Nature in Peru

Promperú promueve candidatura del Amazonas por Internet y redes sociales

2011-02-20T12:43:00.000-05:00

Lima, feb. 20 (ANDINA). La Comisión de Promoción del Perú para la Exportación y el Turismo (Promperú) promueve en su sitio web y redes sociales la votación por el Río Amazonas/Bosque Tropical en el concurso que elegirá a las siete maravillas naturales del mundo.

“Es una candidatura por la que se vota vía online, así que la idea es que se promocione por esa vía en nuestra página web y a través de redes sociales como Facebook”, declaró Rocío Merino, directora de Promoción de Turismo de Promperú.

Según las últimas evaluaciones publicadas por los organizadores del certamen, el Río Amazonas/Bosque Tropical se encuentra entre los candidatos favoritos para la gran final por los niveles de votación.

Este atractivo natural comparte las preferencias junto a las cataratas Salto del Ángel e Iguazú, el mar Muerto, las islas Galápagos y Maldivas, y el Gran Cañón, entre otros destinos. El certamen concluye este año.

Merino explicó que esta iniciativa de promoción del voto por el Amazonas va de la mano con el proyecto de mejorar las herramientas de promoción del turismo, tanto interno como receptivo, mediante las facilidades que otorga el Internet.

“Hay mercados que hemos analizado y donde el 80 por ciento de los consumidores contratan servicios turísticos mediante la red, que no sólo es importante para que voten por destinos peruanos sino para mejorar la actividad turística”, remarcó.

Dijo que con ese fin se estima destinar un presupuesto de dos millones de nuevos soles, que implicará una web de turismo receptivo e interno renovada y esquemas de e-learning (educación a distancia) para que operadores del mundo conozcan el destino Perú, entre otras iniciativas”, agregó.

Parque Nacional de Manu

Peru: Tingo Maria National Park celebrates 45th anniversary

2010-05-14T11:57:00.000-05:00

Peru: Tingo Maria National Park celebrates 45th anniversary Tingo Maria National Park, which is the second largest protected area in Peru, will celebrate its anniversary number 45 with several different activities, according to its Coordinator, Luis Flores Cordero.

The official highligted the fact that the social aid program “Construyendo Peru” has collaborated to improve the access roads to this park, and said that it will grow by another 12 hectares, after an investment of S/.6 million (some US $2 million).

The expansion of the park will allow to open a new touristic route, which will offer three days and two nights camping tour, including several natural landmarks and birdwatching activities.

“Our idea is turning Tingo María into one of the most important tourism destinations in Peru,” said Flores Cordero.

He added that on Thursday, May 13, they will held singing and poetry contests, as well as beauty pageants: on Friday May 14, there will be sports competitions, and the admissions to the famous Cueva de las Lechuzas will be free.

(Photo: Radio Shalom)

River cruise through Peruvian Amazon among world's best

2010-05-06T08:18:00.004-05:00

The river cruise through the Peruvian Amazon, one of the most exciting, memorable experiences in life, is among the best river cruises in the world according to Daily Mail.
"There are still communities whose only connection with the rest of the world are the waters of the Amazon. Iquitos is Peru's third-largest city, yet it is surrounded by impassable jungle and a tangle of waterways," reads a dailymail.co.uk article published today.
The trip takes visitors away from the main river and deep into the flooded jungle of the Pacaya-Samiria National Reserve, where butterflies, birds and monkeys mingle.
The article also includes descriptions of Highland Lochs (Scotland), Amsterdam to Trier, Rhine and Mosel (Netherlands and Germany), Rhone and Saone (Provence, France), Canal du Midi (France), Russian Waterways (St Petersburg to Moscow), Danube (Budapest to Bucharest), and Mekong (Vietnam and Cambodia).
The Best Peru Tour: Tambopata and Manu national Park

National Park of Manu expects over 3,000 tourists after rehabilitation of road

2010-04-21T07:49:00.001-05:00

More than 3,000 local and foreign tourists are expected to visit the National Park of Manu this year, after the reopening and rehabilitation of the road Paucartambo – Kosñipata – Manu which was blocked for more than 40 kilometers by landslides triggered by incessant rains, reported the head of this natural attraction, Vladimir Ramirez Prada.

Some 19 tourist lodges and accommodations located along the route, from the Ajanacu region or Salida del Sol in Paucartambo to the Manu, are ready to receive visitors who couldn't access the site for over a month.

“There are many admission requests and we are authorizing them; we received the visit of more than 40 tourists during the past week,” stated Ramirez.

The government in coordination with concerned entities are working to promote the arrival of tourists, especially from Europe and the United States, and in a lesser amount from Latin America.

Before the landslides in Paucartambo, the National Park of Manu used to attract tourists from different countries who arrived to enjoy the Manu river basin, considered of high tourist value.

More info:

Manu Biosphere Reserve, Peru

Manu National Park Map

Manu National Park Photo Gallery

Suggest Tour: Peru Explorer 19 days/ 18 nights

Treasures in Peru's Amazon: Pucallpa

2010-03-16T08:26:00.001-05:00

In Pucullpa, you can shape clay handicrafts, take authentic iconography home with you (tattooed on your skin) and learn more about ayahuasca from the Shipibo tribe

“Magical, delightful and traditional,” “an unforgettable experience,” “a visit that must be repeated,” are some of the expressions from tourists after visiting the native community of San Francisco, located just an hour from the city of Pucallpa.

It is considered one of the most representative communities of the region (they still preserve their customs and their traditions, as well as their language). However, San Francisco offers much more than just a cultural trip, explains Giovanna Vega, General Manager of Amazon World, an agency that offers this package to travelers.

The Ancestral Route

In order to arrive at San Francisco, crossing Lake Yarinacocha is necessary. The trip takes an hour, during which you can appreciate the richness of flora and fauna that characterizes the Amazon. A group of small natives will welcome you with a song in their native tongue and they will accompany you from the port to a “maloca” (a typical residence in the area) which is developed for tourist activities which have taken place there for the past two years. It is here where you will find women with long hair and painted faces, and shirtless, barefoot men with dodgy looks and big stomachs. In this instant, you will feel that you are in another world, in the deepest part of the jungle, where time has ceased to move.

To the rhythm of the drum

While the adults play different wooden instruments that they themselves have made, the children will invite you to dance in the intense heat, which at this time, is more than 32°C. The beating of the drum marks the rhythm of the jumps, and the flutes sweeten the tone. While holding hands and forming a circle, the tribe and their visitors don’t stop laughing, as they feel they form part of a festival that climaxes in the applause of the dancers.

Original Souvenirs

Afterwards you may visit Graciala Valles, a native expert in pottery that will demonstrate her talent before the astonished eyes of the visitors. The best part is the handling of the cold dough, formed from a mix of earth and water, and making your own dish and taking it home as a souvenir. Also, women may put their original designs on part of their body as well. For this temporary tattoo, which will last a few weeks, they use a natural dye with which they have dyed their hair since their ancestral times.

Mystic Adventure

The trip will continue until you arrive at the house of the Shipibo painter Alberto Muñoz, who will explain his art and the relationship that it has with ayahuasca. This artist and teacher, who holds the sessions in which one drinks from this traditional plant, explains how the community uses the ayahuasca for medicinal purposes. If you can not drink ayahuasca, when you leave this place you will know much more about its characteristics and you will have the opportunity to try it on your next visit. If you have more time, the program can include other activities such as traditional fishing, where you will have the opportunity to learn how to make arrows.

After various hours of cultural exchange, the time will come to say goodbye. Tourists usually acquire many of the handmade products of the tribe. The prices of their artwork range between 10 and 30 soles. As you board the boat, you will be surrounded by children. The spectacle will climax when they launch themselves from the raft into the deepest part of the lake.

Travelers should spend a day with the tribe, but if they so choose, they can stay living with them for up to a month.

Much More to Visit

If you are planning to go to hot Pucallpa, you can see the cathedral built in 2005, which shows off wood-work and stained-glass made by the craftsmen of Chacas, in Huaraz. Don’t forget to try a succulent patarashca or the famous juanes accompanied by a refreshing local fruit juice. And when night arrives, there is nothing better to do than enjoy a good drink in the discoteca El Perico, located just minutes away from the center. This discoteca also has a restaurant and room for 700 people.

How to Get There

From Lima there are two daily flights to Pucallpa via LAN Peru. The flight lasts 55 minutes.

Discover Arequipa: The fog forests of Antiqua

2010-03-11T09:11:00.002-05:00

Atiquipa is a town so small that it hides in the hills of the coast of Arequipa. Only a large welcome sign at kilometer 600 of the Panamericana Sur serves as a confirmation for travelers that they are on the right track and if they take the detour in the direction opposite to the sea, they will find the town.

In the town itself, there is not much to see and the main attractions of the district are scattered around it. Secluded beaches, archeology and nature are the favorite options for those looking to satisfy their explorer soul.

Coming from Lima, we suggest you visit first some pre-Hispanic towns.

One of these is Pueblo Viejo (kilometer 589 on the highway). To get there you must walk for about 40 minutes. You will be able to appreciate their masonry-based buildings with columns, lintels and niches. Then in Ayparipa (kilometer 599), you can see the colcas (deposits) and platforms standing out in the landscape. The Waca gorge in Puerto Inca (kilometer 610) is an archaeological complex you shouldn't miss. The famous chair of the Inca can be found there.

Steep inclines are a constant feature in these walks, so wear sneakers or good hiking footwear.

Of course, the coastal landscapes are the protagonists; especially those decorated by cliffs, green hills and pristine beaches like Jihuay (kilometer 601), or rustic towns like Silaca type (kilometer 596), where it is almost a duty to take a dip in the pools of clear water.

How to get there

Atiquipa is a district in the province of Caravelí, Arequipa.

It's best to go in car, since public transport is difficult to find.

Almost Like Heaven

It is also worth your while to venture into the town of Atiquipa. Go by motorbike or car to the top of the nearby hills, where, 900 meters above sea level, the ecosystem creates a sort of cloud forest. Here, the local people have placed plastic mesh structures, which function as “fog lamps.”

The fog redistributed water and preserves the vegetation, fauna and agriculture intact.

Atop those hills, a cool breeze blows so it is best to wear something warm, even more so if the day is cloudy. The journey takes about 90 minutes.

Get away from modern life and discover Peru through rural tourism.

SUGGESTED PERU TOURS

The enchanted forest of Chaparrí, in northern Peru

2010-03-08T09:58:00.003-05:00

The Chaparrí Ecological Reserve is fascinating. Entering it gives you the feeling of being enchanted, in the middle of nowhere and, at the same time, in the center of the world. It makes you feel reconciled with nature, full of life and relaxed to the extreme.

In this natural paradise there is no Internet, no cell phone signal and no cable channels. However, it just takes one look at the impressive landscape of endless dry forest to realise that those urban details are unnecessary.
Waking up to the sweet melody of a bird, having breakfast together with hummingbirds and reading a book while breathing fresh air is a luxury that you can enjoy here.

If you enjoy walking, this place has long trails to do it and you will most likely be surprised by a coastal fox, which is the smallest of South America, or by a spectacled bear pulling fruit off a tree. But fear not “because the animals that inhabit Chaparrí do not feel threatened and therefore do not attack,” explains its director, Heinz Plenge.

Variety
The reserve is located only 70 kilometers from Chiclayo. It covers 34,412 hectares of dry forest and is named after the imposing mountain that dominates the region.

This is an area that suffers long periods of drought that may last up to three years.
In this place there lives about 30 spectacled bears, Andean condors and the White-winged Guan, which was thought to be extinct until this place brought it back to life.

Chaparrí is also home to over 220 bird species, 36 of which are endemic and 5 threatened. The best hours to view these birds are dawn and dusk when the temperature drops. “If you are looking to see bats or the nine species of owls that exist here, you should go for a walk at night,” advises the scientific director of the reserve, Rob Williams.
You can go for a day to tour major areas or may choose to stay overnight at the lodge that operates inside the reserve, thus being able to live a full natural experience.

For a Day
The tour begins at the interpretive center, where a guide will explain more about the fauna and flora of the reserve.
Walking through the trail you will run into a well of natural water that comes from the vines. You will also see small amphibians and plants everywhere.

In the snake-house you can observe 15 species of boas including the famous rattlesnake, which is one of the most poisonous in the area and the cat snake, so called because it only eats mice.
“Another important point is the shaman or Mochica priest ramada, where spiritual sessions are held, tomas de San Pedro and other mystical tourism activities,” says the guide and resident of the area, Juan Carrasco.

And the most fun part for the children will be feeding the young bear that is in captivity. “He is the only one in that condition and we can not release him because he was rescued from a circus, where they removed the teeth with which he feeds,” says Carrasco.

How to get there

Start in Chiclayo and take the route to Chongoyape, which is right next to the airport. You must take a detour to the left on km 63. 150m away you will see the Asociation for the Conservation of Nature and Sustainable Tourism of Chaparrí where you will meet with you assigned guide and pay the entry fee. Then you will drive along a paved road for an hour.
More about Chaparrí

Last year, the Chaparrí Ecological Reserve received more than 5,000 visitors. 85% were domestic tourists.

The reserve has five rangers, who are residents of the surrounding community and know the animals and secrets of the reserve.

Know that it is forbidden to make loud noise, because animals can feel threatened.

Smoking or lighting fires without permission is prohibited.

It is important to wear neutral colors. It is not forbidden, but you should avoid wearing red or orange.

Do not forget to bring insect repellent, sunscreen, a hat, flashlight and a rain cover.

Tennis shoes are perfect for hiking through the area.

Weather
In Peru's summer months (December through March) the area is green. During the winter, it is so dry that it reveals all the species that inhabit it. It is also known that the area is inhabited by wild cats, ocelots and stealthy pumas, which have only been seen by the cameras that were hidden in the plants to study the fauna.

More info
Photo Gallery
Tour Suggested

Hiking to Gocta Falls, and avoiding the siren's call

2010-02-27T12:57:00.003-05:00

“¿Quisieran que les cuento la historia de la mistica sirena? Would you like to hear the story of the mystical mermaid?” Señora Teo tapped her walking stick on the trail and glanced over her shoulder. I nodded, too out of breath to answer.

“Not too long ago, there was a shaman named Gregorio,” she began, without a trace of exertion. “He and his wife lived by the river, and he would often go up to the base of the waterfall and speak with the mermaid that lived there…”

Señora Teo leads the way to Gocta falls.

Señora Teo’s story was on the surface a cautionary tale about the caprices of mystical creatures, but stories like this one could help explain why a waterfall as tall as Gocta remained unknown to the outside world until 2006. It’s location in a blind ravine in the remote Peruvian province of Amazonas might help, too: Amazonas’ capital, Chachapoyas, was unreachable by paved road until a few years ago, and the airport has been in sporadic operation since 2003.

Gocta gushes during the rainy season but is a thin ribbon of water in the dry season.

More info on Gocta Falls

Click here for recommendations on lodging in our interview with Rafo Leon, host of the travel show "Tiempo de Viaje."

