Audubon, UM group encounter Amazon

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A slide show coming up at the Fields Pond Nature Center in Holden will give people an idea of life along the Amazon River.

The program will be presented by a few of the 26 students, faculty and representatives of the Audubon Society who went to Peru earlier this year to study the river and its flood plain forest. Participants paid the full cost of the trip, plus tuition, to study with University of Maine faculty – Bill Glanz, a zoologist with many publications in tropical field ecology; Aram Calhoun, who also is a wetland ecologist for Maine Audubon; and Malcolm Hunter, wildlife and conservation biologist.

Students attended a series of lectures about the river and rain forest before going on the March break trip.

We flew to Lima, Peru, then up over the Andes and down into the Amazon basin to Iquitos. Thereafter, there are no roads; the river is the road.

From our long thatch-roofed boat, we saw freight and fruit boats, dugout canoes and ferries. One of the ferries was called “Titanic.”

“I’m not getting on that one,” a student said.

Going upstream to our lodge, we saw the famous Amazon River dolphins which live in fresh water and have a neck, pink skin and a very long, toothed snout.

The “riverenos,” rural people who live alongside the river, are the subject of many legends. One is that if a young woman becomes pregnant without obvious explanation, there must have been an aquatic tryst with a river dolphin.

We stayed at the Tahuayo Lodge, 20 feet up on poles in order to be above high water on the Tahuayo River, a tributary of the Amazon.

We were lucky to be in the upper Amazon, where there has been less deforestation than downriver. We had come to see the flood plain forest, where fish swim among the trees and eat fruit as it splashes into the water. Some fish even make their nests in the trees.

On the flood plain islands of the Penobscot River, after the spring floods recede, high water marks are some 6 feet up the tree trunks. Along the Amazon, high-water marks are 30 feet up the trees.

We saw the water rise about 3 feet during our stay, and fish moved into the new habitat. At night we used flashlights to see amazing armored catfish, Peacock Bass, bright-colored tiny fish called tetras, and a coral snake.

A guide brought a Pacu, a fruit-eating fish, into the lodge for dinner. It was interesting to look closely at its front teeth, white and molar-like, unlike the teeth of any Maine fish. The Pacu gets fat at high-water time, which is the season the fruit falls into the water.

Several expeditions were offered throughout the day. The first morning, nine students, two faculty and two local guides went to see the brightly colored poison-dart frogs. We found the frogs, but other events quickly overshadowed that experience.

As we walked along the forest trail the last student in line said, “Isn’t that a snake?”

It was a Fer-de-Lance, the snake responsible for the most human fatalities in Latin America, coiled around a tiny thin shrub right in the middle of the trail.

The guide picked it up behind the head and pressed its open mouth onto the dull side of his machete. Venom dripped out of its fangs.

Then he tossed the 3-foot snake, with its large, triangular head, on the ground. Several of us had stepped within six inches of the snake without seeing it. I called it “the invisible Fer-de-Lance.”

Walking on, we were suddenly beset by a swarm of hornets. Their stings were quite painful.

“Run!” said the guide, and everybody bolted down the trail, hornets following us and stinging all the while. When we stopped, the hornets covered my clothes and the guide scraped them off with his machete until they swarmed and stung some more. At last we outran the hornets.

Other options were a journey by dugout canoe to see Hoatzins, turkey-sized birds with spiky crests and red eyes; a trip by rope up the trunk of an enormous rain forest tree, and a boat ride to go fish for piranhas, small fish with a big reputation for ferocity. A school of piranhas can strip an animal down to its skeleton in ten minutes.

Alicia Nejako of Old Town, a wildlife ecology student, went fishing for piranha with a simple wooden stick for a rod. She caught a piranha and flipped it back into the boat among students, where it impressed everyone by flopping around and snapping its jaws and razor-sharp teeth.

One night a few of us went out on our own with flashlights after dark. We saw many tiny eyes, which mostly turned out to be tarantulas and other spiders. Much larger eyes belonged to birds, relatives of the whippoorwill. We found that if you hold the flashlight against your temple, the eyeshine reflects right to your eyes. This is a trick used by alligator poachers in Florida.

Another expedition took us downriver to a calm backwater – an amazing habitat of huge lily pads, six feet across. We lifted the edges and saw very thick, strong veins with thorns on the underside, strengthening and protecting the gargantuan leaf.

I was particularly delighted with the elegant tropical birds such as red-billed scythebill and black-fronted nunbird.

Toward the end of the class, students turned to their own independent study.

College of Education student Eric Swick, who felt besieged by noxious insects throughout the trip, decided to study methods some plants use as protection – thorns, hairs, a coating of wax, or even volatile oils. One kind of plant, an acacia, had the most interesting protection against leaf-chewing insects – its own colony of ants.

The acacia plant offered the ants housing in hollow thorns along its stem, and fed the ants with sweet droplets. The ants would attack any caterpillar climbing up the stem. The plant’s leaves had almost no insect damage.

A class in rain forest ecology would not be complete without rain, and we had a spectacular downpour. The whole class gathered on the porch just to marvel at the drops as big as grapes. The rain was refreshing, bringing the temperature from 96 down to 78 degrees. One student took a shower in the rain.

A student couple, Shelley Spohr and Dan Ruggiero, announced their engagement during the class after a romantic canoe trip to the confluence of the Tahuayo and the Amazon. Dan announced their engagement at dinner, to the applause of 26 Mainers and as many Peruvians. They married Oct. 13.

Cultural experiences were an important part of the class. Some of the students in anthropology, education and or psychology visited several rivereno towns and interviewed people there, taking notes about their educational system, their ideas about conservation, or their religion.

On the last day of class, we returned to Iquitos by boat through a watery town called Belem, “The Venice of Iquitos.” This town on the Amazon River consisted of rows of floating homes with canals in between.

After experiencing the oppressive heat of the Amazon rain forest for nearly two weeks, we flew back to Boston and drove home to Maine over icy roads, fortunately without mishap.

My last adventure of the trip didn’t emerge, so to speak, until several weeks after I got home. I still had several very itchy chigger bites on my ankle. At work, a stab of intense pain in the ankle caused me to yelp in the middle of a quiet conversation. “Oh, sorry, I think maybe a chigger bite is infected,” I said. There was a big swollen bulge.

I tried treating the bite and evicting the botfly maggot with an application of bacon – the same treatment found in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Finally, I had to make a trip to the doctor to have the insect removed.

The trip to Peru was a wonderful experience despite its discomforts, and I came home happy, having seen 92 species of tropical birds I’d never seen before.

Those wanting information on University of Maine travel study courses can call Wanda Westley at (207) 581-3414 or visit the Web site, www.ume.maine.edu/ced/travelstudy.

For information on Maine Audubon international field trips call Linda Ledoux at (207) 781-2330, Ext. 215, or visit www.maineaudubon.org and click on Group Programs and Activities, then on World Tours.

Judy Kellogg Markowsky is director of Maine Audubon’s Fields Pond Nature Center in Holden. Markowsky, Aram Calhoun and Mac Hunter will present a slide show at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 13, at Fields Pond Nature Center, 216 Fields Pond Road, Holden. For information, call 989-2591.