wildlife

Strangers in the Forest

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Bonanza Lodge, 20.13.

The great Amazonian adventure is almost over. Like the macaws flying in shrieking groups across the river, I too will soon be traveling away from here. I am starting to get cold feet about leaving this place. I don’t have a choice, as I’m with an organised tour, and getting here without one would be next to impossible, but I can’t help feeling greatly attached to this place. There is something eternal about forests that pulls you in. Maybe it’s an inherited memory from years ago, before our ancestors left the shelter of the trees and walked out into the world.

Which is a very fitting image for what happened today.

Dawn breached like a golden whale through the clouded sky, bathing the forest in its hopeful glow. I haven’t had as many Amazonian sunrises as I’d have liked due to the inclement weather, but this morning made up for it.

We stopped off at the ranger station to sign out and fill out a couple of surveys. The posters in there about the pet trade stabbed at my heart like they did the first time – and, just like then, I seriously wondered what I was doing teaching when I could be out here, fighting for what I believe in. If I hadn’t pinned all my hopes on finding Her and raising a family, this is where I would be. Somewhere like this, anyway.

Flights of fancy aside, we set out for the river confluence we forded the other day, only this time we sailed downriver for a kilometre or so to reach Boca Manu, Rive’s hometown, so that he could vote in the presidential election.

I had almost forgotten that the rest of the world was still turning within the timeless shelter of these mighty kapok trees. Here, life goes on as it has done for millions of years. The sun rises over a misty canopy and sets to the shriek of macaws and the chirping of a thousand crickets. Politics feels so petty in a place like this.

Boca Manu is a world away from Cusco. This largely native community sits on the edge of the national park, where the Manu river meets the mighty Madre de Dios. So fierce is the flow of the combined rivers that the town is steadily retreating into the forest. The jetty is a few slabs of wood fastened to several oil drums with a plank bridge leading up to a tiled section of the riverbank that was once a couple of houses, long since lost to the river. Only the scaffold of a single wall remains, and it has been converted into an advertising post for the local ferrymen.

My companions set out for a walk into town while Rive went to cast his vote for one of the thirty-six contenders for Peru’s next president. I followed, albeit at a distance. From the way people stared, I don’t think Boca Manu gets many visitors. It’s certainly wouldn’t be on the itinerary if not for today being election day.

For the second time on this trip, I saw a case of jungle domestication. If I hadn’t met the resident macaw at Bonanza, I might have been more startled when a red howler monkey suddenly appeared out of nowhere, slipping through a farm gate and into a kitchen window, before the monkey’s owner, a small boy not much taller than the monkey itself, came back out with the howler wrapped protectable around his back.

It would be so easy to judge with a European eye, and yet I am sure these animals mean more to the locals here because they can name them. In our rush to become civilised, we have become worryingly nature-blind in the West. If I should be so lucky as to have children of my own one day, I will try to teach them what I know. When you a put a name to something (or even someone), it suddenly matters a whole lot more than it did before.

I dozed off on the boat, but was stirred back out of my reverie by a slightly cautious word from Rive: “Native people, on the bank of the river”.

I looked with my eyes first. Sure enough, there they were: brown figures at the forest’s edge, watching us. A man and woman, dressed in little but string and strips of cloth, flanked by a couple of grinning children. They stared at us at first, and then waved enthusiastically in our direction. A fifth child watched from the shadow of the trees, one finger in his mouth, unflinching.

I counted five, but Rive assured us that there would be a great deal more hidden away in the trees who would appear if we got too close. We respected the law of the land and moved on, feeling the curiosity of their eyes burning into our backs as we sailed on up the river.

Manu National Park is home to an unknown number of indigenous uncontacted tribes, some of the last people on Earth to remain beyond the reach of civilisation. Some were driven into these protected forests by conflict with farmers and miners over the Brazilian border. Others have been here since long before the borders of the park were drawn.

A Proto-Arawak people, the uncontacted tribes are divided into family groups throughout the vast area of forest stretching west from the river to the cloud forests at the foot of the Andes. They are only very rarely encountered on visits to Manu, which is all to the good, as their interactions with us in the past have not always been friendly. Camera traps around the lakes show that they have been known to trail visiting tourists on their walks through the forest, running silently through the trees and making their presence known only by their splayed footprints in the mud and, sometimes, bows, arrows and woven baskets left behind in a panic.

It’s dark out there now. I wonder what that family is called. What hopes and ambitions those young children have. The tribes are known to fight and each other over each other’s women – an important economic force in these communities, since more women means more babies, and more babies means a stronger community. Another side note that we have chosen to ignore in the West.

Back at Bonanza, the weather continued to be exceptionally kind – an apology, perhaps, for all those days of rain.

We had two hours to rest. I spent them exploring the grounds, chasing after a sunbittern that was lurking around the flooded ditch by the lodge and watching an adorable troop of squirrel monkeys feeding in the trees just behind my cabin. I’d forgotten how hard they can be to photograph as they move numbly through the canopy, especially once they’ve become used to your presence and no longer stop to stare at you out of curiosity.

I wonder – do they look at us the same way we looked looked at those native people at the edge of the forest?

After a chat with Rive about the natives over a bowl of Bernadino’s homemade snacks, we went into the forest to look for bats roosting in the great kapok tree. The flooded creek was still nearly waist high in parts, so we couldn’t reach the observation tower to watch the parrots flying in to roost at sunset, which was a shame. Seeing a different kind of bat made up for it though.

Instead, Rive suggested going to help the lodge’s boys retrieve their sunken fishing boat from the river’s edge. We had noticed it on the day we arrived, visible only by its prow sticking out of the water. Weighed down with the sheer volume of rain the night before we arrived, it had tipped over and the river had done the rest, filling it with silt and stones.

I was delayed because I had set out into the forest to try to track down a tinamou that was calling just metres from the forest path. They’re exceptionally hard to locate, though, being cryptically camouflaged and calling from the shelter of the thickest parts of the undergrowth. To make up for my lateness, I stripped down to my shorts once I got there and got into the river up to my neck with the rest of the men.

It took a team of twelve men in the water and another support team of gringos on the rope up on dry land the best part of half an hour (and no shortage of pivoting and digging) to get the job done. Led by our captain, a burly native man from Atalaya who engineered a makeshift tourniquet using logs and thick rope to drag the skiff closer to the shore, we eventually managed to haul the fishing boat up and out of the mud. It felt good to be helpful, rather than just coming and going through Manu like any other passive tourist.

I also learned at first hand why the uncontacted tribes have remained so, with civilisation so close at hand. Swimming from one side of the sunken skiff to the other, I found myself more than a metre from the riverbank. It dropped steeply all of sudden, deeper than I could reach, and the force of the current dragged me downriver. The only reason I didn’t get carried far was because I wasn’t that far out and I had the boat to hold on to.

I’m not the most powerful swimmer, but I don’t think even the strongest swimmer could fight a current that strong. In the dry season, the river isn’t quite as high, but it still flows with the cumulative force of hundreds of miles of rainwater, and the ground here is sloped as it climbs up into the cloud forests and becomes the Andes once again, adding to its momentum. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a river where the water wasn’t level before today. I’ve certainly never been in one that was quite so strong.

Dinner felt earned after that – as did the cold shower immediately afterwards. I stuck around outside for a while before heading back into my lodge to sleep, as the night sky was too good to miss. Accompanied by the eerie flash of fireflies below the skyline, an enormous arm of the Milky Way cut right overhead, flanked by strange new constellations that I’ve only ever read about in books, like the Southern Cross. I might have seen it briefly in Uganda, too, but I was only south of the Equator for a few days. And anyway, that was a very long time ago.

I don’t know when I’ll see a sky this clear again. The only light here comes from the dim lamps in one or two of the lodges, and the nearest town, Boca Manu, is many miles away to the north. So here, deep in the Amazon rainforest, you can see the night sky as it was always intended to be: immense, magical and unspoiled, like the rainforest all around me.

I don’t want to go. My clothes would really appreciate being somewhere higher and drier (especially after my dip in the river), but this place has got into my heart like nowhere else in Peru – and I’ve adored pretty much every part of this country that I have seen.

