Animals along the Amazon River - Liebe zur Erde

If you are undertaking on the Amazon a river trip to see animals - you are at the wrong place… The game are almost exclusively visible at the smaller tributaries, which lie far away from the settlements. Accordingly, our wildlife viewing is available on the pages to Sandoval and Tambopata, the so far rather remote region in the Madre de Dios around Puerto Maldonado. From Leticia (Colombia) one must travel almost a week with a small boat to come in primary rain forest. And that is just where the species is found for which the Amazon is famous.




Along the Rio Amazonas and Rio Ucayalj however much is cut down, rolled flat - even in the Amazon Basin in Peru. While it looks still "green", the new growth is limited to a few species, and thus offers no food source for the in this respect most highly specialized animals. More on the website of the primary rain forest. Yet you can also discover along this route the one or the other. A selection we show here.

What we have dispensed with photography, are the various species of beetles that are in different states found in the morning on the ship before they were swept away. Also, the bats were nocturnal and difficult to picture.


     

A common sight are these birds that seem to populate every sandbank:

Also typical: The river dolphins - or that what is visible from them...:

In general it goes like this: one of us shouts: "Look, a dolphin" - The other, no matter how fast he looks, sees only the rippling water .... Because the dolphins are hunted here as well as everything edible else, they have a habit of coming just to the surface to breathe once - and vanish again. This Delphi school here we found at the very end of our trip and after 10 days in vain staring at the water roundabout - we found them on the Brazilian side behind Leticia.





 





The dolphins of the Amazon are sweetwater river dolphins and colored allegedly pink. About the color, we will have during the whole travel a debate because I find that I can only see gray shadows. They have, however, as this photo shows a pink belly - at least something ...





These animals are playing like play calving. This group skips and jumps, some of the animals clap together in the air - pure zest for life that we see here!


   









Illegal und may be partly legal...



Also here are hidden river dwellers, these men earn their livelihood by pulling treasures from the Amazon for the Aquarium of our western world. In the open boxes that are filled with water, are mini-rays, only slightly smaller than its container. Only a portion of the fish survived the procedure of capture and transportation to the nearest town ...

Flocks of birds ... - Here: Lories

Some villages are home to unwanted birds like this Vulture


and the vegetable compartment of our ship carries these two friends who are pruned upright - fortunately they are in pairs:






At Lethicia we find this quasi-castrated macaws who have been trimmed for better viewing of the springs. On the webside to the claylick these animals are presented in more detail - it's a shame to see these birds here in that state if their counterparts can fly freely .....


Again, this is not quite unusual down here: a captured monkey. For his owner the boat trip pays out, because at the market in Iquitos (see there) is paid a lot of money for an animal like this:





So the rain forest in many forms is turned into cash  -

Remember: Without customers no exploitation ...