Cedro Caño, Flor de Castaña & Supay Caño
The light in the window of my cabin told me that it was time to start a brand new day in the exciting upper Amazon. A pre-breakfast skiff ride along an small black water tributary was our first activity of the day. In the Pacaya-Samiria Reserve there is an immense quantity of creeks, lagoons and lakes that give us flexibility to explore new ones. Today we went to see one of these already unexplored, by us, areas. We had wonderful sightings in a flooded forest that was mainly compound of small palm trees (Bactris spp.) that formed little islands everywhere.
Horned screamers, terns, Squirrel monkeys, parrots, toucans were seen or heard. The highlight of the early morning was nonetheless a fairly close Brown-throated Three-toed Sloth that was unusually active, probably because the morning was sunny and warm. With amusement we observed how the sloth moved its limbs taking peeks of their observers.
After breakfast we went to ¬visit the “Flor de Castaña” community. We certainly enjoyed this visit for we had the chance to interact with the inhabitants especially by visiting one of the local elementary school classrooms where we sang with the children and distributed some school supplies.
Before lunch we had an interesting presentation on the fabulous richness of the amazon fruits. One of our Naturalists, Renny Coquinche, showed us a big array of these exotic fruits. Our guests tried them all and share their impressions.
In the afternoon we visited a different location, the third of the day, Supay Caño. In this paradisiacal creek we had, once again, wonderful wildlife sightings. A pair of White-winged Parakeets (Brotogeris versicolorus) was a true delight for they keep coming back to their nesting site located in a termite nest at a close range from the skiff. This parakeet species is also known as “canary-winged” due to its striking yellow wing coverts and white inner remiges. Coverts and remiges are technical names given to specialized feathers in the bird. Later on we saw many more parakeets flying around and making their characteristic sounds of scratchy chatters.
The sunlight was almost over and a wonderful sunset let us know that it was time to come back to our home this week, the Delfin II.