But going is tomorrow’s business, not tonight’s. I should get some sleep – we have an early start and a long journey tomorrow. I’ll let the rainforest sing me go sleep one last time. BB x

River Wolves

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Bonanza Lodge, Manu NP. 14.29.

Some days are red letter days. I should have known today would be one of those days when I woke up and it wasn’t raining.

After three days and nearly sixty-six hours of on-and-off rain, the sun had returned. The forest looks so different in the sunlight. I had almost forgotten what being dry felt like.

Our destination this morning was the macaw clay lick or collpa in search of parrots. Bernardino sent us off with a packed breakfast and Rive led us deep into the surrounding rainforest, with the caution that the macaws would not come in the numbers that they do in the dry season, owing to the abundance of fruit-bearing trees at this time of year. As such, I wasn’t expecting much – so I wasn’t overly disappointed when the only psitticaforme to put in an appearance (beyond the distant flyby pairs of macaws) was a couple of orange-cheeked parrots. They were adorable to watch, but they weren’t quite the spectacle that this place sees in the hotter months.

Eager to find us something to celebrate, Rive went out into the rainforest and came running back a half-hour later with the news that he had found a Fer-de-lance snake – the deadliest snake in South America and one of the most dangerous denizens of the Amazon – near the mammal clay lick a short distance away. Leaving our supplies in the macaw hide, we set out after him.

Sure enough, it was sitting right where Rive had found it: a beautiful and deadly viper, whose untreated bite is fatal. I didn’t need to worry about getting close enough for a good photo, as the lens was the perfect safeguard.

While we waited out the final hours, a troupe of squirrel monkeys and an accompanying pair of capuchins kept us company. I had been hoping for a close encounter with some of South America’s monkeys since we entered the park, and I wasn’t disappointed.

Back at the lodge, Rive called in a few favours and managed to secure us a couple of extra hours on the lagoon so that we could search for the otters again. Visits to the lake are strictly controlled by the rangers, but since we had laboured fruitlessly under a downpour the day before, Rive was given the green light to take us out again.

While the sun was shining (and the forest was suddenly absolutely sweltering) we rushed to wash and dry our clothes – they were, it must be said, a mass of damp and sweaty fabric by this point. While I was coming and going, one of the lodge groundskeepers approached with a smile and asked me something I didn’t at first understand: “¿quiere el gripotú?”. It was only when I realised that – just like our guide – he was saying a bird’s name in English that I gathered he was offering to show me a great pottoo. It was high up in the tallest tree, unmoving, looking for all the world like an extension of the branch upon which it was sitting, but this Leandro was able to point it out. I was very grateful – hard as they are to find, I was hoping to see one of these cryptic creatures out here.

After another incredible spread put on by our chef Bernadino, we set out. Hoping for a change of fortune, I doubled back and took my rosary this time. Maybe the Lady of the Marshes would give us the luck we needed to find the river wolves of the Cocha Salvador.

And she did. We had hardly been standing at the dock on the concha when our boatman called out “otter otter!”. We got into the catamaran and drifted out into the lake, but didn’t need to paddle the thing far – the otters came straight to us!

Giant otters are found only in South America. The largest of them – the dominant male and female of each family – can grow to an astounding two metres in length. They were hunted to near extinction a few decades ago when overfishing and the demand for otter fur purses led many wily Peruvians to export their pelts for great profit, but in places like Manu they have been able not only to survive but to thrive. Hundreds of otters are estimated to live in the conchas along the Manu river, with each family staking out a territory of their own.

They’re very endearing to watch, whether they’re hunting, eating or just playing around. The locals call them lobos – wolves – rather than nutrias (the Spanish word for otter) on account of their habit of forming family packs around a dominant male and female, but when they’re hauled out of the water and rolling around looking for a comfy spot, they look a lot more like very long cats.

Another tour group was waiting for us to return with the catamaran, so we couldn’t hang out with the otters all afternoon – which is just as well, because my arms got absolutely mauled by the lake’s biting flies, which didn’t seem to be bothered by the DEET I had applied before setting out. My right arm in particular looks like a measles case. We were dropped off at the second of the lake’s two docks, putting a large roost of long-nosed bats to flight from under the jetty as we arrived. I hoped to catch one in flight, but I got luckier: one of them landed on a tree by the jetty and clung to the trunk, watching me from those tiny, beady eyes. It only took off when one of my companions returned from the forest and stepped out onto the jetty.

Before heading back to the lodge, Rive took us on a night walk through the forest. The rainforest is a magical place in the first half hour after sunset: a symphony of birds coming off shift and insects and amphibians taking their place. Tinamous whistling mournfully in the undergrowth and woodcreepers echoing their cries from the canopy. The descending hoot of a pygmy-owl, the beautifully sad song of the ant-thrush and the piping calls of poison frogs from the leaf litter. What an incredible place this is!

Incredible – and also incredibly dangerous. As if the poison frogs weren’t enough, we found an enormous cane toad, many tremendously large spiders and two scorpions, including this especially monstrous individual clinging to a tree trunk near the river. I’ve been checking my boots and shoes twice as carefully ever since!

Bernadino had prepared another incredible feast for dinner, which felt like a triumph after the day’s work. Rive was pleased: essentially, we had ticked every box so far but the jaguar, and that was always going to be a Herculean task during the rainy season, with the sandbars all submerged by the swollen river and the mornings much too rainy to encourage any of the great beasts out into the open.

Tomorrow we begin the twenty-hour trek back to Cusco. Eight hours in the boat as far as Bonanza and then another twelve from there. I am very happy with all that I have seen, and I am ready to return to civilisation, but I still want to come back. In my heart I know that I am not finished with Manu. It has been a very special place. Someday, I hope I will see this place again. It is already imprinted upon my heart like so many places: a lighting tree in Huelva, a porch in Boroboro, a smooth boulder on the cliff at Finisterre.

Someday, Manu. Someday. BB x

Strange New World

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Jaguar Ecolodge, Manu NP. 20.07.

Shortly after eight this morning, we crossed over into the Reserved Zone. After three days of travel through Manu’s enormous national park, we have finally arrived at the inner sanctum – where the wild things truly are.

If it had stopped raining for even a minute or so of the eight hour journey upriver, we might have seen a lot more of those wild things than we did. As it was, the rains had swollen the river to a monstrous size, swallowing up most of the sandbanks, so the only creatures that were much in evidence were the water birds – who probably would have been there anyway.

All the same, it is hard to describe just how incredible this place truly is. The mountains are far behind us now, concealed by the clouds that covered our approach. Now it is only the river and the forest in every possible direction.

It’s surprising how quickly you get used to the sight of free-flying macaws; birds that until now I have only ever seen as captives of the pet trade. Pet parrots are such a thing – or at least, they were in my childhood – that seeing them wild almost feels like the reverse of normality.

So many of the iconic birds live here in Manu: blue-and-yellow, red-and-green and the iconic scarlet macaw. There was a scarlet macaw at the Bonanza lodge this morning, in fact, sheltering from the rain. A “free pet”, according to our guide, who comes to the lodge because of the prospect of handouts (and, evidently, shelter). There is little need for a cage when the animal is already in its natural habitat, I guess.

I realised only when we got to our destination – the Jaguar Eco Lodge – that I have finally lost my first object of this trip. Frustratingly, it’s my card reader. It’s not the end of the world – I’ve managed every other adventure without it – but it does make blogging on the go a lot less feasible as I can’t share the photos I’ve been taking on the go. I guess you’ll just have to wait. I’ll have to backdate these posts anyway, as I’m already three days behind – power has been a precious commodity, WiFi even more so m, and more importantly, I haven’t wanted to waste even a second on my phone when I’m out here in one of the most beautiful places on earth.

After a five o’clock start, we got back into the boat and sailed downriver to Boca Manu, where the Madre de Diós meets the Manu river. Our first port of call was the ranger station, where we were officially signed in and registered. Of the 29 rangers that work within the park, 11 come from the native communities that live within its borders. That much was plain from the personnel at the station, who looked about as far removed from Europeans as the modern world allows.

