{"id":585,"date":"2016-02-17T12:01:07","date_gmt":"2016-02-17T17:01:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.nicholas.duke.edu\/birds\/?p=585"},"modified":"2016-02-17T12:01:07","modified_gmt":"2016-02-17T17:01:07","slug":"a-visit-to-the-most-biodiverse-place-on-earth-ecuadors-yasuni-biosphere","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.nicholas.duke.edu\/birds\/a-visit-to-the-most-biodiverse-place-on-earth-ecuadors-yasuni-biosphere\/","title":{"rendered":"A visit to the most biodiverse place on Earth: Ecuador’s Yasuni Biosphere"},"content":{"rendered":"

Trogons bite hard! Though it may look like a Muppet, that bill is serrated and powerfully built for plucking and crushing tough fruits and beetles. This spectacular creature is just one of more than 600 bird species found in the most biodiverse place on Earth.<\/p>\n

\"Green-backed<\/a>
Green-backed Trogon captured in a mist net at Tiputini Biodiversity Station<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I got to know this bird\u2019s bite force over winter break, when Natalia Ocampo-Penuela (also a Nicholas School PhD student) and I led a trip for nine paying eco-tourists to Ecuador\u2019s Yasuni Biosphere. Both of us being bird-nuts, it was of course a birding-heavy ornithological workshop. The academic focus, with nightly lectures and mist-netting qualified the trip as \u201cscience tourism,\u201d which allowed us to utilize\u00a0 Tiputini Biodiversity Station and its unparalleled facilities as a base.<\/p>\n

\"Entrance<\/a>
Entrance to Tiputini Biodiversity Station<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

To call the station, \u201cremote,\u201d doesn\u2019t do the setting justice. It takes 4 legs over a full day to make the journey from Ecuador\u2019s high Andes capital, Quito: step 1) a plane flight to the ramshackle lowland jungle town of Coca; step 2) a 2-hour boat ride down the Napo River to a Repsol (a petroleum company) security checkpoint; step 3) a 2-hour open-air truck ride down a gravel oil-well-pad road; and finally, step 4) a 2-hour motorized canoe ride down the Tiputini to the station.<\/p>\n

The reward for all this travel effort is the opportunity to experience a pristine rainforest ecosystem untrammeled even by aboriginal hunting pressure. The local monkey troops have learned that the resident research scientists are harmless (well, except that one primatologist who carries a traquilizer gun!) and frolic in the tree tops over the cabins. We saw nine of the 10 regularly observed monkey species in six days!<\/p>\n

\"Red<\/a>
Red Howler Monkey<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Pygmy<\/a>
Pygmy Marmoset<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Indeed, despite the bird focus of the trip, fantastic mammal sightings threatened to outshine the birds. While tooling around the river we saw a Red Brocket Deer cross in front of our boat, a Neotropical River Otter toting a fish meal and several of odd echo-locating Pink River Dolphins. We never saw the king of the Neotropical jungle, the jaguar, but we same across several of its favorite meals: the pig-like Collared and White-lipped Peccaries. The latter species moves in herds of up to more than 100, the snorting sounds and foul odors of which, can permeate the dank forest understory.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Of course the lack of human hunting pressure made seeing some of the sensitive terrestrial turkey-like birds a relative cinch. The moaning sounds of male Salvin\u2019s Curassows and the wing-rippling trills of Blue-throated Piping-Guans were ever-present and we got to within blow-gun range of a few of each displaying in trees. Apparently they taste delicious and are some of the first species to disappear when human hunters access a pristine forest.<\/p>\n