by Gene Walz
Sam (actually Sandra, his wife) did not live up to this dire prediction, but she has become decidedly more insistent with her warning, “If you bird, don’t drive. If you drive, don’t bird.” Excellent advice.
All I can add are the immortal words of a former television cop: “Be careful out there.” Birding isn’t as tame as you might think. The life list you save may be your own.
Looking for Potoos
A Deadly Encounter
Potoos are members of the nightjar or frogmouth family (Nyctibius). They’re weird-looking birds. Shaped like owls, they sit erect like owls, and they hunt at night like most owls. But they have wide, thin beaks, similar to a nighthawk. They look like an odd cross between an owl, a frog, and a tree stump.
Because they’re so well-camouflaged and hunt at night from broken-off tree trunks and branches about four to five metres off the ground, they are difficult to find. They are at the top of most birders’ “must-see” lists in Central and South America.
Led by our guide Domingo and his assistant Felix, John Weier and I set out at dusk one drizzly evening from Sani Lodge in the Amazonian section of Ecuador. It was about 5:30 pm; the sun sets in the area at 6:15 or so every day of the year.
We were all looking up for the potoos. We should have been looking down, too.
All of a sudden, Domingo, who was leading our group of five searchers, jumped sideways and backwards right into me. I staggered back into the next guy, figuring we were all going to topple over like dominoes. At first it was weirdly funny.
Then: “Essnake,” said Domingo, by way of explanation.
On the path, four feet from my leg, was a thick, brown snake with beige markings and a triangle-shaped head. I’d seen one of these vipers years before in Costa Rica but from considerably further away. It was a fer-de-lance (Bothrops atrox), one of the deadliest vipers in the tropics. A deadly, game-over snake. It can strike a person its body length away.
We all backed away very slowly. Although they are well-known for being aggressive, this one did not strike again.
We eyed it for a couple of moments, waiting to see whether it would slither away. It didn’t. So Felix cut a new path through the jungle with his machete and we proceeded with our hunt. We looked both up at the trees for potoos and down at the path for snakes.
After much searching, Domingo finally spotted a Rufous Potoo (Nyctibius bracteatus). Because it wasn’t roosting in its usual spot, it took us much longer to find it. And it was perfectly disguised—sitting on the top of a rotting, broken-off tree trunk like an extension of that trunk. It was on a nest, a simple hollow in the top of the trunk.
On the way back to the lodge, Domingo used his spotlight to illuminate the path, especially where the fer-de-lance had been. He walked very warily. We all did. Luckily, the snake was gone. Maybe Felix had dispatched of it with his machete.
Before we got to the lodge, we heard and then spotted a second potoo, a Common Potoo (Nyctibius griseus). Plus a Tropical Screech-Owl (Megascops choliba) and we heard but couldn’t see a Tawny-bellied Screech-Owl (Megascops watsonii). Our search for it was at best half-hearted. It was pitch-dark now, and the fer-de-lance had gotten inside all of our heads.
At our nightly tally, we noted that the most numerous birds of the day were TVs and BVs—Turkey Vultures and Black Vultures. Far too ironic and ominous!
Later, Domingo admitted he hadn’t seen the fer-de-lance until it sprang at him and was inches from his leg. He recognized it in mid-strike from the whiteness inside its mouth. It had missed him by inches, me by a foot or so. Whew!
When pressed, he said that no one among his people had died from a fer-de-lance bite in about four years. There was anti-venom at the lodge.
Three lifers and one huge scare. Ah, jungle birding! Adventure birding at its best.
Scary Surprise on an
Amazonian Birding Tower
I wasn’t the least bit afraid of heights when I was young. I remember standing on the third step from the top of a thirty-foot extension ladder to paint the peak of our three-storey house one summer. No problem.
I guess I’ve gotten smarter over the years. Heights now make me pretty nervous. I hire a younger guy each fall to clean out my second-storey gutters.
When I decided to go to Ecuador, I knew I was going to have to deal with my old-age acrophobia. Getting up into the canopy of the trees or above it via birding towers is crucial for spotting tropical birds. I promised myself I’d go as high up as it took.
