Day two in the jungle

Ok, I will try to describe the awesomeness of day two in the jungle without rambling forever. And as you can see, we added some pictures, we have a few more to add but Kelly's camera ran out of batteries halfway through the trip. The two kiwis we were with have a blog too and will probably post much better pictures on their blog.

Jeremy says before we go to bed friday night that the best wildlife viewing is in the early morning. So we should be at breakfast at 5:30. It is suprisingly easy to wake up at 4:45 in the jungle, what with the excitement and the loud bugs and birds. There is actually a bug, called the alarm clock bug, that sounds exactly like an alarm clock...however you cannot set it, it goes off unexpectedly. So, we eat our breakfast and set off in the canoe as the sun rises, our plan is to do the longest trail that they have on the Sani property (about a 5 hour hike), with the hopes of seeing some mammals. The canoe ride is about an hour on top and as we drift through the lagoon, being paddled by Jeremy and Orlando, we take note of birds (most of which we saw the day before). On our left are loud noises, we look eagerly and see a troop of red howler monkeys in the near distance. We haven´t even started our hike and already we´re seeing monkeys. A good sign.

We get to the trail and I head up it a bit to take a piss. I see the backside of some tailed, black, furry animal. But all the monkeys here are arboreal. Must have been an otter or something of that type. Rad. As we start off on the trail, we are all teeming with excitement and anticipation. I am thinking of the wildlife hikes I led in Rhode Island where I am pumped if we see a deer, or a fox track. We are noting the little bugs, and birds along the way when Orlando stops in the front and waves us up to him. Jeremy whispers something to him and then looks at us and whispers "squirrell monkeys!". This is going to be a repeated trend for our hike. Orlando often stops and we all wait quietly while he interprets the background sounds of the forest. "Squirrell monkeys." Sho´ nuff a whole troop of squirrell monkeys crash over our heads. Probably ten or more, some with babies on their backs. They leap from trees and fall only to grab a branch and bounce through the next tree. We follow underneath the monkeys for awhile and eventually we part ways.

We continue on our hike. Orlando points to the ground and Jeremy gets excited. "Jaguar footprints." As we keep walking we are noticing that we are following the Jaguar, we even cross on a log across a little stream that has wet footprints, meaning it can't be that far ahead of us. Jeremy has never seen one though, they are pretty elusive.

Orlando stops and points off the trail to the right. We hear large crashes off in the distance, wooly monkeys, the largest that they have in the area. Orlando starts off the trail, making his own way with his machete. We get a ways in and it seems they got away. Back to the trail. We tramp through an army ant "campaign", an uncountable about of small red ants are swarming the trail for about 5, 6 meters and we run through it so that none of the soldier ants can get up our boots and stick their huge pinchers into us.

Above us and in front we see another troop of monkeys, Black Mantled Tamarins. They circle around us while Orlando mimics their call with a lip pursed squeek. They are called milk drinkers because they have a white section just above their lips that looks like a milk moustache. Super cute.

We stroll on for a bit until we hear wooly monkeys off in the distance again. Again we tromp off trail for awhile in pursuit. This time we find them, they are large, about the size of a ten year old human. Jumping and crashing through the tree tops they notice us. Some of them stop and look down at us, curious I suppose. A couple must feel threatened because they are waving branches around and trying to assert their dominance over us. We watch for awhile and head back to the trail.

We are still following the Jaguar. We also see tracks from tapirs and some kind of boar. Signs of an anteater.

We get to a spot and stop, it seems that there are noisy night monkeys in this tree. We look up with binoculars to see a pair of small, undeniably adorable, big-eyed, furry monkeys staring back at us. That's right, now we've seen five types of the eight wild monkeys that live in this region. We see some more random monkeys but Jeremy really wants to see the howlers again, only close up. And of course next we hear a troop of them drinking water off to the right, they definately hear us first and shoot up into the treetops. Two large males pass over us. Looking directly at us, one of them stops and grabs his nuts and shakes them around, again to express dominance. "I am a male, I am big" he says.

I am sure I am leaving things out. But those were the highlights. I think we got to see around 8 or 9 different troops of monkeys. Much more than usual, Jeremy says.

That night we went Caiman hunting. We floated around in the canoe and tried to get the reflections of their eyes with our flashlights. We saw one little one and one huge one. Then called it a night.