This article from the Economist was brought to my attention by a chap I met at a trustee meeting for a new Charity called Leapfrog.

Leapfrog is a unique business-led not-for-profit organisation that channels pro bono (free) services from top businesses into activities that deliver carbon reductions and they look set to make a huge difference by leveraging the desire of professionals in the corporate world to utilise their acquired skills for the not for profit sector, specifically in the climate change arena.

The article talks about how the Amazon ‘could’ develop into the future, focusing on both the needs of the  population within the forests of Brazil and the need for lond term sustainability and forest conservation.

Given the fact that the forest is one and a half times the size of India (8 times the size of Texas according to the article) and is home to over 10 million people, it’s an issue that needs a plan.

The article has some great case studies about villages and towns that have grown and thrive in the forest like Manaus,

About 900 miles (1,500km) downriver to the east, in Amazonas state, stands Manaus. Rubber barons built the city from the 1860s onwards. Its early residents made up for their distance from the European centres of fashion by trying to outdo Paris during the BELLE ePOQUE in drinking and debauchery. Now Manaus’s Zona Franca is the workshop for most of the televisions, washing machines and other white goods sold in Brazil. Special arrangements allow firms such as Sony and LG to import parts tax-free from elsewhere in the world and assemble them there. Despite being surrounded on all sides by thick forest, Manaus hums with manufacturing.

Have a read of it, I think it sounds like a good plan for the future development.

At just about 4 o’clock and two and a half days (give or take a few confusing time differences) after the start of my journey, I finally reached the southern edge of the Amazon rainforest, stretching like a green wall on either side of our straight red road.  A further fifteen minute drive through a green tunnel saw the road suddenly incline sharply down to the edge of the Teres Pires river – far wider here than any English river and still thousands of miles before its waters eventually empty into the Atlantic at the mouth of the Amazon via goodness knows how many other rivers.

The logistics of the Cristalino Jungle Lodge are impeccable.  As I jumped out of the truck and walked down to the waters edge, I heard the hum of a powerful outboard and two minutes later a long narrow Amazon river boat scrunched its nose on the bank and I was shaking hands again, this time with my Portuguese bird guide for the trip, Jorge.

Baggage, me and Bill bundled into the boat and we were off at a diagonal across the Teres Pires to the mouth of the Rio Cristalino and a twenty minute voyage to the Lodge.  Blue sky with towering clouds, the high dark green virgin forest tumbling into the river on either side – some old friends – swallow-wing puffbirds perched obligingly on the highest branches they could find, anhingas stretching their necks and outstretching their wings,  lovely little white-winged and white-banded swallows bursting from the topmost twigs of submerged trees to skim the water yards away, was that a toucan flying across the river?, some rapids to shoot up at speed, round a bend in the river, suddenly a floating pontoon with sun umbrellas and loungers and a sign on the shoreline announcing in big letters that this was Cristalino Jungle Lodge!

Cristalino Jungle Lodge is a commercial eco-tourist operation and on the front of its publicity brochure, underneath a stunning aerial picture of its location (which we’re trying to get hold of for the Blog) it also announces itself as ‘An Amazon Sanctuary’.  It is both!

Interestingly, it describes itself as being in the ‘highlands’ of the southern Amazon Forest (not a word you normally associate with the Amazon but doubtless we shall see).  A further 514 miles to the North West is Manaus, which does actually stand on the banks of the great river itself  right in the heart of the Amazon.  My starting point in Brazil – Sao Paulo – is just a little matter of 1,525 miles away (sorry, got it wrong in yesterday’s Blog) to the South-East, close to Brazil’s Atlantic coast, and last night’s stopover, Cuiaba, 395 miles due South.

Cristalino is in a way a place of curious contrasts. Luxurious VIP bungalows to basic dormitories.  Spectacular food and candlelit dinners, hammocks, a library and comfy armchairs, sunbathing on the floating pontoon, swimming and snorkelling in the river.

The ‘activities’ it offers include walking (trekking) in the forest, guided observation of animals, birds, butterflies and flowers, canoeing and camping expeditions and rock climbing.

But let’s put this little haven of civilised eco-tourism into its environmental context.  If you look at an aerial view of the Lodge, nestled on the left bank of the Rio Cristalino, it is barely visible, enveloped as it is by its pristine forest.

