about 30 yards away, 20 feet up in a tree. I managed this one digibinned photo (my small point-and-shoot held up to my Zeiss 8x42 binoculars). If you can’t tell from the photo, it’s a very large, tropical weasel.

On my way to the lookout I heard a Saddle-backed Tamarin (a tiny monkey) and got some good recordings of its voice. I also recorded Band-tailed Manakin, another White-chinned Woodcreeper, and Bartlett’s Tinamou and heard some more familiar birds such as Scaly-breasted Wren and Variegated Tinamou. This latter bird calls so infrequently (once an hour?) I still have never recorded it.

Here is a view of the Madre de Dios River from the overlook just before sunset. Such a beautiful, peaceful place.

I lingered on the trails and walked a bit further “inland” until I heard my first night bird – an Ocellated Poorwill. Bird #112 for the day, and no water birds at all.

Then the frogging started. As I walked back to the lodge to be in time for a shower and 7:00 dinner, I noticed eyeshines in the trail. Especially in the muddy spots there were frogs. Sadly, I did not have recordings of their voices to go along with the photos, so figuring out which species they are is a challenge.

These next four may all be the same species of Leptodactylus.

But this Leptodactylus frog is definitely a different species, possibly L. didymus, judging from how common it is in the area by voice.

These three are probably all the same species of toad, Rhinella margaritifera, even though they all look quite different, with variation between individuals and age. I actually photographed a couple of these in the morning.

This last photo is of a treefrog in the genus Osteocephalus, a notoriously difficult group, though only two species should occur here, O. taurinus and O. pearsoni.

Ah, but I’ve saved the most exciting find of the day for the end. I’ve already had one thrill after the next today. What more could there be? Well, walking down the trail at dark, with my headlamp on, I spotted two astoundingly bright eyes in the trail about 30 yards ahead. Before I could gather my wits, they were gone. But my first impression was that of a cat.

Indeed. When I got to that part of the trail, I looked all around, and below me about 10 yards were the eyes. At first, all I could see was a head with a snout, and then assumed I had a brocket-deer (Montezuma sp.). Then it walked to the side showing its beautifully spotted pelage and a fluffy, long tail banded in black. OCELOT! The only similar species is Margay, normally arboreal and with a much longer, skinnier tail. This animal eventually found a place to watch me, totally silently, from about 25 yards away from which I could see most of its body. My third cat in the tropics, after having seen Jaguarundi in Costa Rica and Jaguar at Cristalino Jungle Lodge in Brazil.

What a day.

Peru: Day 15 – Cocha Nueva Bamboo and The Grid

Each day here at Manu Wildlife Center we meet for breakfast at 5:00, with a 5:30 departure for the day’s outing. There is little privacy even with separate cabins, as they are largely made of screen, and you can hear others in nearby cabins, their alarm clocks and other noises as they stumble about in the pre-dawn darkness.

But it also allows the wonderful dawn chorus to enter your cabin uninhibited. The dominant song while we were here was the Hauxwell’s Thrush. Here it is, recorded while I was still lying in bed. You can also make out distant howler monkeys and a Cinnamon-throated Woodcreeper.

As the plan has it, we have this one last early morning on a trail that begins downstream, but only 10 minutes away. It’s the Cocha Nueva trail that passes through a very nice stand of bamboo with yet more specialties.

The trail through the bamboo is very tunnel-like but there is usually a lot of light.

There are relatively few tall trees, as the bamboo would not do well in their shade. My guess is that bamboo quickly takes over an area where the trees die from either being stranded after an oxbow closes, or flooded when a new one is opened. Either way, for the 15-20 years while the bamboo grows (it dies after blooming), it must also inhibit the development of rainforest tree seedlings, which need light to grow big.

But though there is plenty of light for birding, it’s also very dense, and birds have to be relatively close for you to see them.

There were a few gaps, allowing us to see some canopy birds too. I tallied 98 species on our 5 1/2 –hour walk. We didn’t actually go very far, taking time to iPod things in and retracing our steps when it sounded like flocks were passing near. Highlights were Dusky-tailed and Large-tailed Flatbills, Striated Antbird and Yellow-breasted Warbling-Antbird, Flammulated Bamboo-Tyrant, Peruvian Recurvebill (heard only, unfortunately, but still makes a clean sweep of the world’s two recurvebills for me – and within 7 weeks of each other), Bamboo Antshrike, Rufous-headed Woodpecker (my third for the trip), Curl-crested Aracari (a troop of 6 birds), and Black-banded Woodcreeper.

This interesting cup fungus was growing on some decaying wood in the understory.