At the Sani Lodge on the Napo River in Ecuadorian Amazonia I got my chance to test my resolve. Sani Lodge was built by an oil company. They wanted the rights to explore for oil on the local people’s land. The oil company was willing to pay dearly for the privilege, and promised more millions should they discover oil. The tribe asked them to finance the building of a modern but rustic-looking nature lodge; this included a steel birding tower. The facilities have provided a steady source of employment and money for the Sani community, though the oil company never did discover oil. (Years later the company asked to explore with newer, more sophisticated technologies. The tribe turned them down flat.)
Early on the morning of our second day at the lodge, we hiked out to the green steel tower. It’s about ten or twelve storeys high. When we got to the base, I deliberately didn’t calculate the height or even look up to see how tall it was. I knew it would be a challenge. Tough on the knees, tough on the psyche.
To keep myself from bailing out, I deliberately went first. Up a skeletal, open structure, more like a series of ladders than staircases. Steep, wet, meshy, see-through steps and minimal leadpipe rails made it an added challenge. I put a steely grip on both handrails and willed myself up.
About two-thirds of the way up the tower, I had to stop and catch my breath in the middle of a stairway. As I stood there looking straight ahead, neither up nor down nor sideways, I kept my rigid grip on the pipe-rails with both hands. Suddenly, our guide Domingo ducked under my right arm and went ahead.
Within seconds he touched my arm from above with his walking stick. I was concentrating so hard, I almost jumped out of my skin. “Essnake,” he whispered.
Ahead, in a corner of the next landing, was an eight-inch coil of lime green—a diamond-headed snake. If I’d gone three or four steps farther, I’d have been staring right into its small, beady eyes. When I think about it, I envision myself becoming a Tex Avery cartoon character: my eyes popping out of my skull, my limbs extended, and my body fragmenting into uncountable pieces.
The others crept up behind me to get a good look. We all gulped. Audibly. Then Domingo’s silent gestures indicated we were going up. I guess he didn’t prod the snake off the tower with his walking stick because he feared pushing it down on us.
Continue up or head back down? I knew if I let others go ahead of me, I might decide to go back to the lodge.
With instructions from Domingo, I turned sideways, grabbed the right “handrail,”—a thin lead pipe—behind me with both hands, and cautiously inched past the snake. It eyed me but never moved.
My knees were jelly when I got to the top of the tower. A twelve-foot bridge was all that separated me from the wooden platform at the top of a giant kapok tree. I grabbed the rails with both hands, closed my eyes, and crossed it.
Once on the platform, I opened my eyes and reached for a wooden support nailed to a tree limb. Domingo grabbed my arm. “Bulleet ant,” he said, pointing to a huge ant about an inch and a half long.
I was getting used to his exaggerated accent. “Bullet ant?”
“Eef eet bites you, eet feels like you heet by a bullet.” All of his accent wasn’t amusing anymore. I gulped hard.
It took me a while to get my equilibrium. Using binoculars at this height just aggravated my acrophobia.
The first bird I saw? A Blackpoll Warbler. All I could think was: Man, I can see this in my own Canadian ba
ckyard at a much lower level! All this aggravation for a Blackpoll Warbler?! Then the Kiskadees and the Tropical Kingbirds arrived—two species also found in North American.
But we did have a productive morning in the canopy. Lots of parrots and macaws, toucans and aracaris, an Ornate Hawk-eagle, and many kinds of brilliantly coloured tanagers to name just a few. The climb was sure worth it. But going down was going to be no easier.
In fact, it was scarier. I knew that the snake was still there because my friend John Weier, afflicted by the Amazonian touristas, had been up and down the steps four times during the day. Much braver than me, he’d practically worn out his Adam’s apple gulping as he passed the snake!
Making matters worse, my solution to acrophobia (don’t look down!) was gone. I couldn’t help but look down. I slithered past the snake and hurried on jelly knees to the bottom.
