Living in the Amazon rainforest for a week

            After eight hours of a plane ride to Coca, a bus ride, a boat ride down the Rio Napo, a truck ride, and another boat ride down the Rio Tiputini we arrived at Tiputini Biodiversity Station in the Amazon. Parque Nacional Yasuní, where TBS is located, contains the highest level of biodiversity per hectare in the world! We were fortunate enough to be able to spend an entire week at the research station to observe this ecosystem and learn all about its complexity. Each day we took hikes and compiled species lists of the plants, insects, birds, and mammals that we encountered. For a couple of the mornings, we woke up before sunrise to go bird watching 145 feet up in one of the station’s observation towers. We saw macaws flying overhead, parakeets eating from the fig tree we were in, toucans roosting in the distance, and several species of monkeys eating and sleeping in neighboring trees. We also canoed out into a pond to run behavioral study on Hoatzins, a mangrove-dwelling bird native to the Amazon. With the help of our professor, we coded several of their behaviors and compiled a summary of our observations. Halfway through the week, we took a night ride in a boat on the Rio Tiputini seeing some caiman alligators and several species of nocturnal tropical birds.

            To wrap up the unbelievable experience, we floated down the river for a couple of hours. All of a sudden, we saw something breach out of the water ahead of us and realized that it was a pink river dolphin. They swam around us for a good stretch of the float and would pop up to the surface unexpectedly always surprising us. It was unlike any river float that I’ve ever done back up in Texas. With the ending of our week in at TBS, our first module also came to a close. I originally entered college as an animal science major, and then transferred into a more agricultural and economics-oriented track. However, after this first Wildlife Conservation and Management class, my interests in animals and forestry conservation have been certainly been revamped.