There are some bamboo-specialist butterflies too; that is, their caterpillars feed on bamboo leaves. Many of them are satyrs, most of which feed on one type of grass or another. This one is Harjesia blanda.

This is Taygetis angulosa.

Back at Manu Wildlife Center for the afternoon, Gary took the group up the Ccollpa Trail while I went back to the Grid – the series of trails set 200 meters apart to the NW of the lodge (see the map in yesterday’s blog).

When I first visited the Grid on our second afternoon here, I placed a few stems of Heliotropium, which I had gathered from near the river bank, on some branches by the trail. I had seen before how many species of clearwing butterflies will flock to this plant to take in the pyrrolizidine alkaloids present in almost every plant in the borage family. Heliotrope seems to have quite a bit of them. The problem is that the plant grows in the sun, and these butterflies live in the forest understory. So you have to take the plant to them.

This is what I found, after the plant had been hanging for two days. Bonanza! But now I’ll have to spend hours sorting through them to figure out what genera and species they all are.

I also came across this frog in the genus Leptodactylus, a notoriously confusing group of frogs, easier to ID with voice.

Peru: Day 14 – Cocha Blanco and Antthrush Trail

This morning we again departed Manu Wildlife Center early for another site downstream called Cocha Blanco. This place is also part of the Tambo Blanquillo lodge and offers quite a different assortment of birds from Cocha Camungo, which we visited yesterday morning.

It was only a short walk down a trail after disembarking from our boat to the cocha, which is the regional word for an oxbow lake – a former meander of the Madre de Dios river which is now cut off at both ends.

Here is the structure where the boat is docked. The boat is a wooden platform attached to two canoes, nice and sturdy, and holds enough chairs for a group of about 12. We were 9.

Here is Carlos, paddling us. He and Pancho worked hard for us.

One of the star attractions here is the Horned Screamer, and we had 18, including these 4 chicks. Horned Screamer is in the same order as ducks and geese, Anseriformes, but the three species in this family are quite different in many respects. The “horn” in this species is a stiffened, barbless quill that juts out from the forehead, mostly broken off in this individual.

I’ve tried including an enclosure link here to my recording of one pair of Horned Screamers that I made here, hosted at xeno-canto. The word “screamer” was first used for Southern Screamer, which really does have a more raucous yelping, unlike the liquid bugling of this species.

If the recording doesn’t simply appear in the blog, you can click here to open the file at the xeno-canto website. Or, you can subscribe to this blog as a podcast or listen to it as a RSS feed. At the end of this post, I’ll give simple directions for doing either of these.

On the way back to the main river, I noticed this assassin bug (a true bug in the family Reduviidae) with its prey.

Our next goal for the rest of the morning was a trail through a substantial bamboo thicket on the opposite side of the Madre de Dios River. As I mentioned in an earlier blog, these Guadua bamboo stands offer a unique structure and food supply that several species of birds have evolved to specialize in.

One of the most distinctive and rare birds is the Rufous-fronted Antthrush, which we heard from the impenetrable denseness. I’ve included an enclosure link of my recording with this post as well, or click on this link to xeno-canto.

While trying to see the antthrush, I brushed up against a tree that hosted a colony of vicious stinging ants. Within about 50 milliseconds, there were a dozen ants on my shirt sleeve. Luckily the sleeves were loose, and Tom Bradford saw it happen, helping me brush them off before I got stung.

The ants are apparently Pseudomyrmex triplarinus, and the tree is in the genus Triplaris, in the buckwheat family. This tree is known as Palo Santo or Palo de Diablo and is famous for the ants that live in the hollow trunk. They exit through holes scattered up and down the stems at the slightest disturbance and not only protect the tree from foliage-chewing and wood-eating insects, but also prune the ground all around of seedlings to prevent competition from other plants.

Other great birds we had here were Manu, Goeldi’s, and White-lined Antbirds and a gorgeous Rufous-headed Woodpecker, one of the most ornately plumaged woodpeckers in the Americas.

After lunch back at Manu Wildlife Center we had a nice siesta, after which I wandered some of the trails on my own, first heading towards the canopy platform (similar to the one by Cocha Camungo, but shorter, and today occupied by another group), then doing a loop down the Creekside Trail, back on the Ccollpa Trail.

As you can see from this map, there is quite an extensive system of trails at Manu – about 17 miles total. There are good signs at every junction though, so as long as you stay on the trail, it’s hard to get lost.