At 771 meters (2,531 feet), however, Gocta Falls ranks among the world’s giants. Stefan Ziemendorff, the German who first measured the falls, announced in March 2006 that the falls were the third highest in the world. Since then the claim has been challenged, and Gocta is currently rated as 16th by the World Waterfall Database. Part of the challenge relates to Gocta’s segmented nature: the falls are broken into two segments of 230 meters on top and 540 down below.

In three short years a tourism infrastructure has sprung up in the nearby town of Cocachimba, in the form of a cooperative of guides and other tourism industry workers. Our guide, Señora Teo, pointed out the improvements being made in the area for the expected increase in tourism: a large hotel that, when finished, could probably house the entire small population of Cocachimba; a few restaurants, both in town and one along the trail; and a small hotel about an hour’s walk along the trail, with all the amenities, where one could relax for a few days enjoying the wildlife, the scenery, and birdwatching.

Señora Teo is one of the fourteen guides that take turns leading visitors from Cocachimba to the base of the falls. The trail itself was excellently if steeply built to accommodate the influx of visitors. I asked Señora Teo how people had gotten to the falls before, and she shrugged. “Nobody went,” she said. She told us that the total elevation change would less that 100 meters, a deceptive number that doesn’t take into account the mountainous terrain that separates the town of Cocachimba from the waterfall.

If we thought we’d only be seeing a tall waterfall, we were wrong. Señora Teo led us through fields of sugar cane, corn, beans, beets, pineapple, banana, potato and carrot, pointing out local agricultural practices as we went (such as the planting of a stalk of corn and a bean vine together, so that the beans can use the corn as support as they grow). We also passed several sugar cane mills where the cane is pressed in a giant wringer powered by oxen, the juice extracted, then boiled for six hours to form the dry, condensed panela.

Getting There: The hike itself took 6 hours, though that’s taking into account Rob’s photo pitstops, and the time relaxing beside the river. From Chachapoyas we took a collectivo for 10 soles which drove us up to Cocachimba, but as we didn’t arrange transportation back we ended up walking 5 kilometers down to the main road and hitchhiking back to Chachapoyas (getting a ride is easy in Amazonas region, despite the general lack of traffic). As tourism to the area picks up it will probably be easier to reach Cocachimba, but for now it’s still a wild and unpaved adventure. Just like we like ‘em.

From cultivated land we passed into old growth jungle, draped with vines and festooned with orchids. Giant ferns rose up beside the trail, eerily prehistoric. Since the construction of the trail much of the wildlife has made itself scarce, but the first tourists to arrive in the forest had been confronted by large yellow monkeys, Sra. Teo said, which surrounded them in the trees and screamed at them, throwing sticks.

From time to time we could see the falls through breaks in the foliage: In the rainy season it would be a torrent, but today it was a long, thin white ribbon twisting down out of the mountains.

After nearly two hours hiking we arrived at the base of the bottom fall, where the water did not strike the ground, but simply dissipated as a mist swirling down in waves and eddies. The waters created a wind of their own that was chilly in the sunlight.

At the base of the falls is a pool, beautiful for swimming but with a hole in the center that draws in water and spits it out two kilometers downstream. It can draw in swimmers, as well, Señora Teo cautioned, but the day was too chilly for us to be tempted. The water of the pool and the river was a deep shade of rust fading to black — a result of the iron in the stones of the cliff.

It was easy to imagine a mermaid lurking in those dark waters, waiting for us to leave so she could reclaim her grotto.

Researchers track the rare Spectacled Bear in northern Peru

2010-02-26T08:18:00.002-05:00

The four wheel drive truck stopped at 8 in the evening in the middle of nowhere. There was no longer a trail to follow so we carefully got out of the truck. Jose Vallejos and Robyn Appleton, members of the Society for the Spectacled Bear Conservation (SBC), and I adjusted our headlights and our backpacks and headed to Cerro Venado on foot. Three hours later we met with Isa Sánchez and Javier Vallejos, also members of the SBC, in the first camp site under the light of the crescent moon and the stars. Me moved some stones to level the ground, laid out our sleeping bags and said goodnight.

From Canada to Chiclayo
Robyn Appleton has had a fascination for bears ever since she was a girl. She studied biology and got a masters on these admirable mammals. On one of her trips, she decided to visit Peru to see a friend who worked in the Chaparrí Reserve. From that moment she fell in love with the Peruvian spectacled bear.

At the end of 2006, together with his friend and right hand, Javier Vallejos, he started a long journey on foot searching for bears in the surroundings of Laquipampa and Incahuasi until he reached Batán Grande. He was convinced that he would find them. One December morning, after unloading their backpacks from a mototaxi and wandering for hours, they saw their first bear. Fifteen minutes later, they saw another one climbing down a hill. They camped on the top of a hill for a week in order to watch these animals.

When they started to run out of food (and without the will or strength to go to the nearest town to get more) they saw a mother bear with her two cubs walk right in front of them right before entering the dry woods. In three weeks times, they had the opportunity to observe over eight spectacled bears. The study had begun. The SBC had taken its first step.

Laura the bear
We awoke at 5 in the morning thanks to the cries of some emerald parakeets and an eagle flying over us. Javier and Isa discovered that Laura, one of their favorite bears, had given birth to her first cub a couple of days ago. The night before our arrival, they had left her sleeping a couple of meters away from the campsite. Well, 200 meters up a 60º slope, to be exact; that is, a two hour walk.

Laura was one of the first bears that they found when hey started the project and ever since she was a year and a half, she let them approach her without showing signs of fear. That is why her, and two other bears, were chosen to be part of the first chapter of the project. Each one of them was equipped with a GPS collar to monitor their movements. The preliminary report that was sent to the General Management of Flora and Fauna of the Ministry of Agriculture (DGFFS) says:

“The data that we have received from the GPS collars are of great importance because they help us understand the life span of wild bears in the dry woods and how they use their habitat. The most important positions were given in Ocotber 2008 when we found a bear in an area that we thought bears never reached. This place consisted of 100 to 500 meter tall rocks (…) a young male walked over 150 kilometers in less than a week. We are now understanding the needs of a young male and the living space that a bear requires. We have also confirmed that males change the use of their habitat during the different seasons. In summer they descend to 200 meters over sea level to eat sapodilla fruit and find females. During the winter, the young males climb back up to the most remote areas where they can feed off the pasallo trees, bromeliads and snails.”

Laura was lying next to her cub at the foot of a rock wall. When she saw us arrive she shyly growled as a warning sign. The cub raised its eyes to look at us and then went back to playing with a dry branch. We stayed there all day observing them. The temperature was of 32 degrees Celsius and we stood on 20 square centimeters on the slope but we did not mind. The show was amazing.

The cub was restless and did not stop playing. It climbed on its mother’s back then it climbed back down and bit her paw; then her ear. It wobbled while inspecting the area and then went back to sleep. It drank Laura’s milk in intervals of approximately one hour making constant slurping noises. Then it got up and drank its mother’s saliva as if it were kissing her. Laura always played along.

When the sun started to set, she placed her cub face up on the ground and started licking it as if she were bathing ad cleaning it before bed. We collected our things and walked up the slope looking for a place to camp and stay the night. When Laura saw us leave, she got up and approached the spot where we had been to check that everything was in order.

More about the bears

The Spectacled Bear is the only one in South America. It became known around the world thanks to Micahel Bond’s Paddington Bear which told the story of a Peruvian Spectacled Bear who loved jelly.

This bear lives in the mountain range from Venezuela to Bolivia, including Ecuador, Colombia and Peru. In our country, they can be found at altitudes between 250 and 4500 meters.

The bears are four to six and a half feet long. Males weigh approximately 308 pounds, females about 176 lbs.

They are mainly vegetarian: they eat bromeliads, berries, any kind of cacti to keep hydrated, the heart of the pasallo tree, sapote fruit, snails and insects.

Life in Cerro Venado
South of the Laquipampa Wildlife Refuge, 60km north of Chiclayo, past the Batán Grande town and across orange, onion, corn and mango crops, we arrived in front of a fenced wall. This is where the hectares belonging to the El Cebú Farmers’ Committee in the Mochumí Viejo community begin. This is also the area of study of the spectacled bear in the northern dried woods. It is an extreme rural area that holds more life than we could ever imagine.

Across this limit we find a plain forest full of sapodilla and carob trees and giant cacti. Cerro Venado is a couple of kilometers away from this first site. It has almost vertical slopes in some places, flat rock slabs on its walls, massive weed and dehydrated tree sprouts on dry seasons and exuberant vegetation during the rainy season.

Despite the complicated conditions, life always appears here. Eight small pools of water or jagueys have been found in the highlands of this area which are the main available source of water during most of the year. The project has the goal of detecting the geographical distribution and abundance of bears in this unprotected – and protected, like Laquipampa – area. To achieve this, twenty “trap” cameras have been installed in these jagueys in order to complement the information collected from observation.

To the date, 33 bears have been identified in the area and valuable information about their feeding habits and journeys have been collected as well as pictures of the abundant fauna that lives there along with them like pumas, ocelots, deer, wildcats, etc. the most interesting finding is the proof that spectacled bears reproduce in their wild state.

Colca valley agriculture platforms declared Peru's Cultural Heritage

2010-02-24T20:16:00.001-05:00

Colca valley andenes (platforms built for developing agriculture in the Incan times) have been just been declared as National Heritage by the National Institute of Culture (INC), reported Jose Luis Talavera, from the Colca Authority.

The area included in this new regulation is spread along the villages of Tuti, Chivay, Coporaque, Yanque, Ichupampa, Achoma, Lari, Maca, Madrigal, Tapay and Cabanaconde, reports Checkperu.com.

The Resolution N° 262/INC, states that from now on any infrastructure works, as well as mining, building or agricultural project that may affect the landscape will have to be previously approved by the INC.

Talavera also informed that they are coordinating with an NGO to preserve the andenes, since they are located in private properties so the state cannot directly invest there

New waterfall promoted as tourist attraction in Ucayali

2010-02-16T08:43:00.006-05:00

A recently discovered waterfall, located in El Bombo area in the Curimana district of the Padre Abad province in Ucayali, will be promoted as a new tourist attraction of this Peruvian region.

The waterfall, called El Bombo de Curimana, is about ten meters high and 5 meters wide and is surrounded by lush vegetation and various kinds of trees, such as shihuahuaco, estoraque, quinilla, among others.

Different fish species have also been found in the area, such as fasaco, bujurquis, carachama, bagres and others. “This is one of the most fabulous places of Curimana,” authorities said.

Because of the clear waters and warm weather, this natural attraction is a great place for activities like fishing, refreshing baths and camping.

More info
About Iquitos and North Amazon

Amazon River leads Natural Wonders contest

2010-02-12T11:18:00.003-05:00

Lima, Feb. 10 (ANDINA).- The Amazon Rainforest/River leads the group of the top 14 candidates in the contest that will choose the world’s New Seven Wonders of Nature, according to the ranking published today by the New 7 Wonders Foundation.

This group also includes the Salto Angel, in Venezuela; The Great Canyon in the United States of America; and the Iguazu Falls in Argentina and Brazil among other world attractions that received most of the votes.

According to the event’s organizers, the Amazon River has registered so far a high percentage in the voting.

The list published is divided in two parts, the top 14 and the bottom 14, based on the number of votes.

The Amazon River goes through South American countries like Peru, Colombia, Brazil, Ecuador, French Guiana and Surinam.

More information:
Amazon Map

Source: Andina News

Peru creates another natural protected area

2010-02-03T18:15:00.001-05:00

The Peruvian government has created another protected natural area between the high basins of the rivers Zaña and Chancay-Lambayeque (in Spanish), in the districts of Catache, Calquis and La Florida, in Cajamarca, as well as Oyotún, in Lambayeque.

The new natural protected area is called Udima Reserve, with an extension of 30 503,45 hectares aiming to enhance the conservation of the highlands where the rivers Zaña y Chancay have their origins, since they play a very important role providing clean water to the whole valley.

Another of the reasons for creating this area is to fight against deforestation and controlling the erosion, conditions which contribute to produce natural disasters in the Zaña basin during the rainy season, especially during “El Niño”.

The area also is a home for the quina tree (Cinchona calisaya), ícon of the National Coat of Arms, and with important medicinal qualities.

Resource: Living in Peru, RPP News

Peru's Wild RainforestPeru's Wild Rainforest

2009-08-24T09:18:00.000-05:00

Stay at an Amazon eco-lodge to experience a jungle teeming with life

Paddington Bear is said to have lived in "darkest Peru" with his Aunt Lucy until she moved to the Home for Retired Bears in Lima. My suspicion is that he came from some part of the Peruvian rainforest.

Before taking this trip, I only associated the Amazon jungle with Brazil, so discovering that it includes part of Peru adds to a sense of mystery. We take a short flight from Cusco to Puerto Maldonaldo, leave surplus luggage in a travel company office, then board a motorized boat for a half-hour trip down the Madres del Dios River -- a wide, muddy tributary of the Amazon.

Gallery: Explore Peru
Gallery: Discover Lima
Gallery: See More of Peru

We hike three kilometres of trail, then spend a final half hour in a canoe being paddled across Sandoval Lake. As one guide book says, "getting there is half the fun".

In the late afternoon, after a brief recovery time in the lodge, we take a two-hour boat trip, being silently paddled around the banks of this huge oxbow lake, a non-intrusive way to observe in safety. The boat is two canoes joined by a viewing platform, catamaran style.

Lonely Planet guide to Peru
Lonely Planet guide to Lima

Every aspect of the environment seems teeming with life. It is almost sensory overload as even the air is alive with noises from the jungle. We are treated to the raucous passing of a large troupe of squirrel monkeys crashing from tree to tree.

It is understated to describe bird life as abundant as we see everything from herons to vultures. As dusk falls, there are waves of different species of birds taking turns to devour the insects -- once the night hawks have had their fill, hoards of bats swoop in the fading light.

Apparently it is just as active below the water's surface with piranhas, stingrays, and electric eels -- information that reduces the temptation of trailing your hand in the water.

We are told the story of a giant anaconda that tried to pull a dog off a boat and how the owner lost a piece of arm in a successful attempt to save his pet.

Modest-sized white caiman (from the crocodile family) watch us from the banks and only dive when our boat gets too close. Adult caiman are reputed to be formidable; we hear of another lodge where meat was thrown into the water so tourists could actually see the larger black caiman, until a lone photographer was attacked and killed.

Perhaps it's better not to disturb natural cycles. I'm content just to see the shore dotted with menacing sets of red gleams, the reflection of their eyes in flashlight beams.

The next trip around the lake leaves at six the following morning, a thick mist giving the scene a magical quality. We are rewarded with our first sighting of a family of giant otters jostling and diving and making a sound rather like Chewbacca from Star Wars.

Later, through binoculars we see them munching on part of the six kilos of fish that each adult consumes every day.

The lodge is really happy that this family is increasing; a sign that tourists are not causing much of an "ecological footprint." The lodge deserves the positive publicity produced by a BBC documentary filmed on this lake about the life of giant otters.

A guide leads a small group on a botanical walk through jungle trails. She describes the normal squawks of multi-coloured macaws, and attributes their absence this morning to the looming presence of sentinel hawks.

