He said it was a place where humans had never been. Between rivers and isolated by a quirk of geography, it had remained forgotten through the centuries. The only tribes who knew of the land had regarded it as sacred and never entered, and so it had remained untouched for millennia. Decades earlier, after weeks of travel up some nameless tributary, Santiago had come to its border. There, he said, you could watch jaguars sunning themselves on open beaches in the morning; harpy eagles haunted the canopy and flocks of macaws filled the sky like flying rainbows. The river was so thick with fish that you could scoop up dinner with your bare hands. What he described was a lost world. He told me that it was the wildest place left on earth.
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In the Amazon large trees are meant to topple, opening gaps for light, which allows new vegetation to flourish, while the carcasses of the fallen giants are digested by legions of insects, fungi, and proteins. It’s how the jungle works; it’s a giant meat grinder. When you are in it, you’re part of that system, part of the food chain.
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A growl erupted from the darkness. A god’s voice. Warm breath fell on my neck in savage staccato like thunder, cosmic and overwhelming. Every fiber of my body understood the command of that growl: don’t move. I closed my eyes and lay still, too terrified to move. Cradled in blind purgatory, grasping at lucidity, I was helpless and prayed that whatever happened next would be over quickly.
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Both Emma and JJ had worked with the endangered birds at Explorer’s Inn and realized they had discovered something special: a colpa. Often referred to as clay licks, colpas are areas of exposed clay where birds and other animals come to feed on salt deposits. Species flock to these areas to replenish sodium in their bodies. Colpas attract herbivorous mammals, including monkeys, deer, peccary, birds, armadillos, and numerous other prey species for cats like ocelots, puma, and jaguars. These deposits are rare, and their locations are guarded secrets to the creatures and local people that know them. Colpas on the riverbanks can attract hundreds of macaws at a time, creating one of the most colorful natural spectacles on earth.
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Back in New Jersey I had been the guy who could find wildlife no one else could, but this was the big league. JJ could predict when spider monkeys were coming, or smell a troop of peccary a half mile out. He spoke of tracks in the mud the way a violinist reads sheet music, interpreting symbols with deft precision, explaining thoughts and motives of each creature while he knelt.“The jaguar came here last night to check for agouti,” or“the huanganas [peccary] were here for the palm this morning.”
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Macaws require primary forest to breed. The ones that frequented our colpa were scarlet and red-and-green macaws, both of which roost exclusively in tree hollows, high in the canopy. Most often they use ironwood trees. But finding a large enough tree with the perfect hole is difficult; studies have shown that suitable hollows are so rare that there is usually only one for every sixty-two acres of forest. This limited real estate means that the birds have to rotate who breeds and when, resulting in only 10 to 20 percent of the population actually reproducing each year.
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In the regional parlance of the Madre de Dios giant anteaters are called oso-bandera-gigante, which literally translates to“bear, flag, giant.” The name is evidence of the confusion that ensues in trying to describe an animal with the strength of a bear, a pluming flag tail, and tremendous size. The giants are alternatively called tamandua gigante, borrowing the name of the smaller arboreal anteater and just adding the adjective gigante. Giant anteaters are the largest of the“Amazon claw” family, which includes sloths, armadillos, and anteaters. They walk on their knuckles to spare their valuable claws, which are used to fend off jaguars and to excavate ant and termite mounds. Their claws are a heavy-duty defense to compensate for their slender, fragile head. They have poor eyesight, a keen sense of smell, and no teeth. Along with their size, local legends surround them because the hind footprint of a young anteater is almost identical to that of a human child, with arch, toes, and heel, leaving delicate impressions in the ground.
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When she came toward me I curled into a ball on the floor in mock terror, knees down, hands over my head. Lulu approached and stood on her hind legs, and a worried Ben warned,“Dude, be careful, she can really cut you, man!” I didn’t have time to move before she was on me. I felt a claw latch onto my shoulder, and then another on to my spine. For some reason, despite the pain, I stayed still and Lulu pulled herself onto my back, where she grunted, wiggled, snuggled in, and seemed to fall asleep instantly. Lifting my face from my hands, I looked up to see everyone staring, stunned. Suddenly it made sense. Female giant anteaters give birth one at a time, and share an intimate relationship with their newborns. The infants spend the first nine months of life on the mother’s back. Lulu almost certainly remembered holding on to her mother’s fur, riding through the jungle in safety. Though they begin eating ants after eight to twelve weeks, they continue riding and learning from mom for months. Only weeks ago Lulu and her mother would have spent nights in the jungle curled tightly, newborn nestled in the center, both blanketed by the mother’s thick tail. For the last few weeks, however, she’d been on her own.
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The strangler fig that the spider monkeys were perched in is one of the strangest trees on earth. A gigantic and deadly species, figs occur in many tropical regions, and in many locations they are crucial for the surrounding ecosystem. The reason they are so integral is their value as food, shelter, and structure within the forest. They produce fruit at odd times of the year, like the dry season, when most other plants are barren. Out of more than fifteen hundred species of plants, only about a dozen, or roughly 1 percent, produce fruit during the driest months, and none in greater abundance than figs.
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