The Lodge buildings stand in three or four tiny sunlit enclosures and are immediately surrounded by a private Amazonian rainforest reserve of 26,000 acres.  In turn, this private reserve is enfolded by the much bigger Cristalino State Park, contiguous itself with other private and state reserves totalling 5.5 million acres of primary (unlogged and untouched) forest with exceptional biodiversity and, as we have already touched on with the ‘highland’ Amazon, a range of different Amazonian habitats. I hope to find out more about these Reserves and their status during my stay at Cristalino.

So, from Bill an introduction to the Lodge and its facilities and my spectacular ultra-modern accommodation with the rainforest 20 yards from my front door.  Half an hour on the floating pontoon as the Amazon daylight fades quickly away and the nighthawks flit overhead, introductions to other guests, dinner, a bash at the Blog and bed.

And so back to the inky, sleepless blackness of the early hours of December 1st.

Birdwatchers always get up early. Morning is emphatically the best time of day to see birds. Jorge had arranged breakfast for 4.30 a.m. 4.15 saw me emerge into total (can’t see a hand in front of your face) darkness, festooned with binoculars, telescope, backpack and million candlepower spotlight.  My bungalow was the most distant from the restaurant/library compound.  No problem the night before – generator still roaring away and knee high lights to lead me along the gravel paths to my front door.

But this morning was a different matter. Set out confidently and five minutes later was totally lost with the forest sticking in my face.  Hadn’t taken enough notice of the landmarks.  It took me another quarter of an hour – and then frankly with some lucky guessing – to get me to two spoonfuls of raw porridge oats with milk and sugar and a cup of coffee.  There was a splendid variety of goodies on offer – but too early for me!

Jorge arrives. Bill already there. Handshakes. “Como esta?  Bien! Vamos!” And we’re off along a narrow path into the dripping darkness of the primary forest.  We are heading for one of Cristalino’s spectacular attractions – its 50.3 metre (154 feet) high Canopy Tower.

This is a free standing galvanised steel structure (vaguely like a square mini Eiffel Tower) with three observation platforms (respectively about 20, 30 and 50 metres above the ground) which allows you to look at the intricate web of wildlife which inhabits the different eco systems, arranged like the layers of a cake, as you climb higher into the forest canopy.

50.3 metres doesn’t sound very high does it?  But, I can tell you,  it’s way above our normal comfort zone and, according to Bill, impossible for a minority of visitors to cope with.  One courageous middle-aged lady, so he told me, got as far as putting her head through the stairwell leading onto the very top platform and then could simply go no further.

We go prettywell straight to the top. Nerve-tingling and breathtaking with backpack and telescope constantly snagging on the open galvanised framework.  But when you walk out onto that top platform you have a 360 degree view of the lush, forest canopy from horizon to horizon.  The crowns of the trees form a dense continuous, infinitely variable patchwork of leaves 20 metres below us and it is only the emergent giants which reach our level and above.  The forest isn’t flat. Range upon range of low, undulating hills stretch into the distance and on this misty morning, low cloud fills the hollows.

I choose to look in the direction which feels like North (now I come to think of it, I’d no idea which way I was looking).

‘How far to the banks of the Amazon from here then, Bill?’  A quick consultation in Portuguese between Bill and Jorge.

‘We think about 600 to 700 kilometers’

‘And what’s in between?’.  Another quick consultation.

‘We don’t think anything but unbroken forest and a few scattered gold mining settlements’.

We all start to look at the treetops and the sub-canopy in earnest.  Bill is used to ‘eco-tourits’ rather than ‘birders’ (that’s how the guests are classified on the planning board back at the Lodge) so he’s more used to searching for mammals rather than birds.  And he finds dark shapes in the trees 200 yards away which, with the benefit of 60 times telescope magnification reveal themselves as a troop of  white-whiskered spider monkey with their striking facial adornments.

They look for all the world like nuns with black cowl and white forehead band – but nuns with a difference because they also sport a magnificent pair of skywards pointing white Edwardian moustaches.

More in my next post…

Rio Cristalino Lodge,

Matto Grosso

Brazil

It’s a long way from Warwick Parkway Station in the West Midlands to Rio Cristalino Jungle lodge at the Northern edge of the huge Central Brazilian State of Matto Grosso.  And it takes a three-day journey to get you there – to what is now the Southern edge of the vast Amazon Rainforest.

About three weeks later than originally planned – and the day before yesterday – after a goodbye kiss – I stepped onto the National Express bus at Warwick Parkway at 9.30 a.m bound for Heathrow.  In the afternoon, I flew with Iberia from London to Madrid; then five past midnight yesterday morning was the start of 10 hour Iberia flight from Madrid to Sao Paulo in Southern Brazil, scene of Lewis Hamilton’s thrilling Formula 1 title win just over four weeks ago.