We hear stories about how the garlic tree protects animals sleeping among its roots. We marvel at walking trees with their many small trunks allowing them to move up to 50 centimetres a year in order to get more sunlight.

Products from the jungle are amazing in their scope and variety: everything from leaves that make lipstick to bark that can bring about abortion.

We discuss the ethics concerning the profits made by certain North American pharmaceutical companies who base various drugs on rainforest products yet provide no recognition to the country of origin.

There is one intriguing product which, when taken after fasting, is supposed to cause you to see episodes from your past, both good and bad.

Our guide tells us of his experience with a Curandero or shaman who made a potion including the bark of the kapok or ironwood tree. J. K. Rowling should come here if she needs additional inspiration to end the Harry Potter series.

Sandoval Lake Lodge is built out of ecologically correct driftwood mahogany and is partly owned by a non-profit conservation group. It provides a restful haven with excellent food, and a row of hammocks for reading and dozing through afternoon heat.

In the evenings mosquito nets are arranged around beds, although the mosquitoes are surprisingly minimal. The generator goes off at 10 p.m. sharp, ending all activity as the lodge is plunged into darkness.

Many guests are keen naturalists, like a couple from Scotland who came to see just one bird that inhabits this particular area of Peru. But we are content to watch the sunset over the water, and wonder why Paddington ever decided to leave. Darkest Peru has so much to entice you to stay.

On the web:

Sandoval Lake Lodge: www.inkanatura.com/sandovallakelodge.asp

Scientists get dirt on mystery plant

2009-08-20T20:14:00.003-05:00

May 5, 2009, by Kim mcguire, www.stltoday.com

The quest to solve a 70-year-old mystery led Rainer Bussmann and Douglas Sharon to northern Peru to interview traditional healers, or curanderos, about a plant that seemingly vanished more than a thousand years ago.

Known as the Ulluchu, the plant turns up in ancient artwork, often seen floating over the soldiers marching off to be sacrificed or flying priests.

But while the curanderos have heard of the Ulluchu, it is not something they use. They cannot describe the plant, and it has no place in their language.

Almost eight years later, however, Bussmann and Sharon have identified the Ulluchu while showing how the plant might have played a key role in human sacrifice. Not only does it appear the plant triggered hallucinations for priests, but it also helped get the blood flowing for those on the sacrificial altar.

And in a surprising twist, the discovery may have turned up modern medical therapies for some age-old health problems.

"For the last 70 years people have been trying to identify this fruit but couldn't," said Bussmann, an ethnobotanist at the Missouri Botanical Garden. "And when our work started, I thought to myself, 'This is not going to be simple.'"

To understand how Bussmann cracked the case of the Ulluchu, the story goes back to 1930. That's when a Peruvian archaeologist first noted the appearance of a comma-shaped fruit frequently shown in the artwork of the Moche, a agriculture-based culture that lived in northern Peru from A.D. 100 to 800.

The archaeologist dubbed the fruit Ulluchu, and scientists have been trying to identify it ever since. Cousins of the papaya and wild avocado are just some of theories that have been scientifically dismantled.

Bussmann became intrigued by the Ulluchu mystery while working at the University of Texas. And in 2001, he and Sharon began conducting fieldwork in northern Peru, home of the Moche.

"We would go to these markets and people would say, 'We think we know what that is, but it's not being sold here,'" said Sharon, the retired director of the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California-Berkley. "Well, one of the reasons it wasn't being used is because the Ulluchu seems to show up during sacrifices. And no one is being sacrificed anymore."

They did find some evidence in the Quechua language, where Ulluchu roughly translates to "penis pepper."

More on that later.

Still, Bussmann had to sort through more than a thousand botanical suspects in one of the most biodiverse spots in the world in hopes of singling out the Ulluchu.

Then a breakthrough.

Archeological excavations at the ancient Moche city of Sipan and the tombs of Dos Cabezas unearthed actual desiccated remains of the fruit. And true to the Quechua translation, the plant indeed has a phallic shape.

"Rainer is a first-rate taxonomist," Sharon said. "He studied every physical characteristic of these plants until he was absolutely certain we had it."

Bussmann began to suspect their elusive plant had hallucinogenic properties. Remember the flying priests? One of them appears to be holding an instrument that Bussmann believes is snuff tube.

With it, priests might inhale ground Ulluchu seeds, get high, and then commence with the sacrifices, he deduced.

"So imagine you're a priest and it's your job to convince God to stop the rain," Bussmann said. "You need some pretty strong stuff."

Bussmann began closing in on a genus of fairly common plants known as Guarea that are found throughout Peru's lowland forests.

He determined that the plants contain compounds that could cause hallucinations if the seeds were ingested. Another effect of eating those seeds would be elevated blood pressure.

Getting the blood to flow quickly would certainly aid in sacrifices, Bussmann thought. And it would explain why the soldiers about to be sacrificed appeared to have erections in the scenes that Moche drew.

What might explain that physical reaction to pending death?

"That was what really got the bell ringing for me," Bussmann said.

When Bussmann compared specimens of Guarea kept in the garden's herbarium to drawings of the Ulluchu that were unearthed about a decade ago, he knew he had a match.

"When I saw the Guarea, I thought, 'That's pretty conspicuous looking.'"

In late March, Bussmann and Sharon published their findings in a scientific journal, identifying Guarea as the mystery plant, Ulluchu. So far, no one seems to be challenging the identification.

Bussmann, director of the garden's William L. Brown Center for Plant Genetic Resources, plans to further study the plant's chemistry and suspects it might have applications as a blood pressure and erectile dysfunction treatment.

Meanwhile, archaeologists continue to dig at Moche burial sites. Because of Bussmann and Sharon's discovery, they know a little more about human sacrifices, many of which occurred during times of extreme weather events and were meant to pacify the gods.

"When life gets unsettled, people find ways to cope with it," Bussmann said. "It all makes perfect sense now."

Peruvian Stalagmites Hold Clues To Climate Change

2009-08-20T20:14:00.001-05:00

ScienceDaily (May 16, 2009) — How will the Netherlands, dominated by water, be affected by future climate change? Dutch researcher Martin van Breukelen hopes to answer that question by analyzing stalagmites from the South American Amazon tributaries in Peru as a way to reconstruct climate changes in the past.

Information that can be used to test climate models is stored in various forms: in ice formations, plant remnants, oceans and caves. Limestone formations in caves, so-called speleothemes, provide insights into the land climate. The best-known speleothemes are stalagmites, standing formations and stalactites, hanging formations. Van Breukelen discovered stalagmites in South America that provide information about the climate over the past 13,000 years.

In order to study climate change, Van Breukelen analyzed the accumulation of oxygen isotopes in both the cave water and the stalagmite. A small quantity of fossil cave water is enclosed in the core of the stalagmite, so-called fluid inclusions. The entrapped water is just as old as the carbonate of the stalagmite in which it is trapped. The isotope ratio of this fossil water can be measured using an extraction technique. As this water has been entrapped for thousands of years it provides unique information about the climatic history.

Much climate research on the land and sea is based on the measurement of subtle changes in the ratio between stable oxygen isotopes in, for example, ice or stone formations. Isotopes of an element can have different numbers of neutrons but always contain the same number of protons. Light isotopes (¹⁶O) respond differently to climate change than heavier isotopes (¹⁸O). Climate changes result in an altered ratio of the ¹⁶O and ¹⁸O isotopes. The ratio of the different isotopic elements oxygen, carbon and hydrogen provides a lot of useful information about the climatic history. Van Breukelen uses this information to reconstruct the changes in temperature and precipitation.

Climate research reveals that even without human influence the Earth's climate was changeable in the past. To what extent humans have influenced climate change since the industrial revolution remains unclear. It should be remembered that studies into climatic history can provide insights into the natural behaviour of the climate in the past. Additionally current climate models can only be improved if more historical data become available so that the accuracy of these models can be tested. The research method used by Van Breukelen that examines stalagmites is vitally important for climate research. This method allows the accurate reconstruction of independent temperature changes and precipitation patterns from thousands of years ago.

Van Breukelen's research was funded by a grant from the NWO division WOTRO Science for Global Development. WOTRO focuses on funding innovative scientific research into development issues, especially sustainable development and poverty alleviation.

Adapted from materials provided by NWO (Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research).

First Evidence Of Pre-industrial Mercury Pollution In The Andes

2009-08-20T20:13:00.001-05:00

ScienceDaily (May 18, 2009) — The study of ancient lake sediment from high altitude lakes in the Andes has revealed for the first time that mercury pollution occurred long before the start of the Industrial Revolution.

University of Alberta Earth and Atmospheric Sciences PhD student Colin Cooke's results from two seasons of field work in Peru have now provided the first unambiguous records of pre-industrial mercury pollution from anywhere in the world and will be published in the May 18th Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

"The idea that mercury pollution was happening before the industrial revolution has long been hypothesised on the basis of historical records, but never proven," said Cooke whose research was funded by the National Geographic Society.

Cooke and his team recovered sediment cores from high elevation lakes located around Huancavelica, which is the New World's largest mercury deposit. By measuring the amount of mercury preserved in the cores back through time, they were able to reconstruct the history of mercury mining and pollution in the region.

"We found that mercury mining, smelting and emissions go back as far as 1400 BC," said Cooke. "More surprisingly, mining appears to have began before the rise of any complex or highly stratified society. This represents a departure from current thinking, which suggests mining only arose after these societies emerged," said Cooke.

Initially, mercury pollution was in the form of mine dust, largely resulting from the production of the red pigment vermillion. "Vermillion is buried with kings and nobles, and was a paint covering gold objects buried with Andean kings and nobles," said Cooke. However, following Inca control of the mine in 1450 AD, mercury vapour began to be emitted.

"This change is significant because it means that mercury pollution could be transported over much greater distances, and could have been converted into methylmercury, which is highly toxic," said Cooke.

"All of these results confirm long-standing questions about the existence and magnitude pre-industrial mercury pollution, and have implications for our understanding of how mining and metallurgy evolved in the Andes," said Cooke.

Cooke is an interdisciplinary scientist researching human impacts on the environment. His research combines paleolimnology (the study of ancient lake sediments) with the fields of archaeology, and geochemistry. The research team included Prentiss Balcom from the University of Connecticut (USA), Harald Biester from the University of Braunschweig (Germany), and Alexander Wolfe from the University of Alberta

Adapted from materials provided by University of Alberta, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Dwarf In The Elfin Forests: Tiniest Frog In South America’s Andes Mountains

2009-08-20T20:11:00.001-05:00

ScienceDaily (Apr. 6, 2009) — It fits on a fingertip: Noblella pygmaea is a midget frog, the smallest ever found in the Andes and among the smallest amphibians in the world. Only its croaking was to be heard from the leaves on the mossier ground of the “elfin forests” in the highlands of Manu National Park, before German and Peruvian herpetologists discovered the tiny little thing in south-eastern Peru.

The popular name of the new species is fitting: Noble’s Pygmy Frog has an average length of 11.4 millimeters. It was introduced in a paper recently published in the journal Copeia by Edgar Lehr, a German herpetologist at the Senckenberg Natural History Collection Dresden, and the Swiss-Peruvian ecologist Alessandro Catenazzi from the University of California at Berkeley, USA. The pygmy that fits on a fingertip was discovered during field work in the Wayqecha Research Station. Not only its small size left it undiscovered for so long. Its predominantly brown colour camougflages Noblella perfectly. But Noble’s Pygmy Frog could be spotted with the assistance of the members of the native communities adjacent to the Manu National Park.

Manu National Park is well known as “hotspot” in the lowland rainforests, a place of exuberant diversity; however the biosphere reserve also preserves vast areas of montane cloud forests, where the sempiternal mists envelop and often conceal plants and animals. In the countless ecological niches many of them were able to evolve undisturbed and are highly adapted to the cold and permanently humidity at a daily average temperature of 11° Celsius. Genetic studies show that the diversity of amphibians in general and especially in this region is highly underestimated. That is why Edgar Lehr and Alessandro Catenazzi think that Noblella pygmaea is only one of many undiscovered amphibians in the Andes mountain area. The scientists expect to find other new species during the next few years.

Currently the midget frog is one of the smallest vertebrates ever found above 3000 metres, where most species tend to be larger than congeneric or similar species in lowland areas. Noblella pygmaea inhabits the cloud forest, the montane scrub and the high-elevation grasslands at a height from 3025 to 3190 metres above sea level. Beside its size the remarkably long forefinger is a notable distinguishing feature that was not found at other pygmy frogs in the mountains of Peru. The females lay only two eggs of approximately four millimeter in diameter. In contrast to most amphibian species these eggs are laid in moist, terrestrial microhabitats, such as in moss or leave litter, and are protected from insect predators by the mother frog. It is noteworthy also that embryos do not change into aquatic tadpoles, but immediately after the hatching lead a fully terrestrial life.

Whilst the scientists cannot give a reason for Noblella’s minute size, it is apparently advantageous. Maybe it is perfectly adopted to its special niche. The fact, that the species is not forced to leave its habitat – not even for egg deposition – might protect it from natural enemies. Despite living in the Manu Biosphere Reserve the survival of the midget frog and of other amphibians is uncertain. Several adverse influences such as anthropogenic habitat changes and the effects of global warming, which among other things facilitates the dispersal of the highly virulent pathogenic fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis threaten amphibians of the Andean region. Fotunately the fungus, which has become epidemic, has not been noticed on Noblella so far. Possibly because of its terrestrial life Noblella is less exposed to the fungus than stream-dwelling frogs.

Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis is suspected to be the cause of the extinction of many frog species in Ecuador and northern Peru and is currently decimating populations of high-elevation frogs in southern Peru. Up to now no effective means are known for stopping the expansion of fungal infections in the region. Researchers hope that the large topographic heterogeneity of the Andes cordilleras will provide refugia where the fungus is unable to cause massive population declines in amphibian species, thus ensuring the survival of the dwarf in the Andean "elfin forests."

Adapted from materials provided by Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum, via AlphaGalileo.

Evidence From Dirty Teeth: Ancient Peruvians Ate Well

2009-08-20T20:10:00.001-05:00

ScienceDaily (Dec. 3, 2008) — Starch grains preserved on human teeth reveal that ancient Peruvians ate a variety of cultivated crops including squash, beans, peanuts and the fruit of cultivated pacay trees. This finding by Dolores Piperno, staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and the National Museum of Natural History, and Tom Dillehay, professor of archaeology at Vanderbilt University, sets the date of the earliest human consumption of beans and pacay back by more than 2,000 years and indicates that New World people were committed farmers earlier than previously thought.

In northern Peru’s Ñanchoc Valley, Dillehay and colleagues recovered human teeth from hearths and floors of permanent, roundhouse structures. Human bone, plant remains and charcoal closely associated with the teeth are approximately 6,000 to 8,000 years old according to carbon- dating techniques.

Piperno examined 39 human teeth, probably from six to eight individuals. “Some teeth were dirtier than others. We found starch grains on most of the teeth. About a third of the teeth contained large numbers of starch grains,” Piperno said.

