After breakfast, we would be heading into an oxbow lake, trying to find any Manakin in our way and the “legendary” black caiman. Black caimans can get to be 5 meters long and don’t live in the main rivers, instead they prefer to be in oxbow lakes, like the one we were heading to. At the lake, we got into a canoe and the adventure started. There are myths that a giant Paiche (fish) lives there. The first animal we saw was the Hoatzin, a bird species that is a very ancestral bird and doesn’t have any close relatives alive in the present. We didn’t see any of the mythical Paiche or the Black Caiman, but saw 17 different bird species, all in just an hour. We saw: Crimson-Creasted Woodpecker, Rufus Motmot, Russet-Backed Oropendola, Amazonian White Tailed Trogon, Black Caracara, Boat-Billed Flycatcher, Great Kiskadee, Social Flycatcher, Cobalt-Winget Parakeet, Cocoi Heron, Agami Heron, Yellow-Rumped Cacique, Black Trailed Tityr, Ringed Kingfisher, Amazon Kingfisher, Green Kingfisher and Red Capped Cardinal. Woodpeckers try to find any old tree and hit it with its beak to see if there are larves or any other insect they like to eat; their tongue is long and has a sticky part at the beginning so it can catch difficult insects.
After a ride in the lake, we went back to the Harpia Plot; about a 4k walk from the lake. Today’s task was small but challenging, we would be making the Super Net. Since we didn’t have the tubes for the Super Net, we had to think outside of the box and create a super net with the materials that we had. Wendy told me that biologist in the rain forest don’t have all the materials they wished they had, so they have to be original and generate solutions with what they have. We knew that we had our normal net tubes (Tube A) which are long (about 2.6 meters) and we found some small but thick tubes (Tube B). We noticed that the normal tubes entered perfectly into the thick tubes and found some smaller “normal” tubes (about 2.4 meters long// Tube C). Our plan was to attach Tube A and Tube C one into each side of Tube B. We ended up with a solid huge tube that looked about six meters tall. Our next problem was How to get the nets into the top of the Tube. This problem was fairly easy to solve. We got a carabineer and paste it with tape into the top of the tube, this would work as a pulley. We passed a rope through the carabineer and tied one side into the top part of the net to pull the net upwards. Then, we tied another rope into the top part of the net and the middle part as well in order to be able to pull the net down. We did this in both of the sides of the net and were successful. We would be trying to catch the bird tomorrow so we closed the nets.
Now that work time was over and are brains were fried from thinking, it was time to have a little fun adventure in the river; we would go fishing with the “Tigres”. Fishing is not generally allowed in TBS, but this was an important event so an exception was made. We stayed from 2:00pm until 5:30pm fishing in the river. I was the only one in the group that didn’t get a fish, but I got a turtle. We love the environment, and know that turtles have to be thrown back into the river, so we delivered it gently back into the water. All of the Tigres started to laugh when I caught the turtle because it was something uncommon and I hadn’t caught any fish. Everyone except me caught at least 3 fish, Enrique and Ovidio caught like 6 each. We caught Piranhas, Bagres, and many other big and small fish. The small fish was used as bait and the big fish were kept for the meal of the night. At night we ate the fish that we had caught and talked with the other researchers, but I felt kind of sad; I only had one day left.