They were exceptionally kind. If we were not on a guided tour, I would have liked to stop and chat for a while. After all, I once wanted to be a park ranger myself. If it hadn’t been for my dismal mathematical ability and my lacklustre scores in Biology – coupled with my desire to raise a family – I might even have followed that path.

Manu is home to 1.030 species of birds. That’s an astonishing one tenth of the birds that can be found in the entire planet. So I might be forgiven for being a little glum at the prospect of the seemingly endless rain continuing for a third day, grounding most of the park’s birds deep within the cover of the trees.

At least a few of the shorebirds were gracious enough to put in an appearance, on what little of the shore remained, including a few handsome cocoi herons, wood storks and a jabiru, a marabou-esque migrant from Brazil.

We even had the good fortune to see the sandy-coloured nightjars that usually roost on the sandbars. They had sought refuge on a sunken tree, and looked rather disgruntled at their change of roost.

After another unbelievably good lunch on the boat courtesy of our chef Bernadino, we made straight for the nearby horseshoe lake of Cocha Salvador in search of giant otters. The usual location, Cocha Otorongo, has been out of bounds ever since it was raided by one of the local uncontacted tribes eight months ago.

There are signs in various places warning you to stay away from the tribes, not so much because of the risk to your own life through conflict, but because of the far greater risk to theirs of disease.

It feels strange to be in a part of the world where there are still people in the forest who remain free and out of step with the world. I don’t know what to make of it.

Powerboats are not allowed on the horseshoe lakes or cochas out of respect for the local wildlife. There is a catamaran for use by guides and their groups, provided you bring your own paddles. We couldn’t see the otters from the jetty, so we set out along its south arc in search.

The cochas are a sanctum like nowhere else I have ever known. I must have counted over a hundred species of animal and bird in the space of a couple of hours, despite the driving rain that returned to lash us throughout our quest. There were at least four species of kingfisher out and about, and an impressive young tiger-heron, which wasn’t as skittish as herons often are and allowed us to float right past.

My companions looked utterly despondent as the hours went by, the rain came down harder and the otters remained invisible. But I was having a great time, though I would have traded an hour of the day for a little sunshine, if only to make the conditions for photography a little better (I had to crank my shutter speed right down and force a steady hand to compensate for how dark it was beneath those clouds).

Another American bird that kept us company on our jaunt around the lake was the anhinga, an extended version of the cormorant, whose habit of swimming so low in the water that only its long neck breaks the surface has given it the alternative name of “snakebird”.

However, while the otters remained beyond our grasp, my primary target for the day was met over and and over again: the utterly bizarre hoatzin, a plant-eating bird that looks like an unholy cross between a hawk, a parrot, a pigeon, a chicken and a cormorant. Understandably, perhaps, this half-breed is in its own family. I’m not sure any other bird family would admit it as it of their own.

It really is, quite literally, the ugly duckling of the bird world. And I absolutely love them in their weirdness.

The otters never did appear, but we were finally relieved of the rain and rewarded with a stunning Amazonian sunset as we sailed back upriver to the lodge. We even encountered a family of night-monkeys on the walk back to camp, but my lens couldn’t handle the darkness all too well. I guess I’ll just have to keep trying! There’s always tomorrow’s night walk.

That’s on write-up done. Onto the next one. BB x

The Drums of War

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Casa Tunki, Cusco. 14.12.

I can’t believe what I’m seeing in the news today. It’s like the world is going to Hell. Here in Cusco, you’d never know there was a terrible war taking place far away, over the mountains, across the ocean and the great sea of sand. Trump might have a habit of talking big game, but he is backed by the mightiest nation on the planet. I fear for the people of Iran.

As if I didn’t already feel cut off from everything that is going on, I am about to go off grid for six whole days. I don’t imagine there’s much signal in the Amazon rainforest, and I would rather not use up my phone battery trying to find out. During that time, Peru will elect its next president and Trump’s deal with have to be met – or else.

Once again, I find myself wondering with no small amount of irony that the most dangerous stretch of my South American adventure will be the layover in New York.

But isn’t that what this was all about? To get away from it all for a bit – from work, from loneliness, from the depressing chaos of global politics?

Having bought the boleto turístico, and with one day more in Cusco than I’d originally planned, I decided to go all in. 130 soles for 16 sites may sound good, but at 20 soles each, the average traveler is more likely to save money by paying at each site. Some are far away, like Tipón and Pikillaqta, four are in the Sacred Valley, one of them is in the middle of a roundabout in one of the busiest streets of downtown Cusco and two of them are art galleries.

However – I bought the ten day pass, so now I have to get my money’s worth. Tipón and Pikillaqta are too far away to be reached without hiring a guide and a vehicle, but I reckon I can do everything else on this ticket. At least now it feels like a proper challenge!

With Sacsayhuamán already achieved, first on my list was the Museo Histórico Regional. It’s worth visiting solely because it was the house of the incredible Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, a 16th century Peruvian nobleman for whom the expression “main character energy” might have been coined. Though Spanish by birthright, he was also the great-grandson of the Inca Huayna Capac, one of the last rulers of the Inca Empire known as the Tahuantinsuyo. Raised primarily by his Inca mother and uncle, he developed a profound admiration for his heritage and, assisted by the lavish education his Spanish father provided for him, he became the first great writer of the Americas. At 21, he left Peru for Spain, fought for the Crown in the Morisco Rebellion, and published many books about his native land and its people.

Understandably, El Inca is venerated here in Peru as both a defender of the native people and one of Cusco’s most illustrious native sons, whose works were influential for many famous statesmen and philosophers.

Another of Cusco’s greatest heroes is Tupac Amaru II, also of royal descent, who started a rebellion against the Spanish after witnessing multiple abuses of power at the expense of the indigenous peoples of Peru through his work as a muleteer. Unlike El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, however, Tupac Amaru met a grisly end, torn apart in a public execution in Cusco’s Plaza Mayor as a punishment for his resistance.

It’s worth noting that Tupac Amaru II was the first public figure to abolish the slavery of Black people in the Spanish Americas. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why Afeni Shakur decided to give her son the name of this legendary figurehead of indigenous resistance, knowing that such a powerful name could only inspire the young 2Pac to great things.

While it’s not on the list, I had to head downtown to find the enormous mural I’d seen on my way into town on my first night. I love a mural, especially when it tells a story, and one day I’d love to see Diego Rivera’s historical paintings in Mexico City. But for now, Cusco has its own retelling of the history of its people.

There are just so many details to pick up. The way the Spanish soldiers merge with the bodies of their horses, like centaurs, in imitation of the confusion the mounted soldiers caused among the natives, who had never seen a horse before. The war dog held on a chain by a Cistercian monk. The conquistadors gambling with dice over their stolen gold. The indigenous painter portraying the scene as a righteous conquest aided by a winged Santiago, under the instruction of a Spanish cleric. The bolas weapons of the Inca and the Spanish cannon.

You could read a hundred accounts of the Spanish conquest of Peru and still learn more from a painting like this.

This morning, I ticked off another two on the list: Puka Pukara, the Red Fort, and Tambomachay, the Resting Place. You’ll be offered a visit to these by any of the guides hanging around Sacsayhuamán, and they’re well served by the white servicio turístico vans – but, me being me, I decided to walk there.

It’s not that far. Tambomachay, the further of the two, is about an hour and a half from the centre of Cusco. It is mostly uphill, however, and I was lucky the weather was on my side: be it a favour of the Lady of the Marshes or no, I was protected from the sun by a merciful cover of cloud all the way there and back. I had my rosary on as I often do when I’m not sure if the road is safe or not, so I’ll chalk it up to a little divine intervention.

Even on foot, I still got there before the bulk of the morning’s tourist traffic arrived. It was worth the hike – steep though it was – to see a part of Cusco that I might otherwise have missed.

It also gave me the chance to check out Huayllarqocha’s small wetland reserve, which will have to be my substitution for Huacarpay. I didn’t see any of the grebes that supposedly live here, but I did see an Andean flicker (an American species of woodpecker) and a number of Andean ducks, a smart relative of the Ruddy Duck that can be found in North America.