To identify the starch grains, Piperno compared the particles in tooth scrapings with her modern reference collection of starch grains from more than 500 economically important plants. “We found starch from a variety of cultivated plants: squash, Phaseolus beans—either limas or common beans, possibly, but not certainly the former, pacay and peanuts,” said Piperno. “Parts of plants that often are not evident in archeological remains, such as the flesh of squash fruits and the nuts of peanuts, do produce identifiable starch grains.”

Starch from squash found on the teeth affirms that early people were eating the plants and not simply using them for nonfood purposes, such as for making containers or net floats. Whether or not some of the earliest cultivated plants, such as squashes, were grown as dietary items has been a long-debated question among students of early agriculture.

Evidence that foods had been cooked was also visible on some of the starch grains. “We boiled beans in the lab to see what cooked starch grains looked like—and recognized these gelatinized or heat-damaged grains in the samples from the teeth,” said Piperno. Starch from raw and roasted peanuts looks similar, probably because it is protected within the hull.

Starch grains from four of the crops were found consistently through time indicating that beans, peanuts, squash and pacay were important food sources then, as they are today. “Starch analysis of teeth, which, unlike other archaeobotanical techniques, provides direct evidence of plant consumption, should greatly improve our ability to address other important questions in human dietary change relating to even earlier time periods,” said Piperno.

The results of this study appear online in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the week of Dec. 1-5, 2008.

Adapted from materials provided by Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Oil And Gas Projects In Western Amazon Threaten Biodiversity And Indigenous Peoples

2009-08-20T20:07:00.000-05:00

ScienceDaily (Aug. 14, 2008) — The western Amazon, home to the most biodiverse and intact rainforest left on Earth, may soon be covered with oil rigs and pipelines.

According to a new study, over 180 oil and gas "blocks" – areas zoned for exploration and development – now cover the megadiverse western Amazon, which includes Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and western Brazil. These oil and gas blocks stretch over 688,000 km2 (170 million acres), a vast area, nearly the size of Texas.

For over three years, researchers from two U.S. non-profit organizations – Save America's Forests and Land Is Life – and scientists from Duke University tracked hydrocarbon activities across the region and generated a comprehensive map of oil and gas activities across the western Amazon. The result is an alarming assessment of the threats to the biodiversity and indigenous peoples of the region.

"We found that the oil and gas blocks overlap perfectly with the most biodiverse part of the Amazon for birds, mammals, and amphibians," said study co-author Dr. Clinton Jenkins of Duke University. "The threat to amphibians is of particular concern because they are already the most threatened group of vertebrates worldwide."

The study also found that the oil and gas blocks are concentrated in the most intact part of the Amazon. Even national parks are not immune; exploration and development blocks cover the renowned Yasuní National Park in Ecuador and Madidi National Park in Bolivia.

"The most dynamic situation is unfolding in the Peruvian Amazon," warned lead author Dr. Matt Finer of Save America's Forests.

The study reports that 64 oil and gas blocks cover approximately 72% of the vast Peruvian Amazon (~490,000 km2 or ~121 million acres), an area much larger than California. All but eight of these blocks have appeared since 2003, when Peru launched a major effort to boost exploration across the Amazon. National parks are off limits to hydrocarbon activities in Peru, but oil and gas blocks do overlap a variety of other types of protected areas.

Many of the oil and gas blocks in the western Amazon overlap titled lands of indigenous peoples and encroach on the territories of indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation. These isolated peoples have chosen to live in the forests without contact with the outside world. They are extremely susceptible to outside illnesses due to lack of natural resistance.

In the second part of the study, the researchers delve into the most cutting policy issues related to oil and gas activities in the Amazon.

The authors highlighted new access roads as the greatest single threat from hydrocarbon development. Roads trigger deforestation, colonization, overhunting, and illegal logging in previously remote areas.

"The elimination of new oil access roads could significantly reduce the impacts of most projects," said Finer, echoing one of the studies' main conclusions.

The analysis points out that the current environmental assessment process is inadequate due to a lack of independence in the review process and a lack of comprehensive analyses of the long-term, cumulative, and synergistic impacts of multiple oil and gas projects across the wider region. The authors stress the need for regional Strategic Environmental Assessments in order to correct this situation.

The study also addresses the complex policy issues related to indigenous peoples.

"The way that oil development is being pursued in the Western Amazon is a gross violation of the rights of the indigenous peoples of the region" said Brian Keane of Land is Life, "International agreements and Inter-American human rights law recognize that indigenous peoples have rights to their lands, and explicitly prohibit the granting of concessions to exploit natural resources in their territories without their free, prior and informed consent."

The authors also detail the growing conflict of hydrocarbon activities slated for the territories of indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation.

Finally, the study highlights the role of the international community. Growing global energy demand is driving the search for more oil and gas in the Amazon and companies from the U.S., Canada, Europe, and China are carrying out most of the development.

"Filling up with a tank of gas could soon have devastating consequences to rainforests, their peoples, and their species" remarked co-author Dr. Stuart Pimm of Duke University.

Ecuador's innovative Yasuní-ITT Initiative is held up as a potentially precedent-setting example of how the global north and south can collaborate on both protecting the Amazon and combating climate change. The initiative is the Government of Ecuador's limited-time offer to keep its largest untapped oilfields unexploited in exchange for financial compensation from the international community.

Journal reference:

Finer et al. Oil and Gas Projects in the Western Amazon: Threats to Wilderness, Biodiversity, and Indigenous Peoples. PLoS One, 2008; 3 (8): e2932 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0002932

Adapted from materials provided by Public Library of Science, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Rain Forest Protection Works In Peru

2009-08-20T19:48:00.000-05:00

Source: Carnegie Institution
Date: August 15, 2007

Science Daily — A new regional study shows that land-use policies in Peru have been key to tempering rain forest degradation and destruction in that country. Scientists at the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology led an international effort to analyze seven years of high-resolution satellite data covering most (79%) of the Peruvian Amazon for their findings. The work is published in the August 9, 2007, on-line edition of Science Express.

The scientists found that the government's program of designating specific regions for legal logging, combined with protection of other forests, and the establishment of territories for indigenous peoples helped keep large-scale rain forest damage in check between the years 1999 and 2005. However, the research also showed an increase in forest disturbance over the last couple of years of the study, primarily in two areas of the jungle where the forests are accessible by roads.
"We found that only 1 to 2 % of this disturbance in Peru happened in natural protected areas," noted lead author Paulo Oliveira. "However, there was substantial forest disturbance adjacent to areas set aside for legal logging operations. This leakage of human activity outside of logging concessions is a concern."
Peru has about 255,000 square miles of tropical forests--an area a little larger than France. In 2001, the Peruvian government placed 31% of the managed forests into "permanent resource production." By 2005, a region about the size of Honduras (about 40,000 sq. miles)--was put into long-term commercial timber production. In recent years, the rain forests have been experiencing increased human impacts, as they have in neighboring Amazon countries, but the extent of the damage over the region has not been thoroughly assessed using high spatial resolution satellite data until this study.
The scientists used the Carnegie Landsat Analysis System (CLAS) in their work. It was formerly used in Brazil to detect logging activities there. CLAS is a satellite-based forest-damage detection system, which can penetrate the shielding upper layers of forest leaves to see consequences of logging activities below. The CLAS system can uncover forest changes at a resolution of less than 100 by 100 ft. The core process behind CLAS is an advanced signal processing approach developed by study lead Greg Asner.
"Our approach has improved over the past eight years, but relies on a core set of methods that have consistently worked," Asner said. "We spent years developing them in Brazil, then went to Peru and completed this study in only a year. We are now operating over Borneo. Our approach is proving a good way to monitor rain forest disturbance and deforestation anywhere in the world."
The researchers found that, between 1999 and 2005, disturbance and deforestation rates averaged only 244 square miles and 249 square miles per year respectively. About 86% of the damaged Peruvian areas were concentrated in two regions--in the Madre de Dios, east of Cuzco, and in the central eastern part of the country near Pucallpa. Most of the rain forest damage--75%--was found within 12.5 miles (20 km) of the nearest roads. However, even within those limits, forests set aside by the government were more than 4 times better protected than areas not designated for conservation.

Related links:
About Macaw clay lick
Macaw recover project at Manu Wildlife Center

New flycatcher bird species discovered in Peru

2009-08-20T19:47:00.000-05:00

mongabay.com
August 13, 2007
Scientists have discovered a previously unknown species of bird in dense bamboo thickets in the Peruvian Amazon.

Writing in the journal The Auk, authors led by Daniel F. Lane of the Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Science describe the new species of twistwing (Cnipodectes superrufus).

The scientists say the brownish-red colored bird (with colors of various body parts ranging from "mahogany red", "auburn", "burnt sienna", "Sanford's Brown", "chestnut brown", "Argus brown", "Xanthine orange", "Prout's brown", "Vinaceous-Fawn" and "raw umber" among other shades of brown) remained unknown until the present due to its poorly known, and largely inaccessible habitat: thickets of thorny bamboo (Guadua weberbaueri) in southeastern Peru. The researchers not that while the species was only recently discovered, it may prove to be a common species with "immense blocks of Guadua-dominated terra firme forest in southwestern Amazonian Brazil, southeastern Peru, and northwestern-most Bolivia." Further, some of the birds were spotted within the Manu Biosphere Zone, a large protected area.

"Presumably, there is a healthy population within this protected zone," write the authors. Relatively little is known about the species. It apparently eats small arthropods (mostly insects) and has a call similar to that of the Sulfur-bellied Tyrant-Manakin (Neopelma sulphureiventer). While C. superrufus was only just now described, the "type specimen" was first captured on February 22, 1990. The specimen was deposited at the Museo Nacional de Historia Natural de la Universidad San Marcos and remaind unstudied until 2002. Subsequent trips to its native habitat turned up recordings and more specimen. Daniel F. Lane, Grace P. Servat, Thomas Valqui H.A, and Frank R. Lambert (2007). A DISTINCTIVE NEW SPECIES OF TYRANT FLYCATCHER (PASSERIFORMES: TYRANNIDAE: CNIPODECTES) FROM SOUTHEASTERN PERU. THE AUK Volume 124, Issue 3 (July 2007)

Related links :
More about Manu National park
About Thomas Valqui
Manu National park tours
Manu park map