Starting with the pair of Plain Softtails and a Lemon-throated Barbet right behind the cabins (which I shared with Matt Denton and some of his Birdquest tour group), I proceeded to Hauxwell’s Thrush, Dwarf Tyrant-Manakin, Peruvian Warbling-Antbird, Black-tailed Leaftosser, and Cinnamon-rumped Foliage-gleaner deeper in the forest. I recorded some frogs to figure out later (one was clearly the loud, ringing “boip” of Leptodactylus didymus), and as the afternoon progressed, White-throated and Bartlett’s Tinamous began to sing. After adding Olive-backed Foliage-gleaner and recording a White-chinned Woodcreeper (normally only at army ant swarms, but there were no ants here), I stumbled into two gorgeous Pale-winged Trumpeters in the middle of the trail. Luckily, it was a long straight stretch, and I had my head up, so they weren’t startled right away. I even saw the green iridescence on the lesser wing coverts. There are but three species of these distant crane relatives (they stand about 1 ½ feet tall and walk in the rain forest understory), and this one was the only one I hadn’t seen yet.

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Peru: Day 13 – Tambo Blanquillo Macaw Clay Lick, Lake, and Canopy Platform

So we came all this way to Manu Wildlife Center, a lodge with one of the largest bird lists in the world, and we spent almost the entire day on another lodge’s property. As it turns out, at Manu Wildlife Center itself there is little more one can do than walk rainforest trails. And if you want to build a big bird list, you have to visit different kinds of habitats – trails accessible only if you go by boat.

But there’s a star attraction here that involves “spectacle birding,” and it’s a half-hour boat ride downriver, followed by a 20-minute walk through seasonally flooded forest: the famous Blanquillo Macaw Clay Lick.

At the end of our forest walk, we arrive at the observation blind.

The view from the observation blind when we arrive at about 6:15 a.m. isn’t immediately impressive, but the sounds of hundreds of parrots echoes across the oxbow.

Before long, numbers began to congregate on the dirt cliffs above the opposite side of the drying-up oxbow. These are mostly Blue-headed Parrots, but one can see to Mealy Parrots and a few Orange-cheeked Parrots. There were hundreds more up in the trees, screaming, cooing, jostling for perches, preening each other, and generally having a good time.

Finally, after about an hour and a half, the ever increasing numbers of Red-and-green Macaws began to descend from the treetops to do the same.

It’s long been theorized that they are coming for minerals in the clay that help to neutralize toxins found in the seeds and nuts they eat from the rainforest trees. It’s a wonderfully complex and romantic theory, but recent research has shown that they’re actually just coming for the salt after all.

Inside the observation platform is a photo gallery of birds and animals from the region. But I noticed a potentially fatal mistake: This photo is actually of Micrurus spixii, a TRUE coral snake, and one with a venom that could surely cause death in humans. I sent an e-mail to the lodge to let them know of the misidentification.

On the way back to the boat, I noticed this lovely little grasshopper.

We crossed the Rio Madre de Dios to the north bank, walked a trail for 15 minutes, and arrived at an oxbow lake. This kind of habitat hosts many birds that do not use rainforest. In fact, the Pale-eyed Blackbird is known from here and just a few other oxbow marshes in Peru. We saw it well, along with Black-billed Seed-Finch, Purus Jacamar, many Hoatzins, and Black-capped Donacobius.

It was a peaceful ride, no roaring motor, just Carlos and Pancho paddling behind.

A Flame-tailed Pondhawk, Erythemis peruviana landed on the platform.

An Agathina Emperor, Doxocopa agathina shows off its green proboscis, characteristic of the genus.

We were back at Manu Wildlife Center for lunch and an afternoon break. During the break I walked a trail, in my efforts to get to know the layout of the network.

This is a Clymena Eight-eight, Diaethria clymena. There are actually several species of eighty-eights, but this is the classic form that give the group its name.

A hairstreak in the genus Theritas.

The widespread brushfoot butterfly Colobura dirce.

This damselfly appears to be a female Mnesarete cupraeus, the same species I photographed 3 days ago at Amazonia Lodge.

The longwing Heliconius numata.

In the late afternoon we returned to the same trail belonging to Tambo Blanquillo lodge that took us to the oxbow lake, but this time we had the key to tallest canopy observation platform in the region.

Here we go up. Looking at the trunk of this Kapok tree face-to-face was awesome. Huge.

Once at the top, we constantly listened and scanned for birds that live in the top of trees. Below is the lake that we cruised before lunch.

There were plenty of interesting things in our own tree, such as this huge-headed, but harmless ant.

Here’s a view over the huge boughs in the other direction.

One of the best birds we saw was this female White-throated Woodpecker. Low afternoon light and great distance made digiscoping a challenge, but the distinctive red nape patch and pale background to the barring on the flanks can be seen here. It also had an obvious white throat.