Back at the lodge we discovered that the snake was a deadly Amazonian palm viper, sometimes called a two-striped forest pit-viper (Bothriechys bilineate). These snakes usually hang out in trees. No one at the lodge had ever seen one on the tower before.
It would have to pick my day on the tower as its first!
Big Jags and Bad Drivers
So, we’re sitting on two rough wooden benches in the open box of a small pick-up truck. Four of us—Rudolf Koes, Peter Taylor, Brad Carey, and me—bouncing in the dark along rutted trails in southwest Brazil. We’re in the Pantanal, a tropical wetland near the Bolivia-Paraguay border, and we’re on our nightly safari.
Our guide, Kefany, is young and perky, much younger than any other guide I’ve ever met. But she is very knowledgeable. She’s strapped into a metal seat mounted above the right front bumper of the pick-up. She’s got a powerful searchlight and she’s scanning right and left, up and down, into the impenetrable jungle darkness, trying to spot some night critters. Owls and potoos and flying whatnots.
The truck is painted orange with black and white splotches in an imitation jaguar pattern. It’s not a great disguise. Every animal in the area knows it’s a truck. Most of the local animals are inured to its noisy presence, especially jaguars, the most wary and secretive of the big cats.
That’s what we’re hoping to see. We’d already met up with an ocelot. We were on a small bridge and it was right below us, not six feet away. Twice the size of a house cat, it was clearly not domestic. Even lying prone by the river, casually drinking, it wordlessly said, “Don’t mess with me!”
Kefany had not seen a jaguar in a month and the head of the jaguar recovery program at the Caiman Ecological Refuge had not seen one for the first two weeks he was here, and seen only thirty or so in six months. Even the jaguar with a radio collar had eluded him. But he said that a capybara corpse had been found, probably killed by a jag the night before, and that this might be a good place to watch and wait.
Brazil is the birdiest country in the world, or one of the birdiest. It’s on most serious birders’ itineraries as the place to go. Most of them head for the infamous Amazon. We chose the Pantanal, a wetland during the rainy season but now dried up. It promised more than 650 different species of birds. We were there to find as many of them as we could in a week.
One hundred metres from the front steps of the Baiazinha Lodge where we were staying, a pair of Hyacinth Macaws was nesting. The largest of the macaws and among the rarest (and the noisiest!), these magnificent, long-tailed, deep-blue birds had been an inspiration for us every morning as we set out at dawn for our daily bird search.
The macaws weren’t the only spectacular birds we’d seen in the Pantanal. Jabiru Storks, another iconic bird of the area, were a constant presence. With their thick, storky bills, black and white bodies, and raspberry-red necks, they captured our attention whenever we came upon them, even in their slow, lumbering flights.
Overall, we would spot more than 200 species of birds—not bad for a week during dry season. But the highlight of our stay was not the birds. It was the animals we encountered.
The Caiman Ecological Refuge is trying to model itself on the great African safari lodges. Just as lodges in Kenya and Tanzania advertise “the big five” game animals (lion, hippo, cheetah, rhinoceros, and cape buffalo or some variant, including elephant or wildebeest), The Refuge has its own version: jaguar (third largest big cat in the world after tiger and lion), tapir (as big as a cow), giant anteater (over six feet from nose to tail), capybara (largest rodent in the world), and red deer (largest deer in South America). We didn’t care all that much about the others—we wanted a jag. The other four are not quite in the same league as the “charismatic mega-fauna” of Africa.
We had begun staking out the capybara corpse just after nightfall (6 pm). Within a half hour another safari vehicle pulls up next to us on the right. A small pond is directly in front of us about twenty metres away. Across the pond is a low grassy hill with the jungle right behind. It takes a while for our eyes to adjust to the dark. There is no dusk in the jungle. It’s like somebody hit the off switch. One minute it’s day and the next it’s the dead of night.
After ten minutes of restless anticipation, a shape emerges from the bushes; the spotlights flash on and catch it in their powerful beams. A jag. We all gasp. It is much bigger than I’d ever imagined.