In Peru, the discovery of a waterfall draws tourists

2009-08-20T19:40:00.000-05:00

BY STEVE HENDRIX
Washington Post Service

Here I am in remotest northern Peru, hard on the trail of the world's third-largest anticlimax.
This is a story of waterfalls and expectations, and you can count me a waterfall skeptic. I know they are picturesque. I know they are soothing, in that stock greeting-card way of rainbows and unicorns. I know they figure largely in the preflight videos they show on planes to take the edge off your airport rage.
But actual waterfalls? They're seldom worth the walk. Somebody always insists on taking the two-mile side trail to see the local waterfall. And so you go. And there's a waterfall, dribbling (picturesquely) down the rocks. And then you hike back.
In my experience, waterfall equals anticlimax.
But the press release that crossed my desk last year was darned near irresistible: ''World's Third Highest Waterfall Discovered in Peru.'' Howzat? Discovered? The Age of Discovery was ages ago. The biggest things they discover these days are new species of beetle and, every now and then, a forgotten cable network. But the major landforms were all mapped out long ago.
A 250-story waterfall that instantly climbs up on the podium with Venezuela's Angel Falls and South Africa's Tugela Falls? How did that avoid the unblinking eye of satellite cartographers?
Who cares? If it was that big and that remote, I just wanted to get there before they bulldozed a road, built the hotels and generally tarted up the place.
And so in September, I set off on the most harrowing waterfall side trip of all: an overnight flight from Washington to Lima, a dawn hop to the northern coastal city of Chiclayo and a 12-hour drive over dicey mountain roads to Peru's impossibly secluded upper Amazon basin.
This high, dry tropical Shangri-La was the domain of the Chachapoyas, a mysterious Andean race that predated the Incas. The new waterfall, dubbed Gocta after an ancient Chachapoyan village, is deep in one of the many blind valleys they inhabited between 800 and 1400 AD. You can still see their carved tombs, some with intact mummies, in the surrounding cliff walls.
According to the press release, the government of Peru was hard on the case, promising safe tourist access and basic accommodations. In the meantime, getting to Gocta requires bone-jarring days on the terrifying roads and hours on steep and dubious valley trails. All to see a waterfall.
This had better be good.
THE `DISCOVERY'
So how do you discover a waterfall? The local people knew about it, of course. It just wasn't a big deal to them.
Luis Chuquimes is an elder in the tiny village of San Pablo, a few hours' hike from the falls. Tourists were unknown in San Pablo before word spread about Gocta last spring. Now Chuquimes' little cantina serves as an unofficial visitors center. According to the wrinkled sign-in book on his bar, more than 70 people had made the trip by the time I got there at the end of the dry season. On the other side of the valley, another village has logged just over 1,000 Gocta tourists.
It's mostly Peruvians coming so far, eager to make the acquaintance of a new national icon. A couple of Israelis and Germans have been. No Americans have signed in yet. (Now that boggles the mind.)
''We knew it was there,'' Chuquimes said as he busily delivered bottles of beer and Inca Kola to a group of Gocta-bound students from Chiclayo, a day's drive away. ``But we didn't know it was one of the tallest in the world.''
It took a German engineer named Stefan Ziemendorff, working on a nearby water project, to realize that the nameless falls might boast world-class specs. He got the Peruvian government to survey it, checked his National Geographic stats and called a press conference. Gocta came in at 2,532 feet, which put it, by Ziemendorff's reckoning, at No. 3 in the world.
Or not. It turns out that waterfall ranking is, well, rancorous. Waterfall people -- who are a lot like train people and lighthouse people -- are burning up the discussion boards, debating Gocta's place on the charts with fierce references to seasonal flow, degree of slope and something called ''freeleap.'' (Partisans of certain Norwegian cascades have bordered on rude.)
All of which makes Peru's bold claim such a brilliant stroke of marketing. Whether or not Gocta deserves the bronze, ''third highest'' gives it instant Seven Wonders cred. That ensures tourist interest in a spectacular but little-known region that really does have a lot to offer anyone lured in. After all, billboard attractions are often not as fun as the areas that surround them. The Hanging Gardens, for example, may have been a wow, but you know the real treat was knocking about the back roads of Babylon.
''I don't know if it's the third-highest waterfall on Earth, but I know it's a very high waterfall,'' said Peter Lerche, a German anthropologist who has lived here since 1980. ``It gives us a diversity of attractions. We have rivers, lakes, archaeology and now this waterfall.''
The Chachapoyas area of northern Peru already attracts two kinds of tourists: birders and a trickle of hard-core archaeology buffs, those who have already seen (or been turned off by) the hugely popular Machu Picchu (so commercial in places you might call it Inca Inc.). That was my toehold in the region.
I found a guide company in the region willing to take me to the waterfall and show me around the archaeological highlights during a six-day flying visit. They paired me with another tourist, a California antiques dealer, who was fishing around for a Gocta visit. Add a photographer from Lima and we would make a threesome.
GOING TO KUELAP
We convened in the tiny airport parking lot in Chiclayo, piled into one of the ubiquitous hired white Corollas that rattle around Peru and began to climb the Andes. The highway from the coast was flat and paved, lined with beige villages and the colorful political graffiti of the recent election.
In the foothills, the road climbed through an arid, Maui tropicality where cacti grew in the shadow of papaya trees. But six hours on, the pavement ended and the rest of the day was spent lurching on a rope ladder of a road that clung to the cliffs above the frisky Utcubamba River.
Unless you regularly holiday in Bangladesh during the monsoon, these will be the worst roads you've ever seen: pitted, shoulderless one-lane threads draped along the lips of bottomless Andean voids. They are not so bad in the daylight, when the splendid scenery is both compensation and diversion. But when you're trying to sleep (our first sightseeing trip started at 3 a.m.), a radically rough road is a kind of torture.
Yet you get used to it. Mostly because the destinations are more wonderful than the roads are awful.
Our base was in the city of Chachapoyas (which is the name of the ancient civilization and the current biggest town). It's a pretty mountaintop berg of about 17,000 people, with numerous Internet cafes, one good steakhouse and a tradition of awful coffee. From there, our first outing was 2 ½ hours to Kuelap, a walled Chachapoyas city perched grandly on a commanding peak.
At almost 20 acres, Kuelap is actually bigger than Machu Picchu. It's a huge stone battlement with two narrow crevices allowing access to the ruins within.
At daybreak, we stood amid the carefully carved stone foundations of ancient Chachapoyas houses -- there were more than 400 of them in Kuelap at one time, before the Incas, invading from the south, conquered the region in the late 1400s.
The view is 360 degrees of forever. A morning moon hung over a distant ridge even as dawn fired the tips of surrounding peaks. Soft morning murmurs and a little tin-pot clatter floated up from the dark, misty villages below.
Flocks of parakeets darted from tree to tree, reminders that this starkly beautiful mountainscape is the upper edge of Amazonia. They were only cackling shadows until they flew through columns of sunlight and flashed a sudden brilliant green.
Except for a crew of local restoration workers and a group of six Austrian students, we had this majestic enormity to ourselves. Kuelap, by far the signature tourist attraction in the region, had just over 10,000 visitors last year. Machu Picchu saw more than 410,000.
We got a deep briefing on Chachapoyas history from Lerche, the anthropologist, that night at his brother-in-law's hotel, a charming colonial-era hacienda near the river. Numbering nearly half a million at their peak, the Chachapoyas were taller and paler than the Incas who eventually overwhelmed them. At least one scholar argues they may have been the lost tribe of Israel.
Like the mystical, mysterious Anasazi of the southwestern United States, the Chachapoyas left a vast and scattered archaeological record in dry mountain cliffs. Most of them are yet undiscovered.
''Personally, I know of more than 350 sites,'' Lerche said.
One of the best, Lerche said, was a massive necropolis discovered by looters, a grave robbery that ended up founding a remarkable local museum.
In 1996, in a high alcove above the nearby Lake of the Condors, a group of workers found a huge cache of ceramics, textiles and almost 220 perfectly preserved human mummies dating back more than 500 years. The looters pilfered some, but infighting among them quickly led someone to spill the beans to the authorities. What was left is now housed in the Leymebamba Museum at the far end of the valley, a little Smithsonian in the heart of nowhere.
It took another three-hour lurch-fest to reach the tiny village of Leymebamba. But all the shaking was forgotten when we entered the stylish, modern museum. The textiles and pots alone are worth the trip.
But it's the glassed-in chamber of mummies that will grab you by the retinas. The scores of desiccated men, women and children are clearly visible, tucked in tight fetal curls and draped in moody white gauze. Hollow eyes peek between bony fingers, giving them expressions both terrible and bashful.
Marcelita Hidalgo, a white-coated technician, took a withered little man from the shelf and showed us tiny threads tied around his fingers and how his ankle tendons, like all the mummies', were cut to make him fold more compactly.
We were the only (living) people there. I was growing to adore this place.
A MISTY WRAITH
Until now, the tourist itinerary around Chachapoyas has been limited to a circuit of ancient relics and ruins: Kuelap, the mummies of Leymebamba, the intact tombs known as Karajia we would visit on our final day. But now, there's a major waterfall to fit in.
''We've never seen this much interest in the area,'' said our expat English guide, Rob Dover, who started his Chachapoyas-based Vilaya Tours eight years ago. ``It's all Gocta, Gocta, Gocta now.''
Like any outing here, the approach to Gocta begins with a bumpy few hours in the van, this time climbing a steep valley up to the village of San Pablo. Gocta is a two-tiered waterfall; it plummets over the ridge and hits a shelf on the cliff, where it pools up for a few hundred feet before falling over the edge to the valley floor. If you want an up-close look at both sections, you have to make two trips.
The gateway to Upper Gocta is San Pablo, an isolated, attractive hamlet of mud-brick buildings and wide Andean views. Tourists have become more common, but not normal enough to prevent a parade of dogs and marveling kids from falling in behind us as we walked up the only street.
At the end of town, a drunk blocked the trail, haranguing our local guide about the increased foot traffic past his house. A local loco, the guide whispered to us.
We moved on, settling into a blissful morning of hiking in a dry, wide vale. After a couple of hours, we passed the limit of usual village activity and a raw forest gloom closed over our heads. The guide pointed us down a newly slashed side trail, a steep scramble down to a small viewpoint. We huffed out of the trees and there, still two miles away at a distant end of the valley, was the world's third-highest waterfall.
This is the moment that I usually stare for a minute, say ''Oooh,'' bounce my knees Chevy Chase-style a couple of times and then turn in search of the hotel bar. But this . . . this was a really, really big waterfall. Even after four days of hard travel, hundreds of miles of chiropractic roads and impossible emotional windup, I was simply awed.
Gocta, at this time of year, is a misty wraith dancing with gravity, a huge, twisting white column of froth chasing itself down the cliff face. It made an immense noise. Even two miles away we could feel its strange clackety vibe, like an infinite train over a bad track. In the rainy season it must shake the world.
We sat for an hour, having lunch and getting our brains around Gocta. It took another hour to reach the upper base of the falls, where I picked my way over soaking rocks to look down at the thundering impact zone 50 yards away. The boulders within the falls were red with some mineral patina, or maybe just raw from centuries of flaying. I was soaked in seconds, looking up to bathe my face in an ecstasy of proximity.
Then, feeling oddly rushed, as if the promised tourist boom was about to appear on the trail, I stripped off my clothes and dove into the freezing pool. (OK, I lowered myself gingerly into the freezing pool.)
THE LOWER FALLS
There are no safe trails connecting the upper and lower sections of Gocta, so we backtracked to the van. By dusk, we had reached the other side of the valley and the tiny village of Cocachimba, gateway to Lower Gocta.
Dover asked around and arranged for us to camp in the yard of an Adventist church. He paid a neighbor woman to stir up her outdoor fire and boil us some fine chicken and rice. We ate, fended off stray dogs and played with our cook's two sweet and baffled children. We turned in, in utter silence under bright stars.
Of the 20 or so Adventist parishioners who showed up for the 5 a.m. singing service, about 15 of them tripped over my tent line.
It took us about three hours to reach the true bottom of the waterfall, a natural rock amphitheater where Gocta releases its final energy in an everlasting explosion of wet.
When the falls are running at their max, the guide said, the entire end of the valley is consumed and unapproachable. But in September, we were able to scramble to the edge of the pool. I even put on my hardiest rain gear, thinking I might get close enough to touch Gocta's very hem. Bad idea. Within 20 yards, the shrieking blow of mist nearly tossed me off my feet.
I slunk away in a soggy crouch, about as happy as I'd ever been.
No doubt they will make this easier in coming years. But they will not make it better. Paved roads, nearby hotels, scenic overlooks will allow more people to see this place, which is good. And they will mean more money for local people, which is great. But I was glad to fight for it a bit, glad to have jumped bare into the thing and elbowed my way into the hurricane heart of its final plunge.
By the end, I didn't visit this waterfall. I had an affair with it. And that was more than I ever expected.
IF YOU GO
• GETTING THERE: Reaching Chachapoyas in northern Peru takes time and, lately, money. In addition to the fare to Lima, the onward flight to the northern coastal city of Chiclayo will cost you $150 to $200 round trip. Lan Peru dominates the route and has ticket and baggage agreements with American. The long overland trip from Chiclayo to the Chachapoyas region will usually be wrapped into your tour, but inexpensive overnight buses are available if you go on your own.
• SEEING GOCTA: You can go in the dry season, traditionally May through September, and have an easier trip but a smaller waterfall. Or you can go with the rains and have a wetter experience all around.
Be aware that the waterfall is in the moderate Andes, 8,000 to 10,000 feet in elevation. Bring light fleece and rainwear at all times of year. The Peruvian government and local tour operators are falling all over themselves to make seeing Gocta easier. But for now you pretty much have to rough it with one of the archaeological tour companies already there.

Earliest-known Evidence Of Peanut, Cotton And Squash Farming Found

2009-08-20T08:57:00.001-05:00

Source: Vanderbilt University
Date: June 29, 2007

Science Daily — Anthropologists working on the slopes of the Andes in northern Peru have discovered the earliest-known evidence of peanut, cotton and squash farming dating back 5,000 to 9,000 years. Their findings provide long-sought-after evidence that some of the early development of agriculture in the New World took place at farming settlements in the Andes.

The discovery was published in the June 29 issue of Science.

The research team made their discovery in the Ñanchoc Valley, which is approximately 500 meters above sea level on the lower western slopes of the Andes in northern Peru.

"We believe the development of agriculture by the Ñanchoc people served as a catalyst for cultural and social changes that eventually led to intensified agriculture, institutionalized political power and new towns in the Andean highlands and along the coast 4,000 to 5,500 years ago," Tom D. Dillehay, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at Vanderbilt University and lead author on the publication, said. "Our new findings indicate that agriculture played a broader role in these sweeping developments than was previously understood."

Dillehay and his colleagues found wild-type peanuts, squash and cotton as well as a quinoa-like grain, manioc and other tubers and fruits in the floors and hearths of buried preceramic sites, garden plots, irrigation canals, storage structures and on hoes. The researchers used a technique called accelerator mass spectrometry to determine the radiocarbon dates of the materials. Data gleaned from botanists, other archaeological findings and a review of the current plant community in the area suggest the specific strains of the discovered plant remains did not naturally grow in the immediate area.

"The plants we found in northern Peru did not typically grow in the wild in that area," Dillehay said. "We believe they must have therefore been domesticated elsewhere first and then brought to this valley by traders or mobile horticulturists.

"The use of these domesticated plants goes along with broader cultural changes we believe existed at that time in this area, such as people staying in one place, developing irrigation and other water management techniques, creating public ceremonials, building mounds and obtaining and saving exotic artifacts."

The researchers dated the squash from approximately 9,200 years ago, the peanut from 7,600 years ago and the cotton from 5,500 years ago.

Dillehay published the findings with fellow researchers Jack Rossen, Ithaca College, Ithaca, N.Y.; Thomas C. Andres, The Curcurbit Network, New York, N.Y.; and David E. Williams, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Washington, D.C.

Dillehay is chair of the Department of Anthropology at Vanderbilt, Professor Extraordinaire at the Universidad Austral de Chile and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007.

The research was supported by the Instituto Nacional de Cultura, Lima; the National Science Foundation; the Heinz Foundation; the University of Kentucky and Vanderbilt University.

Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Vanderbilt University.

Pharmacy student learns about medicine in Peru

2009-08-20T08:55:00.001-05:00

Monday, July 02, 2007

College group also explores foreign culture, canoes down Amazon and climbs Machu Picchu.
By GINA VASSELLI
The Express-Times

Ryan Toth canoed down the Amazon, stood on top of Machu Picchu and got class credit for doing it.

The 23-year-old Phillipsburg man traveled to Peru this summer as part of his studies as a pharmacy student at Wilkes University in Pennsylvania.

The study abroad program was organized through the Global Awareness Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to saving the rainforest, according to its Web site.

Toth and 11 other pharmacy students from across the country returned June 25 from their three-week trip.

Shelli Holt-Macey, director of Wilkes University's Experiential Programs for the pharmacy school, said the students were selected by the institute's founder, Dr. Barbara Brodman.

The students flew June 1 into Lima, Peru.

"That was basically the last city I saw," Toth said. "The rest was more or less all jungle."

Toth said they visited the GAI's Center for Natural Medicine in Iquitos to learn about natural medicine and drug discovery.

While the group was in Iquitos, it was visited by a shaman who talked about the plants used by the different tribes.

Toth said after her speech, the shaman stayed at the center because of a national workers strike in Peru and demonstrations in Iquitos.

"I guess she was scared to go back," Toth said.

He said the strike was unexpected and surreal.

"That was weird. It happened like two days after we got there," Toth said.

The group left the center a few days later and traveled to Cusco, Peru. It arrived there in time to experience the winter solstice at Machu Picchu.

"It's so huge you just wonder how they could build it," Toth said. "They didn't use mortar and the stones fit so perfectly together you can't fit a credit card between them."

But his parents, Brenda and Dale, had other concerns about the Incan city.

"I knew he was going there but I didn't realize how steep it was. So when I saw those pictures it made me a little nervous," Brenda Toth said.

Ryan Toth said the group traveled down the Amazon in canoes for about three days, which was not always easy.

"One time we were rowing as hard as we could with the current and we weren't moving because of the wind coming against us," he said.

Along the river they met three different native tribes: The Bora, Huitoto and Yagua.

Ryan Toth said he became friends with a river guide from the Bora tribe named Wellington.

"He spoke a little English and I speak a little Spanish so we became friendly," he said.

Wellington hand-carved a mask for him and it became one of many tribal souvenirs Toth took home.

Holt-Macey said the program was a great success because "it's directly related to the study of pharmacy and understanding how other cultures work without a system like the U.S.," she said.

Ryan Toth said the trip "was not the kind of thing you can do as a tourist. We got to see places and people that barely anyone ever sees."

Gina Vasselli is a staff writer. She can be reached at 610-258-7171 or by e-mail at gvasselli@express-times.com.

First Amazon-Andean Crop Plant Transfer And Corn Processing In Peru 3600-4000 Years Ago

2009-08-20T08:48:00.001-05:00

Source: Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute
Date: March 7, 2006

Published by Science Daily — Mouthwatering Peruvian cuisine like causa (mashed yellow potatoes layered with avocado and seafood) and carapulcra (dried potatoes and pork/chicken in peanut sauce) combine food crops from Amazon basin rainforests and Andean highlands. Smithsonian archaeologists and colleagues presenting in the prestigious journal, Nature1, uncover the first definitive evidence for this culinary, cultural link: 3600-4000 year-old plant microfossils and starch grains.

Heading to the supermarket to pick up some corn flour, a couple of tomatoes or a can of beans usually doesn't conjure up the notion of 10,000 years of agricultural development in the Americas--a transition from hunter-gatherer cultures to agricultural cultures actively developing and trading new food crops. But this transition is still inadequately understood. New excavations and a growing collection of plant microfossil remains rapidly adds pieces to this puzzle.

