LAURENCE MACKINgoes on the trail of big cats in the Peruvian rainforest
A SMALL GROUP gathers to examine the scene. Dark mutterings and speculation go on behind hands in the humid air. There are signs of a violent struggle, but it takes an expert, Dr Alan Lee, to walk us through a rough timeline of events. “He saw her here, chased this way – and here,” he says, pausing for effect, unable to hide a grin, “is where he made the kill.” The spot is marked with deep claw marks gouged in the soil, a few lone pieces of fluff signifying another death in the jungle.
The scientists go to work, measuring, photographing, debating theories and motives, checking undergrowth for other clues, trying to form a definitive picture of what happened. After some huddled debate one thing is clear. This was no ordinary perpetrator: this was a puma.
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A crowd of rubberneckers would never normally get this close to a scene, but this is no ordinary tourist crew. Out here the predators come in all shapes and sizes, from tiny coral snakes, just 20cm long, that can easily kill a man to pumas and jaguars that roam the forest, invisible until they leave their marks. This puma has made light work of a rabbit down a dark jungle path in the dead of night – and none of us can hide our glee.
Las Piedras biodiversity station lies about eight hours by boat from the Peruvian mining town of Puerto Maldonado. Visitors are not here on safari; they come to work as research assistants on bird- and mammal-based projects.
We are here to study mammal and bird behaviour in the jungle on specific transects – paths that have been cut through the jungle – and on a nearby colpaor clay lick: the earth here is packed with potassium and sodium, and large groups of animals gather to eat the clay and socialise. It is something of a grazing ground for some of the most colourful creatures in the jungle, most notably the macaw and parrot families that call this area home.
But before recruits are let loose on the jungle there are two days of rigorous training, to get to grips with the equipment. Large machetes are sharpened and tested. GPS devices are carefully explained – and pretty much dismissed as useless, because of the remoteness of the region and the jungle’s iron-clad canopy, so compasses and maps are our navigational tools.
There are intakes of breath when the group tests an innocent-looking venom extractor – essentially, a plastic syringe with a blunt end instead of a needle – though it is reassuringly simpler to use than the binoculars and telescope. We are given data sheets to fill out with details of animal behaviour we observe. But first we have to find the creatures.
Off to the jungle, then, for our first transect, a task that for most of us will become a daily ritual. We walk at a snail’s pace along the pre-cut paths, keeping eyes and, more importantly, ears open for any movement or sound. Predictably, we are beyond useless, although the guide spots three leaves 20m up in the canopy that he insists are mealy parrots. He’s not wrong, though it takes some fumbling with the binoculars before we believe in his seemingly superhuman powers of observation.
Among the most common sights on these transects are various species of monkey. Long-limbed spider monkeys freefall from one tree to the next with effortlessly athletic crashes; saddleback tamarins scramble up trunks, eyes glistening in the sunlight that fights its way through the canopy; in the distance, howler monkeys raise a ghostly chorus, sounding like the wind of a rising storm; dusky titi monkeys chatter among themselves, ignoring us for the most part; one squirrel monkey decides he’s had enough of our presence and starts depth-charging us with ripped-off chunks of branch.
These trees crawl with more than monkeys, though. In the roof of the staff sleeping quarters a pink-toed tarantula has taken up residence; early in the trip one guide returns with a clelia clelia snake, its skin a terrific shimmering colour that flits between silver and blue.
To get a more accurate flavour of what crawls beneath, we take a night transect. It is only when the torchlight is reflected back by thousands of frog, spider and insect eyes that you can see the jungle is teeming with life – the noise is almost deafening as the frogs woo each other with their terrific bossa-nova belches in the inky blackness.
During the day the noise is just as extraordinary: the birds and insects make oddly mechanical sweeping, whirring and clicking sounds. With sunlight filtering through the canopy of trees whose buttressed roots stretch perhaps 10m higher than a man, it is as if you are standing at the heart of a great green machine – and in a way you are, one that ceaselessly pumps fresh oxygen into the world around it.
Monkeys skitter across its branches like foremen, tweaking a green piston here, checking a leafy gauge there; birds patrol the treetops, keeping the machine clear of debris and hawking orders at each other; in the belly of the beast, insects toil at clearing pipes and exhausts in minuscule millions-strong armies while knots of armadillos, capybaras and turtles forage in fallen leaves.
The two main tasks at this research station are transects and colpashifts. The latter are much less active. A short boat trip across the river, a brief walk through the jungle and a stealthy half-crawl later we are in a bird hide across the river from the colpaproper on an early shift (we're up most mornings at 4am). We take it in turns to count the number of birds on the colpa; the second person follows the activity of a particular bird for one minute of every five, carefully describing its movements and behaviour to the third team member, who writes it all down.
The macaws claw their way through the trees, often in tight-knit pairs like muttering old married couples, bouncing from branch to branch, spinning upside down to show off their wingspan and pecking noisily at each other. Their glittering garb might have all the finery of European royalty’s, but their language is the argot of sailors – a rough, throaty croak that forms a squawking soundtrack to the jungle, brilliantly at odds with their elegant appearance.
Occasionally, a boat chugging upriver, the noise of an unseen predator from the jungle or the munching of mid-morning snacks by sloppy team members (again, sorry about that) causes the birds to burst away from the colpaen masse.
It’s infuriating in terms of data gathering – they can take hours to return in numbers – but thrilling: their iridescent plumage leaves fiery trails across the sky when the macaws and parrots rise up noisily in a glittering red, blue and green cloud. A rarer scarlet macaw adds a vivid slash of sunburst yellow.
But back to those killer cats. The chances of seeing one in the wild are practically nil, but there are echoes of them everywhere. Animal prints are studied in purpose-built track traps (essentially, dug-up soft earth) along the transects, and among the ocelot, peccary, armadillo and agouti markings are plenty of deep, dark prints of puma and jaguar.
Camera traps – small cameras with motion sensors – are set up along the transects by Dr Marcelo Mazzolli, a big-cat expert from Brazil, and towards the end of the expedition we take a six-hour hike to gather them in.
We find tracks near one box and decide to take a quick flick through its digital camera, knowing there is little chance of success. First there is a picture of us, then nothing, nothing, nothing, a deer, a heron – and then a huge adult male jaguar, red in snarling tooth and claw.
We return to the camp giddy as children, with a real sense of achievement. We may not have seen this jungle’s most impressive predator, but we’ve come within a rather large whisker.
- Laurence Mackin was a guest of Biosphere Expeditions (biosphereexpeditions.com). A two-week trip to Las Piedras costs about €1,130, excluding flights
Go there
There are no direct flights to Peru from Ireland, but several airlines, including KLM (klm.ie), Lan (lan.com) and Iberia (iberia.com/ie), fly to Lima via their hubs.
From there you can fly on to Puerto Maldonado with Lan or Star Peru (starperu.com). As locals are charged less for internal flights, you might be able to save money by booking through a Peruvian travel agency.