We are at most twenty-five metres away and gape in amazement. Its eyes glow a menacing red, but it does not flinch from the spotlight. It sniffs the carcass, then simply plops down on the grass, licking the fur on its back and flicking its tail, like a cat. We hardly move; in fact, we hardly breathe!
After about ten more minutes, a crab-eating fox slips out of the bush to the jaguar’s right and pads down to a stream for a drink, or perhaps a meal, clearly upwind of the jag and oblivious of it. The jag quickly senses the fox, arises, and slinks down to where the pond narrows into the stream, keeping a small hill between it and the not-very-sly fox.
The jaguar pauses, crouches, and creeps up the hill. Silently, it launches itself at the fox, landing about a metre short. With amazing reflexes, the fox takes off as the jag is in mid-air, leaps over the stream, and runs directly at us, the jag, as they say, in hot pursuit—about two metres behind.
The fox runs right by us, between the two safari vehicles, and disappears into the darkness behind. The jag stops its chase right in front of us, maybe eight or ten metres away, and stands erect. It stares at us for a long second or two, perhaps deciding whether we are a preferable catch and, easily deconstructed with its powerful jaws, a tastier meal. My first thought: Kefany’s easy prey, sitting exposed on the front bumper. My second thought: Oh, no! What if it’s looking at me? I’m wearing my brand new western shirt!
The jag seems to eye us contemptuously for several seconds. Is it hunger, or is it disgust, disdain, or frustration? Is it thinking: You bastards just ruined a perfectly good chase! Or: You guys just took an easy meal right out of my mouth! You might be a satisfying alternative. Then it turns on its heel, and, in no hurry, saunters casually through the middle of the shallow pond. In the spotlights we can see that the pond is full of caimans. Dozens of eerie little eyes are reflected in the lights. It is as if the jaguar is defying them to come after it. Without pausing or looking back, it then casually disappears into the woods.
The whole episode lasts about thirty minutes. It is such a rare and thrilling treat that we can hardly talk. Part of the thrill is not just seeing the jag, but being the object of its gaze, being recognized and considered by it. The experience makes me think that we, or at least I, have shared a previously unthinkable bond with a wild creature, have a special relationship with it, one that very few others will ever experience. We had just escaped the routine of everyday life and somehow entered into a different, enchanted realm. Isn’t that the true purpose or effect of all travel? To witness animal majesty, to find myself involved with a wild jaguar in a primal way: that’s what I’m grateful for.
The next evening, with the aid of a radio tracker, we
see a second jaguar. And the following afternoon, a large male walks lazily past the lodge in full daylight. It is close enough that we can see a dab of blood on its flank. It pauses at a tree on the edge of the grassland, turns, and spray it with its scent. Perhaps it lost a territorial fight and was leaving an insolent mark of its reluctant departure.
By the time we leave the Pantanal, we’ve had close encounters with three tapirs, the ocelot, a jaguarundi, a couple of armadillos, an agouti, some coati mundis, four kinds of deer, some howler monkeys, hundreds of caimans and capybaras and peccaries, and, most importantly of all, three jaguars. Our guides tell us we are the luckiest guests to ever visit the lodge.
Postscript: As dangerous as the encounter with the jaguar might have been, it was nothing compared to the ride we got from the host, Lila Ferrez, at our second lodge in Guapi Assu. When we finished staying at her lodge, she drove us to our final destination. It was a truly harrowing ride.
Lila is an eighty-ish birding enthusiast who drives a small Mitsubishi SUV without functioning seat belts. Three abreast in the back meant one of us had to sit forward on the seat as the car wasn’t wide enough for us to sit shoulder to shoulder. Lila, like many Brazilian drivers, believes that road signs and road lines are merely suggestions. She drove like Emerson Fittipaldi, the intrepid Formula One race car driver, i.e. well above the speed limit and often bumper to bumper. She passed sensible drivers on double yellow lines and around blind curves as we held on, white-knuckled, for dear life. She even sped up to pass a motorcycle on a speed bump! We all conked our heads solidly on the ceiling of her car. “It was too dangerous staying behind him,” she said, nonchalantly. Unforgettable!
Terrible Trees and Few Birds