Cacti of the Galapagos

 Both Geordie and I find cactuses pretty neat. The Galapagos Islands had several species. I really liked the Lava cactus below. They are one of the first things to colonize lava fields hence their name. They grew in clusters and were short. None even came close to knee high. These stubby cactuses were on Santiago Island on a 300 or so year old lava flow.

 Giant prickly pear were flowering while we were there. You can see yellow dots on the specimen below which are the flowers. Mockingbirds and Cactus Finches liked to eat the flowers and fruit. We saw Cactus Finches nesting right in the trunk of the cactus. This type of cactus is kind of strange. When it is young like the one below it looks like that. As it ages (it will more than 100 years old when this happens) it looks more tree like with a bare trunk and all the cactus leaves at the very top. Kind of like palm tree but full of spikes.

 Candelabra cactus are most like the ones you see in the American Southwest. They are named for their branching shape. These also attracted various birds to nest in them. They were common on many islands. This one is on Santa Fe.

Kathryn Taylor: Master Angler

Unsupervised activities at La Selva lodge were few since nearly everything in the surrounding area was poisonous and you could easily get lost in the jungle alone, but one easily available activity between hikes was fishing in the lagoon. The setups are as simple and barebones as you could ask for, just a hook on a bit of line wrapped around a stick. You can actually see Kathryn's line in the photo below if you look carefully in the bottom left corner.

 Despite numerous tugs on my line and an ever-diminishing bit of bait I hadn't had any luck when Kathryn squeaked and proudly pulled this little catfish out of the water. For the purposes of internet fish legends, it was at least THIIIIIIS big. We were both shocked when it began mewing plaintively... you typically think of fish as quiet while they flop around, but this little fellow was particularly vocal about its capture.

 Although the lodge staff were quite happy to clean and cook it for her, between its small size and eerie cries for freedom, Kathryn was inclined to let her fish go back to make more generations of fish after a few quick photos.

There were also piranhas in the water there and while we saw one or two that other people caught, we didn't have any luck with our lines beyond this excellent encounter.

Getting Around on the Napo River

Transport in the Amazon. In a word... varied.  For the most part we were in lovely dugout canoes. The anthropologists will know how these are made. Burned out, hacked out and shaped. We took took these anywhere we went off the Napo River itself.  We found several that were no longer water worthy and were beginning to rot. All natural materials meant all natural disposal. These were my favorite. Quiet and real.

 This is very similar to what we took from Coca to miscellaneous shore line 3 hrs East.  Basically its a high speed canoe.  Most have canopies. Their narrow shape means that they can navigate between sandbars more easily than wider vessels.

 Speaking of wider vessels, while we did not journey on one of these we saw plenty. The back is basically the wheel house with perhaps some beds, definately a kitchen and a salon/social area where people can eat and chat. The front had everything like trucks as you see below or huge bulldozers. The Napo has extremely variable water heights. It was low while we were there so even the small speedy engine dugouts had to drop knots to navigate the sand bars and dead heads.

Rainforest Mammals

The below image is a New World monkey called a Squirrel Monkey. Unlike the other New World monkeys, their tail is not used for climbing, but as a kind of "balancing pole" and also as a tool. Their movements in the branches can be very rapid as we can attest to! They are really acrobatic and can leap very far and catch on to what looks like the most delicate of branches. They live together in multi-male/multi-female groups with up to 500 members. These large groups occasionally break into smaller troops.We saw a troop that could have been over 40. They eat primarily fruits and insects. Occasionally they eat seeds, leaves, flowers, buds, nuts, eggs and small vertebrates.

We saw several species of bats but mostly at night when they are virtually impossible to photograph despite some of the very large sizes they come in.. We were canoing along the edge of a lagoon in the day when our guide spotted these wee fellows. It took Geordie and I forever to see them. Can you see how many there are? You have to be pretty sharp eyed. These bats stay still up close but when you move away they take off. These are insectivorous bats and small and cute.  Also the EXACT colour of the branches they are on. And there are three of them.

Black Mantled Tamarin are cute little primates that love the upper canopy. The Ecuadorian Black Mantled Tamarin are often considered a subspecies called Graell's Tamarin. They eat insects, leaves and fruits. We saw groups of two to twelve on several occasions. They were hard to spot as they were quite high up but we had occasion to get some good sightings.

Amazon Amphibians

 Frogs were incredibly hard to spot in the dense shadow of the jungle canopy. I did our guides Marco and Omar proud when I spotted this Ecuadorian Ruby Poison Dart Frog resting on a leaf. Regular Ruby Poison Dart Frogs from Peru do not have those yellow limb spots. Poson-dart frogs have varying levels of toxicity. This one is low.  It is also threatened by habitat loss from deforestation. We were lucky to spot it.

 This one's eyes showed up lovely in the flash photo. This one I think is  a Peruvian Poison Frog (also threatened) but I am happy to be corrected. If the one I think it is, it is VERY toxic.This poison destroys nerve cells and sends powerful impulses, resulting in extreme pain. A Peruvian poison frog will contain around one milligram of poison, enough to cause severe pain in humans, but not enough to kill. We looked but didn't touch.

 Allow me to intruduce Señor Frog. Señor Frog is a frog of excellent size as you can tell by the hand gently holding his back legs. These fellows have the extremely disconcerting habit of crying like a baby when they get caught. This one was content to be gently handled and didn't make a sound even when Geordie and I petted him. Quite gentlemanly of him really. The size of frogs we saw ranged from about this big, O  (a baby tree frog), to the monstrous fellow below.

Big Bugs of the Rainforest

I am not a bug person. I am not a bug fan. I consider it a brave achievement when I handled a stick insect at the Vancouver Aquarium.  But the ones in the Amazon jungle didn't bother me so much simply because they were so FRIGGIN HUGE that I always knew where they were.  The lady tarantula below lived just down the path from us and we saw her every night.  We saw her in her hidey hole too. She is roughly as big as my hand.

We heard Cicadas often. They were hard to spot as they often rest high up in trees. This one was obliging and was at eye level just ouside the social area of La Selva.  They have beautiful wings. His body is slightly less large than a thumb but his wings add to that.

We saw several of these centipedes. I believe the scientific name is Scolopendra gigantea.  You can see how big they are. I poked it gently! I didn't have the courage to actually handle it. They curl into a ball when overly harrased.  This one didn't seem to mind and crawled over hand over hand over hand until it was let on its merry way.

A Kathryn-A-Day Retrospective

 At the end of the year I did a quick name search in our photos and found that I have nearly 365 photos of Kathryn from the past year and thought I'd share a few from earlier trips that didn't get proper coverage at the time. Since we're still covering it at the moment, none of them are from the galapagos either.

This picture is from the beach Sechelt on the sunshine coast of BC with a weird purple seastar we found at low tide. That was part of a very nice trip with my parents along the coast to the north west of Vancouver.

 The old wall of Quebec City is studded with cannons and mortars as castle walls so often are, and since their days of potential violence are over, its great to see them put to use for recreation and fun. Below, Kathryn is relaxing and giving a quick shout out to Doctor Strangelove.

 While it is true that I love getting pictures of her patting statues noses, it is equally true that she's great fun to photograph wearing any sort of over-sized hat. The Ottawa War museum had a number of displays where you could try on different hats and helmets from the previous generations of our soldiers, and this pith helmet helped cast a bit of light on a very powerful but grim museum.

Looking through all my photos to pick this handful has shown me how tricky it is to pick my favorites and that I'll have another busy year ahead of me getting even better ones of her in 2012.