A multidisciplinary team excavated a stone house at Waynuna, north of Arequipa on the western slope of the Andes and analyzed plant remains from three grinding stones.
Arrowroot from the Amazon. Starchy arrowroot (Maranta sp.) tubers don't grow in the Andean highlands. So the presence of tiny Arrowroot starch grains and phytoliths on the grinding stones and in associated sediments means that people were moving tubers from lowland Amazon rainforest sites east of the Andes west to the Waynuna site.

Maize from Mexico. Maize (Zea mays) cultivation also swept through the Americas in the millennia following its domestication from Teosinte, a wild ancestor from Mexico's tropical Balsas river valley, some 9000 years ago. At the Waynuna site, maize starch grains were the most common plant remains on the grinding stones. Phytoliths derived from the leaves of maize provided evidence that maize was grown at the site. The shape and grinding damage of maize particles suggests that two races of maize--one used as flour and another, popcorn or dent corn variety--were probably grown and processed at the site. The Waynuna house is older than any of the other sites in Peru where maize has been found and sets back the date of maize cultivation and processing in the region by ~1000 years.

Obsidian trade. The Waynuna site perches on the shoulders of Cerro Aycano, the northernmost point of one of the Andes' richest sources of obsidian. Ample archaeological evidence shows that preceramic peoples moved obsidian from the mountains down into the Amazon basin, so it is not surprising that travelers eventually introduced new foods to residents of this upland area.

Multiproxy microfossil analysis of starch grains and phytoliths is proving to be an extremely important tool--applied to stone tool surfaces and associated sediments, to new sites and to sites where warm, wet climates have destroyed larger plant remains. Future work is expected to yield a better understanding of the domestication and trade of peanuts, manioc and achira, staples depicted in the stone iconography of the first great cultures to develop in a region where amazing cooking is still the standard.

###
The research team included members from the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, the University of Maine, Orono, the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, along with Ithaca College in the U.S. and the Museo Contisuyo, Moquegua and the Instituto Nacional de Cultura, Alameda, in Peru. This work was funded by a grant from the Heinz Charitable Trust Latin American Archaeology Program, FERCO, the Office of the Provost, Ithaca College, the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History.

The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI), a unit of the Smithsonian Institution with headquarters in Panama City, Panama, furthers our understanding of tropical nature and its importance to human welfare, trains students to conduct research in the tropics and promotes conservation by increasing public awareness of the beauty and importance of tropical ecosystems. http://www.stri.org/

Ref. Perry, L., Sandweiss, D., Piperno, D., Radmaker, K., Malpass, M., Umire, A. and de la Vera, P. 2006. Early maize agriculture and interzonal interaction in southern Peru. Nature, 2 March, 2006.

Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.

Predators Keep The World Green, Ecologists Find

2009-08-20T08:43:00.000-05:00

Source: Duke University
Date: February 28, 2006
Published by Science Daily — Predators are, ironically, the key to keeping the world green, because they keep the numbers of plant-eating herbivores under control, reports a research team lead by John Terborgh, a professor of environmental science at Duke University's Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences.

Their findings confirm the answer to one of ecology's oldest and thorniest questions: why is the world green? It also seems to put to rest a competing theory that plants protect themselves from herbivores through physical and chemical defenses.

The researchers drew their conclusions from study of a Venezuelan valley flooded 20 years ago by a hydroelectric project.

The research, reported in the March 2006 issue of the British Ecological Society's Journal of Ecology, was supported by the National Science Foundation. The paper was co-authored by Terborgh, Kenneth Feeley and Bradley Balukjian from Harvard University, Miles Silman from Wake Forest University, and Percy Nuñez of Universidad Nacional "San Antonio de Abad" de Cusco in Peru.

Their results support the so-called "green world hypothesis," first proposed in 1960 by United States scientists Nelson Hairston, Frederick Smith and Lawrence Slobodkin. Despite being almost 50 years old, the green world hypothesis has been almost impossible to test until now.

"Since the landmark paper by Hairston et al, ecologists have been debating whether herbivores are limited by plant defenses or by predators," wrote the authors. "The matter is trivially simple in principle, but in practice the challenge of experimentally creating predator-free environments in which herbivores can increase without constraint has proven almost insurmountable."

However, the researchers realized that the hypothesis could be tested on a vast hydroelectric project.

Within Venezuela's Caroni Valley, an area of 4,300 square kilometres was flooded in 1986 to create a lake (Lago Guri) containing hundreds of islands that were formerly fragments of a continuous landscape.

Terborgh and his team monitored the vegetation at 14 sites of differing size. Nine of the sites were on predator-free islands, while the others were on the mainland or on islands with a complete or nearly complete suite of predators.

They found that, by 1997, small sapling densities on small islands were only 37 percent of those of large land masses and by 2002 this had fallen to just 25 percent. Most of the vertebrates present in regional dry forest ecosystem had disappeared from small islands, including fruit eaters and predators of vertebrates, leaving a hyperabundance of generalist herbivores such as iguanas, howler monkeys and leaf-cutter ants.

"Mere numbers do not do justice to the bizarre condition of herbivore-impacted islets," the authors wrote. "The understory is almost free of foliage, so that a person standing in the interior sees light streaming in from the edge around the entire perimeter. There is almost no leaf litter, and the ground is bright red from the subsoil brought to the surface by leaf-cutter ants.

"Dead twigs, branches and vine stems from canopy dieback litter the ground, and in places lie in heaps. But in striking contrast with this scenario of destruction, the medium islands presented a relatively normal appearance."

Besides proving that the green world hypothesis is correct, Terborgh's team's results have important implications for the debate raging in many countries over reintroduction of top predators such as wolves. "The take-home message is clear: the presence of a viable carnivore guild is fundamental to maintaining biodiversity," the authors wrote.

Information collected for the Journal of Ecology report is a five-year update of results published by Terborgh and 10 other scientists in the Nov. 30, 2001, issue of the journal Science.

"The Science article reported on the first plant census we did, involving 15,000 plants, but it only gave us a snapshot in time," Terborgh said in an interview. "We could see that there were huge differences between the little islands that didn't have any predators on them, and larger islands that did have predators. But we couldn't say much about where that was going to go in the future.

"This article reports on the re-census," he added. "Indeed, during that five-year interval the populations of small, sapling-level plants continued to decline quite radically. And there's no question that the vegetation on these islands is just in a state of collapse."

A drought that began in 2001 and reached extreme levels in 2003 has now ended the study, Terborgh reported.

"By 2003, the lake level had dropped 26 meters," he said. "By then, I think only three of the islands were left surrounded by water. That ended the experiment because it allowed the animals to redistribute themselves in their own fashion. The overcrowded populations of the plant-eating animals that had been the object of our studies simply dispersed.

"The fundamental premise of the whole project was our ability to study predator-free space, and that condition was no longer met. In one period in 2003 we found six different predators on islands that previously had no predators."

Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Duke University.

Disoriented Penguin Reaches Peru's Shore

2007-06-26T15:46:00.001-05:00

Sunday May 13, 2007 2:31 AM

LIMA, Peru (AP) - A "disoriented'' Magellanic penguin swam ashore on Peru's coast, some 3,100 miles north of his home in the frigid waters of southern Chile.

The penguin got lost while looking for food, Peru's National Resource Institute was quoted as saying in El Comercio newspaper Saturday.

"It seems he was disoriented and got lost in the sea due to the different ocean currents,'' said Wilder Canales, who heads the National Paracas Reserve in southern Peru. "In his endless search for food, he casually climbed up on our shores, something that has never happened before.''

Television images showed scientists at the nature reserve treating an injury to the penguin's right wing that was apparently caused by a fishing net.

Peruvian authorities are trying to coordinate with their Chilean counterparts to return the penguin to its home waters.

LSU Researcher Discovers New Bird During Expedition To Peru

2007-05-21T16:38:00.001-05:00

Source: Louisiana State University
Date: July 13, 2004

Published by Science Daily
Science Daily — He saw it. He heard it. But he needed proof.

For almost four years, LSU research associate Daniel Lane was haunted by the memory of an unusual, yellowish bird. He and an associate caught a glimpse of itwhile bird watching in Peru. They even recorded some of its song. Right away, they knew it was something new. Something different.

Now, thanks to Lane, a specimen of that bird previously unknown to science rests in a Lima museum and it will soon bear a name of Lane's choosing. As the discoverer of what could be a new species or, perhaps, a new genus, Lane will also be the first to author a scientific description of the bird.

The process will take some time, but, for someone who says his interest in birds began when he was "three or four," it's all a labor of love.

Lane, a New Jersey native who earned his master's from LSU in 1999, says his quest for the mystery bird dates back to 2000. As a part-time international bird-watching tour guide for WINGS Tours, Lane was one of the leaders of a group near the Manu National Park in Peru. He and fellow guide Gary Rosenberg, also an LSU graduate, spotted the bird along one of the park's major roads. Unfortunately, almost as soon as it was there, it was gone and no one else in the group had seen it.

The bird remained in Lane's mind as he returned to lead tours in the area for the next few years, but it didn't reappear.

"After three years, I was starting to doubt my sanity," said Lane.
Then, last year, the pair finally saw it again, and this time, the rest of the group saw it as well. They were also able to make a lengthy recording of its song, a critical part of ornithological study. Nevertheless, they were unable to obtain a specimen and, therefore, remained reticent about announcing their find.

Determined to obtain the proof he needed of his find, Lane returned to the region last November and played the recording of the bird's song. His attempt to attract his quarry failed and he once again went home empty-handed. Then, last month, Lane and some cohorts were in Peru conducting other field work when they made spur-of-the-moment plans to give it one more try.

After obtaining permission from the proper authorities, Lane and his group set off on their mission. On the morning of June 9, the playing of the taped song worked and the bird appeared, coming to rest in some nearby bamboo, just off the road. After observing and playing "cat and mouse" with the bird for almost an hour, Lane finally got his specimen.

Lane explained that the bird is likely a tanager, a type of songbird found mostly in tropical regions of the Americas. He describes it as having a short, bushy crest and olive back, wings and tail that contrast with a burnt orange crown. For now, the specimen is in the keeping of the National Museum in Lima where it will become the "type," the specimen on which the species' description is based and against which all others will be compared. Eventually, it will be sent to Lane so that he can write the scientific description and record his observations and its DNA will be tested to determine its specific relationship to other birds.

However long it takes, Lane is understanding of the pace of science. He's been in a similar situation before. In 1996, while on another expedition in Peru, he discovered the Scarlet-banded Barbet, a small, colorful toucan-like bird. And besides, he says, it feels good to know that he was sane after all.

Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Louisiana State University.

Where Is The World's Greatest Biodiversity? Smithsonian Scientists Find The Answer Is A Question Of Scale

2007-05-21T16:36:00.001-05:00

Source: Smithsonian Institution
Date: January 25, 2002
Published by Science Daily

Science Daily — Amazonia represents the quintessence of biodiversity the richest ecosystem on earth. Yet a study by Smithsonian scientists, published this week in the journal Science, shows that differences in species composition of tropical forests are greater over distance in Panama than in Amazonia. The finding also challenges recent models proposed to explain forest species composition.

The research team, led by Richard Condit of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute's Center for Tropical Forest Science, compared data from single-hectare (2.47 acre) tropical forest plots near the Panama Canal with plots of the same size in the Yasuni National Park of Ecuador and in Peru's Manu Biosphere Reserve. After identifying, tagging and measuring more than 50,000 individual trees with stems of ten centimeters or more in diameter in all three forests, they observed that a wide swath of the western Amazon has a forest in which the species change very little over distances of more than 1000 kilometers. The tree species counts in any one locale are high, but each locale turns out to be much like the others in terms of species composition.

In contrast, forests on the Isthmus of Panama change dramatically in tree species composition from one site to the next. Forests just 50 kilometers apart in Panama are less alike than forests 1,400 kilometers apart in the western Amazon. As a result of such high landscape variation, parts of Panama have as many or even more tree species than parts of Amazonia. "Ecologists have a technical term for landscape variation in forest types: beta-diversity," Condit explained. "Beta-diversity is high when forests change a lot over short distances as in Panama but low when forests are similar over long distances as in Ecuador and Peru." The unique aspect of this research by the Smithsonian team, including colleagues from France, the United States and South America, was a precise mathematical prediction of beta-diversity that helped them pinpoint its cause. A theory for beta-diversity had heretofore eluded ecologists.

"The Smithsonian theory is based on a basic ecological premise called the 'neutral theory,'" Condit said, "but adds to it the simple yet crucial observation that trees do not generally spread their seeds very far a factor which tends to enhance beta-diversity."

The Science report provides one of the most precise tests of the neutral theory yet published.

The team concludes that the neutral theory cannot account for beta-diversity in tropical forests, and they discount the importance of random events in establishing what grows there. Instead, Panama's high beta-diversity must be due to the abrupt variation in rainfall across the Central American isthmus, from the ever-wet Caribbean shoreline to the dry Pacific slope.
Forests across western Amazonia, however, were more uniform in species composition than the theory allowed, a surprising result.

"Explanations for this uniformity will require deeper understanding of how different tropical trees are from one another," said co-author and Smithsonian scientist Egbert G. Leigh, Jr., who devised the mathematical formula that led to the undermining of the neutral theory.
"More tedious field work, it seems, is in store," Leigh concluded.

###

The Center for Tropical Forest Science, established within the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in 1990, is a consortium of forestry agencies, universities, research institutes and nongovernmental organizations around the world, each managing or involved in one or more of 17 forest dynamics plots in 14 different countries. In addition to monitoring the trees, the center sponsors training programs, scientific meetings, and communications between sites through a newsletter and Web site at http://www.ctfs.si.edu/.

The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, headquartered in Panama City, Republic of Panama, is one of the world's leading centers for basic research on the ecology, behavior and evolution of tropical organisms. More information is available at http://www.stri.org/.

Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Smithsonian Institution.

Deep in the Jungle

2007-05-02T17:40:00.001-05:00

Published by TRIBUNE-REVIEW

By Bill Zlatos
Sunday, April 22, 2007

Boating on the Manu River in southwestern Peru, I brace a lunch of pork and spaghetti against a strong gust. Suddenly, my guide gives me an incredible birthday gift.
He peers through his binoculars and points to the left bank more than 200 feet away.

"Jaguar!" he yells.

For many wildlife lovers, Peru's Manu Biosphere in the Amazon River Basin offers a diversity of plant and animal life one can only expect to see on cable TV nature shows. Roughly the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island, the area consists of the Manu National Park and the Manu Reserved Zone, which tourists, led by guides, may visit.

The region is home to 10 percent of the world's birds -- about 1,000 species -- and 10 percent of its plant life. It has 13 species of monkeys. Among the 13 species designated as "threatened" are ocelots and black caimans -- a kind of crocodile. And, of course, my jaguar.

The weeklong trip offers the chance to go deeper into the more isolated areas of the park and see much of it.

Take a bus to Manu and a plane back to Cusco. It costs more, but shaves a day of travel off the trip. And tourists get a spectacular aerial view of the jungle canopy and more time to explore quaint Cusco, the ancient Incan capital of Peru.