It was a sunny morning in Sao Paulo and I was safely re-united with my luggage with a long wait for an afternoon flight to Cuiaba, the capital of Matto Grosso. So I decided (as this was originally a birdwatching trip, now turned into part conservation report for the Blog) to push my laden trolley in the direction of the nearest trees.

South America is full of birds (nearly 3,000 different species out of a World total of about 10,000) and the trees fringing the airport car park were home to some of the commoner ones; great kiskadees, big flycatchers with black and white stripey heads and bright yellow breasts and stunning fork-tailed flycatchers trailing their 12-inch long black tail streamers over the shining roofs of the cars. Twenty or thirty black vultures wheeled lazily overhead.

Brazil is really big!!  When I got back inside the terminal, I checked my flight times and noted that it was just an hours flying time from Sao Paulo to Cuiaba.  Wrong!!! When our Tam flight was still powering along at 33,000 feet well after an hour into the flight and the food and drinks trolley was being trundled down the centre aisle, I realised something was amiss here.  Cuiaba is, of course, in another time zone, some 1,000 miles (distances to be verified in a future Rio Cristalino blog) to the North West of Sao Paulo and the actual flying time is nearer three hours.   (Perhaps it’s time for my editor Rob to give us a map so we’ve all got some idea of where we are).[Rob: Done, click here]

After bits of natural forest separating Sao Paulo’s posh swimming pool studded residential suburbs, there’s not a lot to see till you get to Cuiaba but vast, flat, agriculturally intensive plains and wide winding muddy rivers. This, of course, is the legacy of nearly 500 years of Portuguese colonisation. Portugal established its first permanent Brazilian settlements in 1532, one of them close to the now huge city of Sao Paulo.

Cuiaba has an intimate, busy little airport and so many tower blocks thrusting up a few kilometers beyond the single runway that it makes Birmingham look like a village.  But the fruiting cecropia trees attracting pale vented pigeons and blue-grey tanagers and the head high grasses tell you you’re in the tropics.  This is reputed to be the hottest place in Brazil!

So after a restless night in the hospitable Diplomata Hotel (overlooking the airport runway) yet another hour and a half’s flight (this time just East of North) to Alta Floresta.

There is a close relationship between propellor aeroplanes and virgin rainforest. You always seem to switch away from jet propulsion the closer you get to the forest.  And on this flight the landscape did finally start to change – still vast acreages of commercial crops but with blocks of native forest left (albeit some of it dying, degraded or damaged), many of them linked by narrower connecting strips allowing mammals (like monkeys) and birds (like the vast South American antbird tribe) neither of which will cross open ground, to travel through the forest canopy or the understorey in search of food or genetically healthy mates.

And so to my reception committee at tiny Alta Floresta airport. I emerged into a crowded forecourt, gratefully re-united with my bags again, to be met by a smiling American who introduced himself as Bill Walker, extending his hand as he explained he was going to be my minder and interpreter for the next fortnight.  Beside him was a slender, striking, 6 foot, darkeyed Brazilian girl who was going to take me through my booking-in procedures at the Floresta Amazonica Hotel (of which more later) in Alta Floresta.  This was my gateway to Rio Cristalino Jungle Lodge.

So about 3.30 this afternoon, I climbed into a pick-up truck with Bill and our driver and we threaded our way through spread out, low rise Alta Floresta (only founded in 1975), finally headed for the Brazilian countryside. The tarmac soon ran out and we were on red soil Amazon roads.  On either side, coarse bright green grasslands were grazed by white beef cattle.  But this was no agricultural desert.  Scrubby grassland with scattered trees  and ponds and marshes constantly broke up the pastoral monotony and on the watersheds not too far distant patches of forest hundreds of square meters in extent gradually came into view.

Suddenly, in the middle of a conversation about Rio Cristalino’s magnificent conservation intiatives (of which more scattered throughout these blogs) BIll  made an astonishing announcement.  We had been passing farm entrances all along the route with the names of the farm owners displayed on the gates.

‘Nearly all these farms were up for sale last time I travelled this road. But all the for sale notices have disappeared.  They were all put on the market because the State Government issued a decree recently that only 30% of the land area of any one farm in the Amazon region of Matto Grosso could be used for pasture or cropping and the remaining seventy per cent must retain its forest cover or be allowed to re-forest! This was the State Government’s response to increasing pressure to preserve the Amazon forests’.

