The highlight of our time in the Manu Jungle Reserve was an evening raft ride in a little oxbow lake, when the birds were busy with their evening stuff.
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| A definite Huck Finn feel to the rafts, which were just logs hanging together. |
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Meandering waterways in the oxbow lake.
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| Social flycatcher. Not being so social. |
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| Yellow rumped cacique, in its community of nests, built like the oropendola nests below, except they're attached like condos. |
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| Oropendola nests - very social birds, very loud. They swing so nicely in the wind. |
My favorite bird was the Hoatzin (pronounced Watson), a pheasant sized bird, an almost prehistoric looking bird that whistles, groans, grunts and hisses noisily in groups. There's debate in the bird community as to which family of birds these actually belong, because they're sort of weird. It has a digestive system sort of like a cow, and this big digestive crop replaces some of the flight muscles, making them clumsy, clumsy fliers. Their babies are weird in having two claws on their wings, which they lose in adulthood, and very big feet that allow them to scramble around the tree limbs as needed to escape predators. But if they fall in to the water in their escape, they can use those claws to climb the tree back into their nest. !! They're supposed to taste bad, although their eggs are gathered by locals. They're not endangered.
This bird has the best name -- the Horned Screamer. It's horn is not very visible in this photo, but it has the hard spine of a feather (the rachis) that sticks out of its forehead, and is it's "horn." It flew away from us, screaming.
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| A pair of masked crimson tanagers. |
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We saw a pair of purple gallinules, with two adorable black puffed babies.
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| And we saw a capybara in the water. Not easily visible (check the center of the picture), but it was such a find. |
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