Nueva Esperanza - Part I

Yesterday I returned from the second field site! I already uploaded pictures - the reason why I don't put a lot of pictures on this blog is because most people who are reading this can see the pictures on my Facebook anyways, so I don't want to be redundant and repost them all here, too.

Nueva Esperanza is a small, poor community 22 kilometers from Iquitos. Like I said before, from the road to Iquitos, you have to hike an hour down a trail to get to the community and the building where we stayed. Judit usually hires men from the village to meet us at the road and help us carry our gear and food, so we are just responsible for carrying our own backpacks. This year, however, apparently the people who Judit told never passed on the message, so no one showed up when they arrived and they had to carry most of it in two trips!  I feel like miscommunications like this are pretty typical here.

The new volunteer and I arrived 3 days later. Since we didn't have to help with the gear and only had to bring our own backpacks, the hike wasn't too bad. We were staying on a smallish piece of land with a single building on it. We stored our gear and food inside the building, but the thatched roof leaked in many places when it rained. There was a small platform in front where we would hang out, eat dinner, and leave our backpacks and various belongings, and an outdoor "kitchen" on the side - just an elevated fire pit, a shelf and a table. Judit hired señoras from the village to come and cook lunch and dinner for us everyday. Sometimes they would bring their children with them, and sometimes they would sell us things like fruit and fish, so we had fish for dinner two nights! They were little fish that you had to pick all the bones out of, but it was worth it after so many nights of rice and beans.

Hanging out on the last day

Like the last site, we had 4 net-lines to run here. Since there were 14 of us though, including Judit, we easily could run 2 of them simultaneously in 4 days - 1 day of set up and 3 days of netting. That means we really only had 8 days of work this time, so we had a day off on Sean's birthday (cake, alcohol, and dancing with headlamps) and the day before we left (I think they also had a day off the first day, but I wasn't there yet!). We would have 2 people stay behind to guard our stuff, fetch water, tell the señoras what to prepare for meals, and hike out the lunches to the netlines. That left 6 people for each netline, but two of the Colombians are working on their thesis projects for university, so they would help but would be doing their own thing most of the time. Having 5 people on each netline is plenty, though, so I feel like things went pretty smoothly the whole time.

We caught of lot of really cool birds here! I don't have pictures of most of them because I was always at the other netline (unlucky!) that day, but I did get to see one really cool one I was excited about: Momotus momota, or the Blue-crowned Motmot!

Serrated bill!

Beautiful colors!

Racket-tail!

Motmots are very bright, cool-looking birds. With a lot of the species, the barbs on the middle tail feathers fall off to make the racket-shape you see there. It's said that when they are nervous, they twitch their tails back and forth, kind of like a pendulum.

I'm going to try and steal pictures of the other cool things we saw, so stay tuned!