Now that I’ve had some rest, I should go and pick up my washing from the lavandería down the road. After that, I should pack for tomorrow, before checking out the two art galleries and, with any luck, a performance of local music and dance at the Centro Qosqo de Arte Nativo.

I’m not sure if you’ll hear from me tomorrow. Like I said, going into the Amazon may well mean going completely off-grid. Either way, I’ll try to keep writing. The next six days are likely to be red letter days, both here in Peru and out there in the wider world.

Hasta la próxima. BB x

Violetears and Metaltails

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Casa Tunki, Cusco. 17.42.

Six hundred years ago, under the vision of the Inca Pachacútec, a team of architects were tasked with turning an existing settlement in the Sacred Valley into the cultural nerve centre of an empire. For their inspiration, they chose one of the most powerful of all the animals with which they shared their world: the puma. The city of Cusco is believed to have been built in the shape of a resting puma, with the Tullumayo and Saphy rivers marking the outline of its body, the citadel of Sacsayhuamán as its head (ears and all) and the Huacaypata – the present-day Plaza de Armas – as its heart.

The puma was an incredibly important spiritual entity for the Inca. Legend gave it tremendous power: their spit was hail, the blink of their eyes thunderbolts, and their roar was the roll of thunder.

I’m writing this in Casa Tunki’s restaurant, with the heavy roll of thunder overhead. I have been exceptionally lucky with the weather thus far, but it’s still the rainy season out here, and the rain has finally caught up to me. It has spelled disaster for tomorrow’s expedition to Waqrapukara, which the operators have had to cancel due to landslides in the area. Luckily for me, I have three whole days after returning from Manu, so I am not too troubled. I could always try again when I return.

My wanderings today took me to a quiet corner of Cusco. Tucked away in the hills to the south of the suburb of San Jerónimo is a tiny hummingbird sanctuary, nestled on a forested slope off the 123 highway. If you didn’t know it was there, you’d never be able to find it.

My guide Benjamin picked me up from the hotel and, together with his companion and driver Jeremy, we set out. It was just me on this tour, so for the first time out here I had the chance for a proper conversation.

The sanctuary itself – titled the Pachacútec Bosque Andino – is a strange mix of what looks like a garden centre, a Zen garden and a hiking trail. At different times of year, different birds can be found here. I got the impression from my guide that other guests have come here seeking the Bearded Mountaineer, a Peruvian endemic. He seemed a little anxious at first that I might be pinning my hopes on finding one. I hope I gave him the impression that I wasn’t a lister. I was just happy to be out of the city and surrounded by nature again.

One of the sanctuary’s starlets, a young trainbearer, put in an early appearance. The adult males of this species have enormous tails that nearly double their length, but this one still has a fair bit of growing up to do.

The primary residents of the sanctuary – as in the hills around Cusco itself – are the violetears. They’re extremely territorial and will fight off just about anything that gets in their way, no matter the size. I saw them take on metaltails, thrushes, tanagers and even the giant hummingbird that was trying to use the feeders.

Yesterday, I found them by sound and movement. Today, I hardly needed to try. They didn’t seem to be bothered by us at all.

Whenever the violetears were busy fighting everything that came too close, a tiny metaltail popped out of the bushes to chance a quick feed at one of the flowers, before darting away the moment the mechanical clicks of the violetears announced they were on their way back.

I seem to remember reading somewhere that hummingbirds and flowers have evolved simultaneously, with some flowers only admitting a certain species of hummingbird to visit them. It explains why their Old World equivalent, the sunbirds, remain stranded east of the Atlantic, while hummingbirds can only be found in the west.

The largest hummingbird species, the giant hummingbird, was surprisingly shy – though that may have more to do with the aggressive violetears than any inherent skittishness in its nature. They’re considerably larger than their diminutive relatives, being about as large as a small thrush, and they sound a lot less like bees when they fly overhead, though they still move like the clappers.

Well now – now that I have a whole day free, I think I’ll take it easy tomorrow. I’ll try to make more use of my boleto turístico, the ten-day ticket that covers most of the historic sites and museums in Cusco.

I’ve finalised the arrangements for the Amazon, which is now only a little over twenty-four hours away. The two Americans in the hotel next to me are busy discussing which nautical themed tattoo they should get (as they’re considerably cheaper here than back home), but I will be putting all of this behind me for a week. I am quite looking forward it that.

Fingers crossed my luck holds out for some wholesome companions! BB x

Mirrors in the Mountains

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Aeropuerto Internacional Alfredo Rodríguez, Arequipa. 16.20.

I have often seen it written of Uganda that it is Africa in miniature – that is, a concentrated version of the vast array of biomes you can find across the continent. The more I travel Peru, the more I’m convinced that this is South America’s equivalent: jungle, desert, glaciers, prairie, megacities and coastal plains. Peru really does have it all. No wonder it is home to the second largest number of bird species in the world (after Colombia).

If the Islas Ballestas are touted as the “poor man’s Galápagos”, then today I paid a flying visit to the poor man’s Salar de Uyuni. While my original plan for this adventure ended with a trip to Bolivia’s enormous salt flats on the edge of the Atacama Desert, my decision to go all in on an Amazonian side-quest to Manu got in the way. I really didn’t want to leave South America without seeing the salt lakes, though, as they were a fairly major inspiration for coming out here in the first place.

Luckily, there’s one tiny outlier of the Uyuni salt flats tucked away in the mountains east of Arequipa, within the Reserva Nacional de Salinas y Aguada Blanca. Getting there is a pretty arduous journey, but if you can find a way, the views are out of this world.

My onward flight to Cusco leaves at 18.05, so I needed to find a way to the salt flats and back in time to catch my plane. As luck would have it, there was a tour on GetYourGuide that fit the bill perfectly. It meant another early start, but after yesterday’s 2am kick-off, a 5.40am pick-up felt like a lie-in.

Not a bus or a people carrier this time, but a Land Cruiser. There were only two other travelers on board – a bilingual couple from Texas and Veracruz – so I got the front seat. Result!

Ah, but I’m not that naive. If something feels too good to be true, it’s usually because it is.

We had one more passenger to pick up before leaving Arequipa, but in a turn of events that would probably be familiar to a US Homeland Security officer, that one passenger turned out to be a family of five – they’d simply “forgotten” to mention they’d booked for more than one.

Not for the first time, being young and single became a major liability. As the most expendable passenger, I was asked if I would be so kind as to sit in the back.

I didn’t mind overmuch at the time – after all, one thing my superzoom isn’t very good at is in-transit photography – but I hadn’t considered the terrain… or the supreme manspreading abilities of the couple squeezed in next to me. The tarmac road stops shortly after leaving the Arequipa suburb of Paucarpata. From there on out, it’s a dirt track all the way up to the salt lakes – and the road winds a lot.

For all of two hours, I was rocked about in the back of the car, bumping my head quite a bit – which is more than can be said for the state of my legs! The relief when the lakes came into view… words can’t begin to describe!

There was a fair bit of activity around the edge of the lake – mostly free-roaming llamas and alpacas, but a couple of small herds of vicuña, too.

We stopped by the lake’s edge for a closer look. The herd’s dominant male wasn’t particularly chuffed, but he had his hands (or hooves?) full keeping one of the younger males in line with much running around and snorting.

Before going out to explore the area, our driver took us to the tiny lakeside community of Chilitia for a light breakfast. As an apology for the cramped conditions of the journey, breakfast was on the house for the three of us on the back row. Granted, we’re talking a grand total of 15 soles, but the gesture was very much appreciated – my legs were still pretty sore!

As always, the stop was also an incentive to buy local alpaca products. It’s getting to the stage where I’m considering breaking a lifelong aversion to souvenir shopping, but I’m still very conscious that I have to carry everything I have on my back – and it’s already a tighter squeeze than the back seat of that Land Cruiser once my lens is packed away.

So I just contented myself with watching the llamas and enjoying the palliative effects of a coca tea.

The most amazing thing about today’s adventure was the unrestricted freedom of it. Once we’d reached the water’s edge, we were given an hour and fifteen to go wherever we wanted – even out onto the flats, if we so desired.

Music to my ears! I’d already clocked a number of things I didn’t recognise, so I was anxious to get to work.