I join 10 other tourists from around the world on our bus, which leaves Cusco, follows the Urubamba River across the Sacred Valley and climbs a dirt road into the Andes.

After crossing a 13,000-foot pass, we stop to observe the chullpas, pre-Incan graves. About 5 feet high, these circular stone tombs once held the mummies of the royal family buried in fetal positions. The gold and silver treasure stashed with them has long since been plundered.

An obelisk marks the entrance to misty Manu at Acjanacu. We descend into the dwarf forest, the cloud forest and then to our lodge in the lowland rain forest. The lodges on this trip are spartan by American standards -- screened cabins with little more than twin cots for furniture and separate kitchen, shower and toilet facilities. At least it discourages more tourists from coming.

Wildlife abounds

We rise at 5 a.m. the next day and hike to a camouflaged blind to observe the Andean cock-of-the-rocks. The male birds preen in their reddish orange plumage with black tails and red crests to attract the females. The males woo the ladies in their guttural voices. After breakfast, most of the group rides mountain bikes for two hours. David, an architect from Switzerland, and I opt for a nature hike. We see brilliantly colored butterflies, eagles, a swallowtail kite, white-collared swifts, tree ferns, and a wasp nest hanging in the bamboo.

That afternoon, we launch two rafts on the Alta Madre de Dios River. Water from the Class I and II rapids splashes over the bow. With the guide's permission, I jump in to cool off. Most of my companions follow suit. We might as well swim now before we reach the Manu River and its crocodiles, piranhas, electric eels and snakes.

We observe animals during hikes in the jungle, from towers or from a 25-foot-long motorized boat with a bright blue canopy. Our pilot expertly guides the boat through a maze of logs lodged in the river. Sometimes, turtles, herons, egrets and other birds perch on the limbs.

Close encounters

On our third day, we awaken at 5 a.m. and boat 15 minutes on the Alta Madre de Dios River to a rocky island 300 feet from shore. We sit on inch-thick mattresses and face a clearing on the bank. Birds soon flock in the trees above a 50-foot-high clay lick. Parrots and parakeet first swoop down, then macaws.

They peck at the clay for minerals that counteract the toxins in the unripe fruit they eat. As if at a deli, the colorful birds patiently await their turn.

Later that morning, the boat pulls ashore where a stream joins the main river. We climb 75 feet, and I plop into a pool fed by a hot spring. The water is 105 degrees, but I soon get used to it.

On my descent, however, I hear a shriek. Heidi Coyle, a tourist from St. John's in the Virgin Islands, is standing in the stream and trying to balance herself on a rock when she notices a snake a foot away. Our guide identifies it as a poisonous coral snake.

"I was very scared," she said later. "I was looking around because where there's one, there's more."

The 3-foot snake eventually swims away, ending our snake encounters for the rest of the trip.

We ride the boat for five hours. Egrets, herons and cormorants stand on rocky islands, the banks or in river shallows. Vultures soar overhead or flock ominously in trees. Flood-tossed trees stripped of bark and blanched by lichen clog the river or are strewn ashore. And wild cane flourishes on the banks like the dandelions in my backyard.

Suddenly, we spot a dead white caiman, upside down and lodged in the branches of a tree stuck in the Manu River. Three vultures perch atop the 10-foot-long body until we pull alongside it.

Treetop view

Back in camp, I go into the jungle on a canopy tour. We climb a series of five towers linked by inch-thick cables. The purpose ostensibly is to observe wildlife from the treetops. But we see no critters as we zoom as far as 300 feet among the ivy like modern-day Tarzans and Janes. I even practice my Tarzan yell.

Most of our success in spotting wildlife is because of the skill of our guides, Alvaro Zamora and Abdel Martinez. They are adept at following the tracks or slightest movements of animals and pointing them out to us.

We stalk a wild pig, rustling and grunting down the trail. For a fleeting moment, I make out its silhouette. We see a poison frog, used by Indians for arrows and darts, inside the hollow of a tree. Of more concern are the inch-long giant ants, whose bites scare even the natives. The giant ant nests and those of termites and wasps hang on trees throughout the jungle.

The jungle is not as hot as I expect but noisier. The air is filled with the chirping of the cicada, the howling of monkeys and the squawking of parrots and macaws.

During our hikes, light filters through the dense foliage, casting mottled shadows on a jungle floor of matted leaves. We enjoy watching the spider, squirrel and brown capuchin monkeys swinging from tree to tree, sometimes baby in tow.

On one occasion, we observe some spider monkeys high in the fig and sava trees. Disapproving our presence, the monkeys shower us with leaves and limbs. We do not budge. Then they defecate on us, scoring a direct hit on a tourist. That gets us moving.

One of my favorite Amazon Basin animals is the giant river otter. We visit them by flatboat on Salvador Lake, an oxbow lake and the biggest one in Manu. Oxbow lakes are formed by a change in the course of a river.

We eventually spot a family of six otters, each about four and half feet long, as entertaining as circus clowns. They play or fight with each other, then dive into the lake and surface, clutching and crunching fish, bones and all. They are absolutely mesmerizing.

In addition to the animals, the guides point out a wide variety of plant life. We see walking palms, trees whose roots move toward sunlight. I am amazed at a giant fig tree. It stands on a root system of tentacles 25 feet tall and spreading out 100 feet in diameter.

The leche leche tree grows about 130 feet high, and its flared trunk stretches 10 feet across. On another hike, the guide stops to show us a cocoa tree, the source of chocolate. I kiss it.

Tribal lodge

Tourists are few in Manu, but we visit a lodge of eight thatched huts of the Matchiguenga, the biggest Indian tribe in this region. I am told there are three kinds of Indians in Peru: those who have assimilated the white man's ways; those who have some contact with whites, but still follow the traditional way of life; and "the naked people," who live isolated in the jungle.

The leader of this lodge, Carlos, is of the second type. He demonstrates his skill with the bow and arrow, and we tourists take turns with the bow and later play soccer with our hosts.

At the lodge, I buy two necklaces made of seeds, the tusk of a wild pig and the skull of a pacu, a fish related to the piranha, for my son and nephew. I also buy them handmade bows and arrows with feathers from a variety of birds.

Imagine my sweet talking to get bows and arrows through four airports on the way home.

After a week in the jungle, most of my group returns by boat down the Manu River to a grassy airstrip guarded by ducks. On the way there, my eyes glaze over by the abundance of wildlife I've seen and, imagining there's little new to see, I leave my camera in my pack rather than around my neck. All the better to steady my lunch against the breeze blowing into our faces.

It is about 1:30 p.m. when Abdel spots the jaguar. He stands -- fortunately for us -- in a clearing on the river bank where he probably had just quenched his thirst. His sleek tawny body, about six feet long, ripples with muscles.

In just a matter of seconds, the cat lumbers back to the jungle -- indifferent to and undaunted by us. The brush and wild cane soon blend into the natural camouflage of his fur as we fumble for our cameras. David snaps the only photograph among us, but by now the jaguar's body blends into the jungle, making him virtually invisible.

It marks only the second jaguar Abdel has seen all year, and it happens on my birthday.

"Thank you, Peru," I say aloud.

Spectacular Courtship Display of Rare Hummingbird Filmed For First Time

2007-04-19T12:18:00.000-05:00

Published in Surfbirds News

Washington DC, 5 April 2007. American Bird Conservancy (ABC) today released the first ever film of the spectacular courtship display of the Marvelous Spatuletail, a highly endangered hummingbird that lives in the mountains of northern Peru. The video was shot by wildlife filmmaker Greg Homel of Natural Elements Productions. To view a segment of this extremely rare footage, please click on the graphic.

The Marvelous Spatuletail is unique among hummingbirds in that it has only four tail feathers. The tail of the adult male is more than twice as long as its body and ends in two great spoon-shaped ‘spatules’ that radiate a metallic purplish gloss. The males compete for females by whirling their long tails around their bodies in an amazing courtship display, which had previously only been witnessed by a few ornithologists, and had never been filmed. This display is considered to be one of the most bizarre in the bird world - the males repeatedly attack each other in the air, contorting their bodies and tails into strange shapes at incredible speed.

“The Marvelous Spatuletail is the ultimate hummingbird for most birdwatchers because of its rarity, spectacular tail, and vibrant plumage,” said Mike Parr, Vice President of American Bird Conservancy. “It is also the focus of conservation efforts in an area that is rapidly becoming one of the birding hotspots in South America.”

ABC is working with its Peruvian partner group Asociación Ecosistemas Andinos (ECOAN) to protect the spatuletail, which is considered to be one of the world’s most endangered hummingbirds. The groups have set up a new protected area under a conservation easement, are developing a nature tourism program to benefit local communities, and conducting reforestation programs in the area.

“Conservation is not the role of single individuals but of our entire society. When you see communities that understand such challenges and sign such commitments as this conservation easement, you see progress and feel there is hope,” said Constantino Aucca Chutas, President of ECOAN.To support the conservation of the spatuletail, visit https://www.abcbirds.org/membership/donate_spt.cfm

The Spatuletail is also becoming a flagship species for tourism in the area. It has been declared the “Regional Bird” for Peru’s Amazonas region, and is featured in the Commission for the Promotion of Peru’s tourism brochures and the Northern Peru Birding Route (www.perubirdingroutes.com).

Birdwatchers wishing to search for the spatuletail should contact Hugo Arnal at American Bird Conservancy, abc@abcbirds.org

Long Sought After Bird Spotted in Peruvian Nature Reserve

2007-04-19T12:17:00.003-05:00

Published in Salem-News.com

Endangered species known only from captured individuals seen in wild for first time

(ALTO NIEVA, Peru) - The extremely rare Long-whiskered Owlet (Xenoglaux loweryi), a species that wasn’t discovered until 1976, and until now was only known from a few specimens captured in nets after dark, has been seen in the wild for the first time by researchers monitoring the Area de Conservación Privada de Abra Patricia – Alto Nieva, a private conservation area in Northern Peru.

The sighting is considered a holy grail of South American ornithology and has not been accomplished in thirty years, despite the efforts of hundreds of birders.

The species is among the world’s smallest owls. It is so distinct that it has been named in its own genus: Xenoglaux meaning “strange owl” on account of the long wispy feathers or whiskers that stream out from its wild-looking reddish-orange eyes. The owl inhabits the dense undergrowth of mountain forests in a remote part of northern Peru.

“Seeing the Long-whiskered Owlet is a huge thrill,” said David Geale of Asociación Ecosistemas Andinos (ECOAN) who was part of the research team. “Its population is estimated to be less than 1,000 birds, and possibly as few as 250. Due to the rapid destruction of its forest habitat and its tiny range, it is inferred that the species is in serious decline. Until recently, the owlet’s key habitat was completely unprotected.”

The Long-whiskered Owlet has previously been captured by researchers on at least three occasions, but until 2002 nothing was known of the bird’s natural history. At that point, calls were recorded from a captive bird, but its biology still remained virtually unknown. Last month, researchers Geale and Juvenal Ccahuana, rangers of Abra Patricia and monitors of the MNBCA program from Alto Mayo, encountered the owlet three times during daylight hours and recorded its calls frequently at night. Several photographs were also taken of a bird captured in a mist-net and later released onto a tree branch where it posed for photographs before disappearing into the night. These additional photos are available at http://www.abcbirds.org/whiskeredowlpic.htm and high resolution copies are available upon request.

“The creation of the Area de Conservación Privada de Abra Patricia – Alto Nieva, located in the Northern end of the Peruvian Yungas ecosystem, provides protection for the key site for the Long-whiskered Owlet,” said Hugo Arnal, American Bird Conservancy’s (ABC) Tropical Andes Program Director. “By establishing a reserve and protecting the owlet’s forest habitat, ABC and its partner ECOAN are giving many other species a chance to survive as well.”

The northeastern section of the Peruvian Yungas, comprises habitat for 317 resident bird species, of which 23 are considered globally threatened. The conservation area also protects much of the known habitat for the endangered Ochre-fronted Antpitta, and has been declared a priority by the Alliance for Zero Extinction. Other endemics in the area include the endangered Royal Sunangel (a hummingbird), the rare and recently-described Johnson’s Tody-Tyrant, and the endangered Ash-throated Antwren.

Several songbirds that breed in North America such as the beautiful Blackburnian Warbler also use these forests during the winter. Other migratory species include the Broad-winged Hawk, Swainson’s Hawk, Swainson's Thrush, and Alder Flycatcher. In total, 29 neotropical migrant species use this area, of which 13 are of conservation concern. Nearly 98% of the reserve consists of well-preserved stands of typical Yungas forests, and it is also considered a rich area for orchids.

ABC’s work in the region is supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Conoco Phillips, the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, and Robert Wilson. Birdwatchers wishing to search for the owl should contact Hugo Arnal at American Bird Conservancy (see: http://www.abcbirds.org/ ). Access is strictly limited to small groups and the chances of success though better than in the past are still considered very low for anything but the luckiest groups.

American Bird Conservancy (ABC) is the only 501(c)(3) organization that works solely to conserve native wild birds and their habitats throughout the Americas. ABC is a membership organization that is consistently awarded a top, four-star rating by the independent group, Charity Navigator.

Peru: Amazon tribes demand creation of national parks

2007-04-19T12:17:00.001-05:00

(LIP-jl) (La Republica) -- Authorities from the Organization for the Development of the Indigenous Communities from the High Comaina (ODECOAC in Spanish) and the Organization of Development for the Cenepa Border Communities (ODECOFROC in Spanish) are demanding the creation of two national parks in Peru's Amazonian region.

The representatives from both organizations expressed their intentions of maintaining the areas within the proposed national parks free from any type of contamination and industrial operations.

"Last September we publicly denounced the contamination of our rivers caused by gold mining operations conducted by the Afrodita mining company at the mouths of the Comaina and Sawientsa Rivers and by Ecuadorian citizens who cross over into Peruvian territory," commented one of the representatives.

According to representatives of the indigenous groups, they have always defended their territory, even battling alongside Peruvian soldiers in the Peru-Ecuador border conflict.

"Our people have given their lives to defend the Condor Mountain Range, a Awajun ancestral territory," sustained the organizations.

They reminded government officials that as a result of that conflict, the Peruvian government agreed to protected areas as part of the peace treaty.

According to the organizations, this is the reason they are asking authorities to protect roughly 152,000 hectares of land by giving them national park status.

The proposed names of the national parks are Ichigkat-Muja Condor Mountain Range National Park and Tunta Nain Communal Reserve.

Published On Line

The `Newest' Natural Wonder

2007-04-19T12:06:00.000-05:00

The Locals Knew Of Peruvian Cascade; They Just Didn't Realize What They Had
March 4, 2007
By STEVE HENDRIX, Washington Post

Here I am in remotest northern Peru, hard on the trail of the world's third-largest anticlimax.

This is a story of waterfalls and expectations, and you can count me a waterfall skeptic. I know they are picturesque. I know they are soothing, in that stock greeting-card way of rainbows and unicorns. I know they figure largely in the pre-flight videos they show on planes to take the edge off your airport rage.

