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For those who are really interested in what I do here is a second day (couldnt decide which to upload so decided to do both) …..
7:00am – Time to get up as today we will be heading to land! In the flooded forest you forget what it is like to walk on solid ground, spending your life in canoes and walking around on boats. The last few days we have been rained off and we were unable to visit the land. However today we were hoping it would be dry (little did we know)….
7:30am – After a quick breakfast and checking the sky for rain the guides decided it was going to be a clear day. So we left the Patacia and started the two hour journey to the only spot locally, which is high enough to do a terrestrial transect… We get to the lake (which is about 40 minutes from our base) when the rain started! This was no shower this was a full blown Amazon downpour…. We did not give up as we wanted to get to land so continued on. About half way there I realised the boat was getting very full of water, so decided I needed to start bailing the water out. I therefore spent the rest of the next hour bailing, so that we didn’t sink.
9.30am – We finally arrive at land, and somehow managed not to sink but the rain was not giving up. We started the transect in the rain using my very useful waterproof notepad. After a while the rain started to ease and the frogs started to come out, we had a very successful transect and found many frogs species, along with a few reptiles. This particular area of land was the only place where we found poisonous frogs, as they do not like the flooded forest. We did a nice long walk into the forest, which turned out to be around 3km and then we stopped for a break, where we ate a few snacks which we had brought with us. By this point the rain had stopped, and the forest was starting to warm up. I found a little Gecko whilst we were sitting waiting, it had no tail as he would have shed this in response to a predator attack. We then did the long trek back to the boat and start returning to the Patacia.
5pm – After a very long day we finally return to the Patacia very tired and hungry. We then spent a few hours relaxing, showering and typing up the day’s data.
7pm – Dinner time yay! The guides have been playing cards whilst we using our laptops and organising our photos. We are all very hungry after our long day, when Denise brings the food in we all get very large portions. This just happens to be one of my favourite meals, pasta with green sauce (the sauce is amazing I have no idea what is in it!).
8pm – Even after such a long day we still couldn’t have a night off, as there was much data to collect. So we headed out to do some floating vegetation surveys in the channel. This we did from the large boat, which we were able to drive into the vegetation and search for frogs for 15 minutes around the boat. This is always good fun as you get covered in insects whilst trying to catch frogs that were a mere two meters from the boat, this often involved a long pole or paddle and someone balancing trying to lean far enough to catch it (no one has fallen in yet and we all have lifejacket on!). We have a successful night and even catch a giraffe morph triangulum frog.. one of my favourites.
10.30pm – We decided to call it a night and headed back to the boats to go to bed. After quickly sorting the equipment and a short diary entry I fell asleep very quickly.