One of the big draws of the Salinas – at least for a naturalist like me – is that all three of South America’s flamingoes can be found here. The red-kneed Chilean flamingoes stayed far out in the centre of the lake, but a few flamboyances (yes, that is the collective noun) of Andean and James’ flamingoes were a little closer to the shore, so I tried to see if I could differentiate them by sight.

It’s mainly a question of checking their legs. Chilean flamingoes have black legs with distinct red knees. Andean flamingoes have yellow legs, and James’ flamingoes have red legs. If your eyesight is sharp enough, you’ll also notice that James’ flamingoes have red lores – that is, the patch of skin between the eye and the beak. Simplicity itself!

In the winter months, these lakes dry out and turn bone white under the unforgiving Andean sun, but now it’s the shoulder season, and there’s still enough water to keep the flamingoes around. Once it’s gone, they’ll leave these mountains and make for more permanent wetlands along the coast, like the Pántanos de Villa in Lima.

I’m still a kid at heart, so I scoured the lakeside for flamingo feathers. I found three bright pink ones, but they were kind of wet (as you might expect) so I cleaned them up using a couple of napkins I’d brought along and pocketed them. When they’re properly dry, I’ll put them in my journal with the others I’ve picked up along the way.

While there’s water, the salt lakes form an altogether different kind of miracle: an enormous natural mirror, broken only by the tiny ripples around the feet of the flamingoes. It’s places like this that make you especially grateful for clouds, because under a clear sky, half the magic of these magic mirrors would be lost.

Flamingoes aren’t the only knock-kneed stars of the altiplano. A familiar and yet unfamiliar call alerted me to a couple of Andean avocets, who sounded like the ones we have back home, only… accented. As though they’re speaking a different language. Which, I suppose, they are!

This one spent a long time chasing sandpipers. I’m not sure what threat it thought the tiny little waders posed, but it wasted no time in putting all the sandpipers in the immediate area to flight.

I spent about half an hour exploring the lakeside before turning inland in search of highland species. I found quite a handful, all of which I had to look up later: cream-winged ciclodes, Andean negritos, Cordilleran canasteros and crested ducks, to name just a few.

But the star find was a pair of adorable seedsnipes – a tiny wader distantly related to the plovers, but looking for all the world like a finch-sized partridge.

If it hadn’t been for the driver whistling me back to the car (fifteen minutes early, mind!), I’d have stuck around to see if I could find some more of them.

But alas! My traveling companions were bored and had seen all they had to see, taken the selfies they wanted to take, and were ready to go home. So I was summoned back to the car and we set off on the return journey to Arequipa.

Mercifully, I fell asleep for the first hour of the journey – probably on account of the sun! – but the last hour was even more cramped than the journey up had been, with both of my neighbouring passengers spread out in slumber. Once we were back in Arequipa, it took the best part of an hour before my legs had recovered completely.

That’s enough cramped conditions for one day. I’ve found my seat on the flight for Cusco and it’s wonderfully comfy (LatAm, you are a dream come true).

It’s time to go up again. The Inca stronghold of Cusco awaits! See you on the other side. BB x

Penguins in the Desert

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Hostal Pariwana, Lima. 8.05.

Today is a travel day. My onward flight to Arequipa doesn’t leave until 5pm – a luxury in a trip full of early starts – so I’m having a proper rest this morning.

It also gives me ample time to give yesterday’s adventure the write-up it deserves.

When I leave Lima for Arequipa on Thursday, I won’t see the Pacific again until I return to the capital for my flight home in just over two weeks’ time. That means saying goodbye to something awesome and powerful that has been the eternal backdrop to my Peruvian adventures thus far, and trading it in for the majesty of the Andes, the longest mountain chain in the world.

I couldn’t leave without going out onto the waters of the Pacific at least once, so today I jumped onto a trip to the Islas Ballestas – the Ballista Islands – run by the Peruvian tourism colossus, Peru Hop.

Paracas is a proper schlep from Lima – four hours, to be precise – so the company’s iconic red bus picked me up at 5.30am. One of the backpackers from my hostel panicked because it wasn’t there bang on half past, which I thought was surprising from a person who had been traveling South America far longer than I. In any event, the guides came looking for us at each hostel along the way, which I thought was bloody efficient, given the size of Lima itself.

Peru goes to the polls to elect its next president on the 12th April, and there are billboards for the various presidential candidates everywhere. Comedians. Bankers. Career politicians and military generals. Relatives of former presidents. Every district seems to have its own champion. If it’s a two-horse race like it so often is elsewhere in the world, you’d never know at a glance.

I’ll be deep in the Amazon rainforest when it all goes down, but at least I’ll be here. What a time to be in Peru!

The bus to Paracas was packed – every seat taken. Mostly young backpackers, but a scattering of older couples as well. A British woman all in pink ended up next to me – pink crop top, pink smartwatch, pink nails, pink leggings, pink lipstick, pink stripes on her shoes, pink cover for her phone, pink handbag… An Essex Elle Woods if ever there were one. I suspect she was off to Pisco and Huacachina for wine-tasting and dune-buggying, rather than a tour of the national park. To quote an old friend, “you don’t need foundation for a safari”.

In Paracas, all three buses in our convoy were disgorged onto the steps of the Hotel Residencial Los Frailes, before being led straight to the jetty for the boat trip to the Islas Ballestas. Honestly, I was expecting more hassle from local touts on route, but my experience so far of Peruvian hawkers is that they are considerably less aggressive in their tactics than their African and Asian counterparts. I wasn’t hassled once.

There’s plenty to see before you even leave the still waters of the harbour. Neotropic cormorants are just about everywhere, perched on the hulls of almost every skiff in the bay, but they’re far from the most obvious residents of Paracas.

Far larger and more impressive are the pelicans, with a seven foot wingspan and standing at around five feet tall. That’s as tall as the average Peruvian woman. They’re not exactly shy, either. While they’re more commonly observed resting on boats and skiffs or crashing headfirst into the sea in a clumsy imitation of the Peruvian booby, they can often be found right at the heart of human activity. There were a few loitering around the jetty in Paracas, but I had a boat to catch, so I made a mental note to swing by later.

The Peruvian coastline from the sea is nothing short of mesmerising: undulating deserts of marbled rock set against a powder-blue sky that lightens toward the horizon. The cliffs are scored with white, a combination of thousands of years of accumulated salt and guano, the bird droppings that once made Peru one of the richest countries in South America.

One of the most iconic sights in this corner of Peru is the enormous geoglyph, “El Candelabro”. This 170 metre tall symbol was carved into the earth some 2,500 years ago and, due to the extreme scarcity of rainfall here (it rains for an average of thirty minutes a year), it has never been washed away.

Scholars believe it may be related in some way to the Nazca lines, which can be found further inland along the coast. I had originally planned to see these for myself, but they aren’t on my itinerary this year. Maybe next time.

Everyone on the boat got up on their feet to get a photo or selfie with the enormous geoglyph, but I was quite happy with the one picture I had. I was a lot more trigger-happy with the feathered denizens of the cliffs – the pelicans, boobies and Inca terns – which were fishing all around us. They made for quite an awesome sight against the backdrop of the desert.

After visiting the geoglyph, the captain turned the boat around and stepped on the gas in the direction of the islands. The Islas Ballestas take their name from the crossbow used by hunters long ago against the thousands of birds who call these craggy cliffs home.

Incidentally, that’s also where the name “booby” comes from. These beautiful seabirds were bobos to Spanish sailors – stupid – because they were so unafraid of people that they came right up to the boats, only to be captured and clubbed to death. Boobies are extremely monogamous, usually pairing just once during their lifetimes. It is said that they will perish of a broken heart if their partner is killed. As such, they are also known in Peru as “bobos románticos”.

It says a lot about the human character that we once saw such devotion as something foolish.

These islands were once home to an enormous colony of guanay cormorants – the primary source of the guano on these cliffs – but they have all but evacuated the place. The reason is not hunting or overfishing but the vicious avian flu epidemic in 2022, which cost the lives of nearly six hundred sea lions and fifty-five thousand seabirds, decimating the islands’ populations of boobies, pelicans, cormorants and penguins. The colony is slowly recovering, but the cormorants that once turned the sanctuary cliffs black and white are now just a shadow of what they once were, especially outside of the breeding season.