But actual waterfalls? They're seldom worth the walk. Somebody always insists on taking the 2-mile side trail to see the local waterfall. So you go. And there's a waterfall, dribbling (picturesquely) down the rocks. And then you hike back.

In my experience, waterfall equals anticlimax.

But the press release that crossed my desk last spring was darned near irresistible: "World's Third Highest Waterfall Discovered in Peru."

Howzat? Discovered? The Age of Discovery was ages ago. The biggest things they discover these days are new species of beetle and, every now and then, a forgotten cable network. But the major landforms were all mapped long ago. A 250-story waterfall that instantly climbs up on the podium with Venezuela's Angel Falls and South Africa's Tugela Falls? How did that avoid the eye of satellite cartographers?

Who cares? If it was that big and that remote, I just wanted to get there before they bulldozed a road, built the hotels and generally tarted up the place.

And so in September, I set off on the most harrowing waterfall side trip of all: an overnight flight from Washington to Lima, a dawn hop to the northern coastal city of Chiclayo and a 12-hour drive over dicey mountain roads to Peru's impossibly secluded upper Amazon basin. This high, dry tropical Shangri-La was the domain of the Chachapoyas, a mysterious Andean race that predated the Incas. The new waterfall, dubbed Gocta, after an ancient Chachapoyan village, is deep in one of the many blind valleys they inhabited between 800 and 1400 A.D. You can still see their carved tombs, some with intact mummies, in the surrounding cliff walls.

According to the press release, the government of Peru promised safe tourist access and basic accommodations, hopefully starting in 2007 (don't count on it). In the meantime, getting to Gocta requires bone-jarring days on terrifying roads and hours on steep and dubious valley trails. All to see a waterfall.

This had better be good.

It Was There All Along

So how do you discover a waterfall? The local people knew about it, of course. It just wasn't a big deal to them.

Luis Chuquimes is an elder in the tiny village of San Pablo, a few hours' hike from the falls. Tourists were unknown in San Pablo before word spread about Gocta last spring. Now Chuquimes' little cantina serves as an unofficial visitors center. According to the wrinkled sign-in book on his bar, more than 70 people had made the trip by the time I got there at the end of the dry season. On the other side of the valley, another village has logged just over 1,000 Gocta tourists. It's mostly Peruvians so far, eager to see the new national icon. A couple of Israelis and Germans had come . No Americans had signed in yet.

"We knew it was there," Chuquimes said as he delivered bottles of beer and Inca Kola to a group of Gocta-bound students from Chiclayo, a day's drive away. "But we didn't know it was one of the tallest in the world."

It took a German engineer named Stefan Ziemendorff, working on a nearby water project, to realize that the nameless falls might boast world-class specs. He got the Peruvian government to survey it, checked his National Geographic stats and called a press conference. Gocta came in at 2,532 feet, which put it, by Ziemendorff's reckoning, at No. 3 in the world.

Or not. It turns out that waterfall ranking is, well, rancorous. Waterfall people - who are a lot like train people and lighthouse people - are burning up the discussion boards, debating Gocta's place on the charts with fierce references to seasonal flow, degree of slope and something called "freeleap." (Partisans of certain Norwegian cascades have bordered on rude.)

All of which makes Peru's bold claim such a brilliant stroke of marketing. Whether or not Gocta deserves the bronze, "third highest" gives it instant Seven Wonders cred. That ensures tourist interest in a spectacular but little-known region that really does have a lot to offer anyone lured in.

"I don't know if it's the third-highest waterfall on Earth, but I know it's a very high waterfall," said Peter Lerche, a German anthropologist who has lived here since 1980. "It gives us a diversity of attractions. We have rivers, lakes, archaeology and now this waterfall."

The Chachapoyas area of northern Peru already attracts two kinds of tourists: birders and a trickle of hard-core archaeology buffs, those who have already seen (or been turned off by) the hugely popular Machu Picchu (so commercial in places, you might call it Inca Inc.). That was my toehold in the region. I found a guide company willing to take me to the waterfall and show me around the archaeological highlights during a six-day flying visit. They paired me with another tourist, a California antiques dealer, who was fishing around for a Gocta visit. A photographer from Lima made it a threesome.

A Museum Of Mummies .......> more information

Scientists discover new species of distinctive cloud-forest rodent

2007-04-19T12:00:00.000-05:00

Published On Line - Physorg
Source: Field Museum

A strikingly unusual animal was recently discovered in the cloud-forests of Peru. The large rodent is about the size of a squirrel and looks a bit like one, except its closest relatives are spiny rats.

The nocturnal, climbing rodent is beautiful yet strange looking, with long dense fur, a broad blocky head, and thickly furred tail. A blackish crest of fur on the crown, nape and shoulders add to its distinctive appearance.

Isothrix barbarabrownae, as the new species has been named, is described in the current issue of Mastozoología Neotropical (Neotropical mammalogy), the principal mammalogy journal of South America. A color illustration of the bushy rodent graces the cover of the journal.

The authors of the study found the rodent in 1999 while conducting field research in Peru's Manu National Park and Biosphere Reserve Mountains in Southern Peru along the eastern slope of the Andes. Extending from lowland tropical forests in the Amazon Basin to open grasslands above the Andean tree line, Manu is home to more species of mammals and birds than any equivalently sized area in the world.

"Like other tropical mountain ranges, such as the Himalayas, Ruwenzoris, Virungas and Kinabalu, the Andes support a fantastic variety of habitats," said Bruce Patterson, MacArthur Curator of Mammals at The Field Museum. "These in turn support some of the richest faunas on the planet."

The nocturnal, climbing rodent is beautiful yet strange looking, with long dense fur, a broad blocky head, and thickly furred tail. A blackish crest of fur on the crown, nape and shoulders add to its distinctive appearance.

Isothrix barbarabrownae, as the new species has been named, is described in the current issue of Mastozoología Neotropical (Neotropical mammalogy), the principal mammalogy journal of South America. A color illustration of the bushy rodent graces the cover of the journal.

The authors of the study found the rodent in 1999 while conducting field research in Peru's Manu National Park and Biosphere Reserve Mountains in Southern Peru along the eastern slope of the Andes. Extending from lowland tropical forests in the Amazon Basin to open grasslands above the Andean tree line, Manu is home to more species of mammals and birds than any equivalently sized area in the world.

"Like other tropical mountain ranges, such as the Himalayas, Ruwenzoris, Virungas and Kinabalu, the Andes support a fantastic variety of habitats," said Bruce Patterson, MacArthur Curator of Mammals at The Field Museum. "These in turn support some of the richest faunas on the planet."

"The new species is not only a handsome novelty," Patterson said. "Preliminary DNA analyses suggest that its nearest relatives, all restricted to the lowlands, may have arisen from Andean ancestors. The newly discovered species casts a striking new light on the evolution of an entire group of arboreal rodents."

Article On Line

Birdwatching & Documenting a region's species

2007-04-19T11:55:00.001-05:00

Reitz graduate finds adventure of lifetime doing research in Andes
Published On Line - CourierPress
Photography by JILL JANKOWSKI
Story by SHARON SORENSON
Sunday, January 28, 2007

Imagine nearly five months in the jungle. No television, cell phone, newspaper, e-mail, electricity or running water. With a few dedicated assistants, Jill Jankowski lives in a tent; eats rice, pasta and dried soup; treats brown river water for drinking; and stays alert for poisonous snakes, disease-transmitting mosquitoes and stinging ants. Even after a bout with a serious parasitic infection, she's going back.

Jankowski, a 1998 Reitz graduate and a graduate of Purdue University, abandoned her 4.0 grade-point average earned studying chemical engineering, as well as a starting position on Purdue's soccer team. She chose instead to study birds.

Now earning a doctorate from the University of Florida, she's studying the diversity of birds in Peru's 3.75 million-acre Manu reserve.

Supported by her research team, she trudges from the Amazon foothills (elevation 2,550 feet) to the Andes Mountains tree line (elevation: 11,000 feet) to learn why, in a day's stroll up or down the slope, one can cross the ranges of hundreds of bird species.

"You can find as many bird species on this single Andean slope as in the U.S. and Canada combined - about 1,150 species," Jankowski said.

Tropical forests, Jankowski said, are "spectacular places that we know next to nothing about."
"They have the most amazing and quirky animals on the planet. But in many cases, tropical forests are destroyed before anyone can document the life within."

Jankowski feels an urgency about her work, in part, she said, because "in later years, this project will gauge effects of climate change."

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Peru Bird-Watching Takes Flight With 1,800 Species

2007-04-19T11:52:00.002-05:00

John Roachfor National Geographic News
November 22, 2004

Eco-lodges are sprouting under the forest canopy, guidebooks are rolling off the presses, and Peruvians are eager to showcase their country as a bird-watcher's paradise.

That is the message trilled by John O'Neill, an ornithologist at Louisiana State University (LSU) in Baton Rouge, who has visited the country to study birds almost every year since 1961.

"It's a country that still has major areas totally unknown biologically," he said. "There have been more than 50 species of bird discovered and described in the last 50 years. I've had the good fortune of being involved with 13."
Peru is home to more than 1,800 bird species, 120 of which are found nowhere else in the world. At least five new species have also been discovered as of this year and are still waiting official scientific description.

The diversity of bird species in Peru, O'Neill said, stems from its ecological and geographical diversity. On the coast, the Pacific Ocean laps at parched desert. Inland, dry forest and scrubland rise to the snowcapped Andes. Toward the east, cloud forests spill into the Amazon Basin.
"It really is packed with landscapes and habitats," said Thomas Valqui, a Lima-based ornithologist and graduate student at LSU. "In five hours you can go from a dry desert through snow at 5,000 meters [16,400 feet] elevation to the rain forest."

Thomas Schulenberg is a conservation ecologist at the Field Museum in Chicago and an expert on Peruvian birds. He said South America is the "bird continent," thanks to bird species that are more diverse and abundant than those in tropical Asia or Africa.

That, in turn, makes Peru a hot spot, Schulenberg said. "Peru has dazzling geographic diversity, which equates to habitat diversity, which translates to more bird species."

Birders' Delights

Barry Walker is the owner of Cuzco-based Manu Expeditions and a recognized expert on birding in Peru. He said the opportunity to discover bird species new to science is attractive to a handful of people, but most come simply to marvel at the diversity of species.
"Large numbers [of birds], plus some large spectacular attractions, are the prime reason for a visit," he said.

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Cloud Forests Fading in the Mist, Their Treasures Little Known

2007-04-19T11:52:00.001-05:00

John Roachfor National Geographic News
August 13, 2001

They are nature's "water towers," providing billions of gallons of fresh, clean, filtered water. They are home to thousands of indigenous peoples, and storehouses of biodiversity, at least 80 percent of which has not yet been catalogued.
Yet in as little as ten years' time, biologists warn, the world's cloud forests—evergreen mountain forests that are almost permanently shrouded in mist and clouds—may be all but gone.

They are being cleared for cattle grazing and coca plantations. Logged to provide fuel for heating and cooking. Paved over and developed to make way for transportation and telecommunications networks. They are being damaged and dried out by air pollutants and global warming.
Now, cloud forests are rising to the top of the world's scientific and conservation agenda. But will scientists learn enough about these important ecosystems to be able to convince the world to conserve them before they are gone forever?

Percy Nuñez, a research biologist in Cuzco, Peru, who studies cloud forests, estimates they are disappearing at a such a rate that the "the cloud forest will all be gone in the next ten years."
"We don't know about our resources—80 to 90 percent of the cloud forests are a mystery to us all," Nuñez said.
Yet scientists have barely begun assessing the wide range of species that clod forests harbor, he noted. "We don't have biologists working in cloud forests. We are not training young scientists to do the work," he said.
Now, he added, "we are working with NASA, using satellite images to get some idea of what's there before it is gone. There aren't any field guides available."

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Gocta waterfall

2007-04-19T11:37:00.000-05:00

The 14 tallest waterfall is located in Chachapoyas in the Northern part of Peru.

This waterfall has been known by locals for decades, but only recently has its existence emerged as common knowledge. (See map)

The German Stefan Ziemendorff is thought to be responsible for bringing the falls to the attention of the Peruvian government in 2002, he was working in Peru for a water project and he realized from far in a expedition that something was there since then he participated in documenting, constructing a trail to and measuring the falls. The falls appear to exhibit a modest to high volume of flow, becoming an immensely powerful cataract when its stream is full. According the list of waterfalls released by a Waterfall database, Gocta is the 14 tallest waterfall in the world. Some weeks ago Gocta was announced as the third tallest but this is wrong.

To reach this waterfall the only way is walking 5 hrs by virgin jungle departing from the village of Cocachimba, through the trek its possible to see another amazing waterfalls, toucans, hummingbirds, monkeys and much more. Although there are some explorer or adventure lovers visiting Gocta but there is not yet tourist circuits or paths at the moment.

Then a question appears, which is the third tallest waterfall? Its name is Las Tres Hermanas (The three sisters) and is also located in Cutiverini reserved zone in Ayacucho, Peru.

For those interested in visit Gocta, InkaNatura recommends spend extra days visiting the Chachapoyas archaeological jewels: Kuelap fortress, Karajia, Revash, Lake of the Condors, and the interesting Leymebamba Museum where visitors can admire more than 200 chachapoyas mummy found at the Lake of the Condors.

More information :
The tallest waterfalls
Kuelap
Chachapoyas tours

Manu, The most intense wildlife experience the Peruvian Amazon

2007-04-18T16:51:00.001-05:00

There is no doubt that Manu is the superlative of biodiversity thanks to a great variety of habitats that includes Andean grasslands, elfin forest, cloud forest and jungle lowlands. Nature-lovers and wildlife enthusiasts can find more species of plants than any other part of the world. And when we talk about wildlife, we can count 13 species of monkeys (including the charm Emperor Tamarin), Giant armadillo, Giant anteater and endangered predators like the Jaguar, Giant Otter and the Black Caiman.

Recently, InkaNatura has designed new programs that include accommodations in its comfortable tented camps located inside the Manu National Park, close to the famous Lakes Salvador and Otorongo.

In order to offer a reliable and secure air service, InkaNatura is pleased to have made an agreement with Pisco Airlines to offer flights between Cusco and Boca Manu. We now guarantee departures, using a modern Cessna Gran Caravan (12 seats) with experienced and high quality trained pilots. This 2005 plane has the latest technology for safe air transportation. Some Manu tour operators recommend traveling through Puerto Maldonado, but they do not mention that clients will spend more than 11 hours sitting in uncomfortable fast boats/buses and, in addition, this route does not have clean and decent bathrooms.

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More info about News in May 2006
http://www.inkanatura.com/news/2006/mayo/index.htm

Birdwatching in Peru

2007-04-18T16:41:00.000-05:00

Peru is one of the top countries for birdwatchers and nature lovers. Here some important facts about birds in Peru.

Did you know that:

Peru has the second highest number of bird species in the world? Counting only breeding species, Peru ranks first.
More new species were described in Peru in the last 30 years than in any other country in the world, with about 1 new species on average.

You can find more information about our programs at:
http://www.inkanatura.com/birdingtours.asp

More info about News in Febreruary 2005
http://www.inkanatura.com/news/2005/February/index.htm