One of the biggest draws on the islands remains its dwindling colony of Humboldt penguins. We saw only seven of them, but there may have been others out hunting in the open ocean, as the breeding season is now long behind us. How these bipedal creatures made it high up onto the cliffs beats me, but it was fun to see them waddling down to the edge to watch us sailing by.

The last of the feathered residents of the islands that deserve a mention are its Inca terns, an especially smart seabird with handsome “whiskers” beneath its eyes. They’re known colloquially as “ladrones del mar” on account of their habit of stealing fish from the neighbouring cormorants and boobies, but I didn’t see any thieving today. On the contrary, they were showing remarkable success in their own fishing endeavours around the islands, and like most terns, they’re tremendously acrobatic and quite a joy to watch.

It would be remiss of me not to mention the fur seals and sea lions that live on these islands. They’re not as fun to photograph as the birds, and as we’re in the middle of their breeding season, we weren’t allowed to get too close to their sanctuary beach (males and females live apart, with only the dominant male having access to his mighty harem). The fur seals were mostly lounging around in the midday sun, but I did see a few sea lions chasing our boat there and back, and a mother and pup playing in the surf not too far from the boat.

The return journey to Paracas stops at a buoy, which is apparently a favourite haul-out for the seals. Why here, halfway between the islands and the coast, was not explained, though I suspect it’s because the waters are especially rich in this spot. There was a huge amount of activity from both birds and fishermen around here.

The captain drove right up to the buoy, which spooked the fur seal that was already in the water, but the others didn’t seem to troubled. It was already pretty hot, and with the waters in these parts carrying the Antarctic chill of the Humboldt current, it must be nice to have an isolated spot to come and warm up, out of reach of the blue sharks that hunt them further out to sea.

Back in Paracas, I made sure to revisit the pelicans, who clearly hadn’t gone very far since we set out. I suspect they’re enticed by a couple of savvy local touts who hope to draw in tourist traffic by keeping a few of these mighty creatures close at hand, but they didn’t give me any trouble. One advantage of having the mighty zoom lens on me is that I don’t need to get too close, especially when to comes to birds as big as the Peruvian pelican.

Swooping in to steal the spotlight, however, came a cousin of the gallinazos I spent so long with yesterday: a turkey vulture. If black vultures were the stars of yesterday’s adventure, the turkey vulture worked overtime to take its place today, starting with this happy chappie who had a large fish all to himself – once he’d scared off the kelp gulls who had found the thing first.

Seeing the vulture tucking in reminded me that, bar a light street food snack the night before, I hadn’t really eaten a square meal since departing Colombia on Monday. As such, I was quite prepared to go all out for lunch. There were plenty of spots offering ceviche, a Peruvian specialty, but I was much more interested in the parihuela, a crab-based seafood stew laced with Peruvian lime.

Honestly? One of the best meals I’ve ever had, and that’s not only because my hunger was keen. They left the entire crab in the bowl to intensify the flavour, and I very nearly ate the entire dish, defeated only by a couple of spoonfuls.

One large bowl of the stuff was enough to keep me going all day and well into the following morning. I wonder if that’s a healthier way to live? It sure makes a nice change from three school meals a day.

After lunch, I swapped buses with the tour heading into the national park. There were only nine of us including the two guides, Deborah and Paul, which made for a much more peaceful and reflective adventure into the desert. I wound up next to a chatty English girl on her gap year, who was headed for Panama and had struck it out alone for most of the journey. There seem to be quite a few types like that out here, wending their way up the continent, and with bus and flight prices being why they are, I’m hardly surprised.

The Paracas peninsula is special in that it is one of the last stretches of the Atacama Desert, the driest desert on the planet. True to form, there was very little to see by way of life from the bus. No vegetation, no water, almost no sign of life at all.

That is, except for the turkey vultures, which have a colony of their own along the cliffs.

In the late afternoon, with the wind picking up, these handsome creatures ride the thermals along the coast and can be seen at eye level as they glide up towards you from the bay below.

It’s always special to see a vulture from above, as they’re usually specks against the firmament. I’m fully expecting that to be the case with the condors, but if I should be so lucky, I might just get the same experience in Colca tomorrow. Fingers crossed!

Right – that will do for today. That took me the best part of two hours to write. Now I should really think about packing up, checking out and heading into Lima for lunch before taking my onward flight to Arequipa, the next stop on my journey.

The world around me is about to change. Quite literally, it’s only up from here. BB x

Vermilion City

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Miraflores, Lima. 15.00.

Where do I begin? Where do I even begin?

I’ll start with Uber. Lima is absolutely enormous – a 2,672 square kilometre metropolis with over ten million inhabitants – and it’s pretty daunting to get even from Miraflores to the coast, and especially when you’re lugging around some pretty expensive gear.

Uber to the rescue! For little more than the price of a meal deal, I was able to get to my destination this morning: the Pántanos de Villa, a wetland reserve sheltered within the city itself.

I actually had cold feet about my plan this morning. Was I doing some ridiculous by striking out on my own to a corner of Lima well off the usual tourist trail?

Then again, if I didn’t, would I regret it? The answer was a resounding yes, so I hailed an Uber and set out. But not before seeing my first Peruvian bird of the trip: an eared dove which was kind enough to wake me up this morning.

Uber drivers aren’t a very talkative lot, but their choice of radio is always interesting. My first had YouTube on and was watching/listening to a bizarre Peruvian comedy show featuring two men with oversized prosthetic noses commenting on the imminent Paraguay/Brazil football game. Whatever they were saying was hard to follow beneath an overactive soundboard, rotating between all the classic meme sounds after almost every line. Soundboards seem to be a feature of modern mass media, but I confess myself surprised to find it already taking root out here.

The most obvious sound by far is car horns – which are technically banned in Miraflores, though that doesn’t stop them being part of the sinfonía limeña.

The Pántanos are a sanctuary within the hustle and bustle of Lima. Even if birds aren’t your thing, it’s good to come here for a bit of peace and quiet. I got there for 8.30am, which is when the website said the reserve opened its doors, but I was told very politely that the guides would be there at 9am, if I would be so kind as to wait.

I had no issues waiting – one of the thing I was most excited to see in Peru was already here. So many of them, in fact, that I lost count.

Introducing the black vulture, known in Peru as the gallinazo, which might be translated as “enormous chicken” – which fits quite nicely, I think.

They’re about the size of a turkey, and the only sound they make is a sort of grunted sneeze. My guide, a knowledgeable young tourism grad who was working her way toward a posting in Arequipa, pointed out how skittish and shy they can be – which was the only thing she said that made me raise an eyebrow, because it feels like nothing in this country fears the presence of man like they would in Europe. I’ve never been so close to so many species in a single day. I wonder why that is?

The Pántanos’ star resident is the Siete Colores de la Totora, a seven-coloured gem of a bird that is surprisingly hard to spot as it feeds among the stems of the reeds. Seeing one would, according to my guide, be a very “buen augurio” (good omen), but I made it plain that I wasn’t here to tick boxes – I just wanted to see any and all of the magic that Peru would offer. We got incredibly lucky and saw a wild cuy, a species of guinea pig that are native to the marshes, but it was much too quick for my camera.

I had more luck with one of the reserve’s most beautiful treasures: a vermilion flycatcher, surely one of the most spectacular birds to be found in Peru – and they’re quite literally everywhere!

I needn’t have worried about the Toledo night heron being so distant, because there was one sitting right next to the visitor’s centre. I’ve never had the chance to appreciate their bright red eyes from so close, an evolutionary adaptation to hunting by night – hence the name!

Not to be outdone by the vultures, a young Harris hawk swept in to investigate the cuy situation. These incredibly intelligent birds are a favourite of falconers – if you’ve been to a bird of prey show, you’ve almost certainly seen one – but they’re native to this part of the world. They’re also one of the few species here I knew on sight!

I saw my first hummingbird of the trip: an Amazilia, I think, though I haven’t gone through my sightings with a guidebook yet. They’re damned near impossible to photograph until they land, being about the size of a finger and moving with all the agility of a butterfly. I’m trying to snap everything I see so I can log them later, but at least I recognised this little fella: a striated heron, one of a number of familiar species that are shared between Peru and – of all places – Uganda.

To reach the last circuit of the Pántanos de Villa, you have to leave the wetlands and walk about ten minutes further along the road to the coast. The road passes through a private residential estate, but they’re quite used to naturalists from the Pántanos passing through, so I was waved through without any ceremony. I could have stopped a number of times in pursuit of an unfamiliar birdcall, but I didn’t particularly want to draw attention to myself by pointing my zoom lens into somebody’s garden, so I contented myself with the mockingbirds that followed me inquisitively for half of the journey.

Out past the condominium is the Circuito de Maravilla, which – at the right time of year – hosts an enormous flock of Franklin’s Gulls, which come all the way down to Peru from their breeding grounds in the prairie lakes of central Canada and the Dakotas.

This was obviously the right time of year.

Hundreds of them had gathered at the lagoon, making ready to begin their 15,000 kilometre migration to their nesting grounds. Some were already sporting the handsome salmon pink chests and black hoods. They were joined by a huge flock of skimmers, a bizarre bird whose lower mandible is longer than its upper, so that it can skim the surface of the water to catch its prey.

Beyond the lagoon, however, is a sight even more impressive than anything I’d seen thus far. The Pacific.

If I’m mentioning it a lot, it’s because I’m bewitched. I’ve never seen or heard an ocean quite like it. It booms just like I’ve read about in books. Not the slow, salty roar of the Atlantic, but a genuine boom like a distant cannon. It has to be heard to be believed.

I had to sit and watch it for a while. I wasn’t the only one with that idea, either: I was joined in my vigil for most of the morning by a local man with a baseball cap and a Disney princess carrier bag. He simply stared out to sea for the best part of half an hour.

So did I. It’s nice to know I’m not the only one who can lose time just staring at the beauty of nature.

The Humboldt current which flows up the South American coast from Antarctica keeps the water cold – and extremely productive. This is one of the richest seas in the world, and you won’t be allowed to forget it for even a moment. Gulls, terns, cormorants, boobies, pelicans and an attendant host of shorebirds are constantly in sight. I suspect I’ll have better results at Paracas tomorrow.

It wasn’t just birds, either. While I was scanning the open ocean from a washed-up palm stump, I saw something dark cresting the water, then another – and another. A whole family of dolphins were feeding just off the shore. They didn’t breach, but they stuck around long enough to count them: eight of them in all. And all because I stopped to watch the waves for a while.

The sun came out from behind the clouds around 12, at which point I thought it sensible to consider a retreat – the Peruvian sun can be a cruel god, and I hadn’t brought my sun lotion (I hadn’t expected to stay so long!). Some of the Franklin’s gulls came to say goodbye, looking even more smart in the sunlight.

I made it back to the shade of the Pántanos visitor centre and rested for a bit. I could have hailed an Uber there and then, but I wasn’t quite done with the wetlands, and when I saw a couple of visitors head into the reserve on their own, I followed suit.

No sign of the cuy, but while I was searching I saw something moving among the reeds. My buen augurio had come to see me off: a seven-coloured rush tyrant. It’s only a youngster, so it’s not as dashing as it will be in a year’s time, but that’s neither here nor there. Peruvians say they grant wishes. So I have made mine.

I could have included even more photos, but I’ll try to pace these posts – there’s simply too much to report, so I must be choosy!

I’m currently taking it easy back at the hostel. My camera definitely needs charging after a serious workout, as do my own batteries – and I could use a shower.

That’s enough work for the Nikon today, I think. I’ll switch things up tonight and explore the human side of Peru for a change! BB x

Five Hundred

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

When I set out for Peru next week, the number of bird species I will have seen in my lifetime will be a clean five hundred. I’d like to say I’m not usually the record-keeping sort, but that would be pretty unbelievable. The fact that I’ve kept this blog going for the best part of eleven years says otherwise. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with list-keeping, but it does border on the nerdier, birder side of birdwatching, and there is a lingering part of me that still raises a wary eyebrow at the prospect of becoming an anorak. However, since Peru is generally considered one of the world’s finest destinations for birdwatching, I thought I’d cave in for a change, do a little spring cleaning and get my affairs in order before I go. And that means working out just how many birds I have seen over the last thirty-two years or so. It took me a few days to collate the various lists I have held onto over the years, and longer still to whittle down some of the more fanciful additions that may or may not have been added in haste, leaving me with a perfectly square total of five hundred species exactly. It’s a start.

I have been very lucky. I haven’t been as committed to my old hobby as others my age, but even so, my travels have afforded me encounters with a number of species I might otherwise never have seen: pygmy cormorants in the silent marshes around Torcello, Berthelot’s pipits in the Teide caldera and Rwenzori double-collared sunbirds in the clouded hills of Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable Forest. I thought I’d share a few of my favourite encounters below.

Griffon Vulture

Vultures are far and away my favourite creatures on the planet and I make no secret of that. Cinerous, Egyptian, Palm Nut, White-backed, Hooded or Griffon – I’m not fussy. Something about their enormity, the way their wingtips spread wide like fingers, the silence with which they rule the skies… It’s spellbinding. They’re easily the fondest memory I have of my year in Spain when, aged eleven, I traded herring gulls for griffons for a year. I think I can be excused for being occasionally distracted in class when a tawny giant with a nearly three-metre wingspan happened to be passing by the window. I still get the shivers when I see that silhouette, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed for an even greater shadow in the sky when I go in search of an Andean condor in Peru’s Colca Canyon.

Nightjar

Something of a late discovery for me and inseparable from the Camino de Santiago, where it is the nocturnal yin to the diurnal yang of the stonechat – since both species seemed to follow me all the way from the French Pyrenees to Santiago. Nightjars can be found in the UK, but I’ve never seen them, despite searching the forests and heathlands where they are said to breed. On the Camino, however, one is so often up before the break of dawn that it’s virtually impossible not to run into these cryptic creatures at some point. Their endless churring sound must be very strange indeed to those who aren’t aware of its maker, sounding more like a giant cricket or a miniature UFO than a bird. Reports from Manu NP indicate that there may be nightjars to be found along the Madre de Dios river – I shall be keeping my eyes open.

Abyssinian Roller

I could have put any number of the more than two hundred and fifty species of bird I saw in Uganda on this post, but this one takes the top spot because of our story. Having never had any luck with European rollers in Spain, I was amazed to learn on the very first day of my stay in Uganda that there was a particularly handsome Abyssinian roller in the neighbourhood. But I’ll be damned if I thought photographing it might be a cinch – the bird gave me the run-around for most of my three-month stay, fearless and indifferent to my presence when I didn’t have my camera to hand and skittish in the extreme when I came prepared, as though it were camera-shy. In the end an act of God intervened on my behalf: an explosion of winged ants in the neighbour’s garden brought every winged insectivore within a hundred miles to the yard. With more than forty kites to worry about, plus a host of other raptors including shikras, lizard buzzards, grey kestrels and falcons, the roller had his mind on other things and I was able to get in a good shot or two. Sometimes it’s hard-fought encounters like that one that make a photo more compelling than all the editing in the world.

European Bee-Eater

Much like the roller, the bee-eater is an explosion of colour in avian form – at least, to a British birdwatcher’s eye, since most of our native birds are rather drab by comparison. They’re incredibly captivating creatures to watch as they flit through the air like oversized moths, but it’s their call that I love the most: a cheery whirrup that heralds the spring in Spain just like the merry twitter of the swallow in Britain. The sound alone makes me feel warmer – it takes me back to the sands of El Rocio and the dusty scrubland between the Madre de las Marismas and the Palacio del Acebron. One day, it may be warm enough for bee-eaters to colonise the UK. They have bred here with occasional success in the last few years, but it remains to be seen whether they will follow the example of the egrets and move in for good. A part of me hopes they don’t – they are far too tied to my image of Spain as a special paradise. Some things you should have to travel to behold, to see with your own eyes. That’s what I think.

Purple Swamphen

What list would be complete without one of my all-time favourites – the bird that probably kickstarted my obsession with Spanish birds? The purple swamphen is unmistakeable: a moorhen on steroids, with bigger feet, a bigger face-shield and a bigger attitude. I saw them first in El Acebuche, but since then I have found them in several other places: the rice paddies of the Brazo del Este, Uganda’s White Nile river and under the Roman Bridge in Merida. Like griffons, they lose nothing with each successive encounter, and I confess that my eyes are always on swivel-stalks whenever I’m crossing the bridge in Merida in the hope of catching one of them in the reeds below.

Red and Black Kites

WordPress won’t let me upload the images I have of the hoopoe, Iberian magpie and Montagu’s harrier, which would bring the total to ten, so I will have to finish with another old favourite: the kite. Specifically, it’s black kites that have always held sway in my heart, due to their association with the Elysian stone-pine forests of the Raya Real, but since red kites have pretty much exploded in number in the UK in my own lifetime, they’ve earned a spot in this list too. Despite nearly twenty years of active pursuit, I have yet to take a decent photograph of a black kite (in my defence, I have often been without my camera when the right moment presented itself). Had I brought my DSLR with me on the Camino last summer, I would have had the opportunity of a lifetime when I stumbled – quite by chance – upon a feeding frenzy for the local kite population in a rugby field a day’s march from the Spanish frontier. But, I didn’t, so I just took a few photos on my phone and watched the spectacle.

Kites are something of a bait-and-switch story for me. Since their whistling call was used in the BBC’s Land of the Tiger whenever vultures were on screen, I came to associate that sound with those kings of the sky. It wasn’t until I was much older that I realised that vultures are pretty much silent (when they’re not squabbling over a carcass, that is), but by then the spell had already been cast. I would travel all the way to the Raya Real just to hear that sound. Of course, I’d go for more than that: the music-box melodies of a nightingale, the flute-song of a golden oriole, the oop-oop-oop of a hoopoe, the beak-clacking serenade of a stork and the descending whistle of a woodlark. But even if all those voices should fall silent, leaving nothing but the trill of a kite, I’d still make that journey. That’s how precious a single sound can be.

T minus one week. It’s getting closer! BB x

Bitterns and Boomers

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

The Flat, 21.03.

It can be done! After living in Somerset for the best part of two years, I finally made it to the Avalon Marshes. It’s a little out of the way – as fenlands often are – and, being without a car of my own, impossible to reach outside of term-time, but with a little planning I managed to successfully navigate the one bus there and back again after school this morning. Worth it? Absolutely!

The Avalon Marshes are a network of pools, channels and reedbeds that stretch from the west of the festival town of Glastonbury across the Somerset Levels. Being naturally averse to crowds, Glastonbury and its ilk have never even crossed my mind as a way to spend the summer, so I’ve never had any cause to come this way before. Evidently, I was missing out. This mystical corner of the British Isles has a real charm to it. The 376 bus dropped me off outside The Royal Oak in neighbouring Street and I struck out across country for the marshes from there. Along the way, I walked in the sightline of the legendary Glastonbury Tor. It was a balmy spring day – the fourth in a run of consistently sunny days – so the Tor was drawing a growing crowd of sun-seekers, like a sweet on an anthill. If I had a little more time, I might have gone and had a look myself.

The magic started before I even reached the Glastonbury Canal that runs into the fens. I had just come upon the first of the reedbeds that herald the Avalon Marshes when I heard the sound that I had come here for: a low, pipe-like boom. A sound that inspired many a myth and folktale in the British Isles, and that once was surely heard all across this island. The noise belongs to the great bittern, a singularly beautiful and cryptic variety of heron that is surely the prince of the fens. I can’t remember whether or not I have ever conclusively heard a booming bittern before – my memories of a possible encounter with one in Stodmarsh when I was a lad are a bit hazy – so I have hesitated to add them to my life list thus far.

Today, however, I was left in no doubt. I must have heard at least six different individuals booming all across the fens, including one that was so close that I could swear I heard its resonant intake of breath before each boom. The great bittern is a master of camouflage, however, with a plumage so perfectly suited to its life within the reedbeds that it is almost completely invisible when “bitterning”, so despite the fact that they were making enough noise to be heard from Glastonbury, I never saw so much as a feather. But I wasn’t disheartened in the slightest. Just to hear that booming sound was worth the journey out here. I’ll have to do it again sometime.

While I was scanning the reeds for one of the bitterns, a swan came swimming by, giving me something to train the lens on.

The swans weren’t the only great white birds in the marshes. Another species that has drawn me to the Avalon Marshes today is the Great White Egret, a relative newcomer to the British Isles. The largest of the egrets is actually a heron, a fact that is obvious from its size, which is considerable. I’ve seen these beautiful birds before on the continent, but this would be the first time I’ve seen one here in the UK. When I was a kid, this would have been a very rare find, but much has changed since then. The Avalon Marshes have around fifty breeding pairs, which is frankly ridiculous, considering that they only started breeding here a few years ago. Even the other birdwatchers in the Avalon Hide barely batted an eyelid when one flew into view. It’s a sign that, no matter how bad things may seem, life always finds a way.

On that note, I feel I have to talk about one of the things I haven’t missed about birdwatching: the manspreading. The term didn’t exist when I was a kid, but it certainly does fit the bill.

I thought I’d check out the Avalon Hide to see if I could find one of those elusive bitterns, but it had been staked out by a very different group of boomers, who had each selected a window to themselves and laid out their gear all about them: a panoply of scopes, binoculars and cannon-like lenses that made even my monster zoom lens seem like a hand gun. Only one window was available, which looked out back the way I had come. I stuck around for about twenty-five minutes, listening to their familiar birder-talk, but it quickly became apparent that they meant to stick around until sunset to see if either the bitterns or the resident barn owl would make an appearance, and as I had to catch a bus home, I had to cede the hide to them.

I explored the “cattle class” alternative screens below the tower, very much aware of the scopes poking out of the windows above me like artillery. Sometimes a bird-hide can look a lot like a pill-box.

A friendly chap and his wife restored my faith in the hobby when they pointed me in the direction of a water rail they had just seen, but it never did reappear from its hiding place in the reeds, so we went out separate ways with a shrug. Fortunately for me, there was plenty to see: perhaps sixty or seventy shovelers out on the lake, along with attendant flocks of gadwall, mallard, tufted duck, teal and coot, as well as a few noisy great-crested grebes. Most of them were much too far for even my faithful 500mm, but a robin that followed me out of one of the hides was perfectly happy to let me take his photograph, which definitely made up for it.

As this was my first sortie to Avalon, I didn’t want to end up stranded by missing the last bus home, so I left with plenty of time to get back to Glastonbury. It was a quiet walk once I’d put the birders and the bitterns behind me, and I only ran into two other walkers out with their dogs along the trail. There seems to be a small gypsy community on the edge of the marshes – something about the layout of their encampment seemed strangely familiar, not to mention the presence of two old and very battered horse-drawn caravans in the yard. When I reached the edge of the marshes, I stopped to look back in the direction I had come, and when I turned back to Glastonbury I saw something staring back at me from the edge of the reeds. I thought it might have been a muntjac at first, but it was much too big for that. It was, of course, one of our native roe deer. Fearless as ever, it didn’t even flinch when I raised my camera.

One thing’s for sure: I’ll be back. It’s only a £3 bus ride from Taunton and, while the return journey is broken up with a layover in Somerton, it’s perfectly doable in a day. I’ll be back for the bitterns, either later in the spring or next year, depending on how busy my duty weekends are after the holidays.

This time next week, I’ll be in Madrid. From there it’s only a matter of hours until I set out for South America. That has come around shockingly fast. I’m starting to get very excited! I’ve had a full month to put the camera through its paces and I think I’ve got the hang of the lens and its demands now – the way it handles, the settings it requires for optimum output and, of course, its weight. Now all I need is to be out there already. Thank you Avalon for being the last stage of boot camp for my trusty Nikon companion. Here’s to the next grand adventure! BB x