What a revelation to a conservationist!  On the face of it that could mean thousands, hundreds of thousands of hectares of gradually regenerating  forest from the plant, insect and animal banks in the blocks of natural forest remaining close to the farms on the watersheds and the unbroken primary forest just a few kilometers to the north.

Questions raced through my mind.  Would there be active reforestation schemes? Who would monitor the new law? How strictly would it be enforced? But most amazing of all was the actual initiative of the state Government!

But this was all left as a lot of loose ends (which will plainly take months and years to unfold) as our driver suddenly ground to a halt and pointed to a little colony of six burrowing owls, standing long-legged on the top of their little earth piles in broad daylight, staring at us with unwinking yellow eyes.  And overhead, a raucous racket as two huge scarlet macaws flew past reminding us that even this degraded landscape still held its wildlife wonders.

The eco-tourism industry does amazing things these days. The owners of Rio Cristalino Lodge have an agreement with a local farmer whose land lies between Alta Floresta and the Rio Cristalino that visiting birdwatchers can visit a grove of Mauritia Palms where lives a gorgeous bird called the Point-Tailed Palmcreeper.

So a few minutes later we pulled into the farm compound, shook hands with all the family who were sitting in the shade, headed out towards the palms, despite all our technology failed to find the bird and returned to the compound.

And there, walking towards us on curved arms and legs, its body just suspended above the ground, was a charming, doe-eyed two-toed sloth which had recently been rescued from the middle of the road and was to be returned to the safety of the forest in due course.  As it approached us, the farmer picked it up, carried it back across the compound, laid it gently down, whereon it instantly made towards us again.  Got a bad reputation sloths – for slothfulness and rather complex and long-drawn out toilet arrangements – but, close to, the charm shone through. And so I bent down to stroke its long silky coat.  It looked up soulfully. An unforgettable moment.

Then more red road, a right turn onto another arrow straight track and a couple of kilometers down the road a horizon-full of dark green trees – the unspoilt rainforest with its myriad wonders was minutes away.

And now, I have to stop the blog for the time being as a tropical storm builds and threatens the electronic equipment.

In tomorow’s blog I hope to finally describe my arrival at the Lodge.

After a couple of blogs when I focused on the new Prince of Rainforests, this time I am going to take you deep into the rainforest itself and introduce you to the King of the Canopy – the Harpy Eagle.
I saw my first Harpy Eagle just after dawn on the 24th April 1995 at the La Selva Lodge on the Rio Napo river in Eastern Ecuador.
The previous day, with my mate Tim Key, I had been driven from Ecuador’s sky-high, white capital, Quito, down the spectacular eastern slope of the Andes to Coca, a frontier town on the edge of the Amazon rainforest, for all the world like something out of the Wild West.
Coca’s streets were glutinous black, a churned up mixture of crude oil and red Amazon mud, lined with ramshackle wooden buildings and rather menacing, gun-slinging locals, lounging in doorways. My old granny would have turned in her grave if she’d seen me there!
The Rio Napo, one of the Amazon’s massive tributaries, swirled past Coca’s waterfront.
We embarked on a narrow wooden river boat with a big outboard on the back for the 70 kilometer trip down river to La Selva Lodge. By the way, if we’d gone about 70 kilometers upstream, we would have been sliding between the forest-covered banks of the Second International Children’s Rainforest Reserve at Jatun Sacha, largely purchased and preserved by the International Children’s Tropical Forest charity network.
Dawn the next day saw us tramping along a forest trail with our diminutive Quichua Indian guide, Oscar, towards La Selva’s canopy tower, basically a wooden staircase built round a huge sabre tree with an observation platform about 30 metres up.
When we finally walked out onto the platform, we suddenly had a breathtaking view from horizon to horizon out across the top of the Amazon rainforest, a vast expanse of billowing green clouds. First instinct of a birdwatcher. Raise binoculars to eyes and scan! I did.
Just thirty yards away, a spectacular Blue-throated Piping-Guan was perched on the very topmost branch of a tree..
I shifted the binoculars to the far horizon and instantly saw something which looked like two large blankets flapping furiously on a very thick washing line. Dangling from below this vision was a monkey, writhing desperately like a murderer at the end of a hangman’s rope.
I shouted to Oscar and pointed to the horizon and, after a split second’s glance, he shouted back to us – Harpy Eagle! We watched as Harpy, with monkey, flapped slowly away and was lost in the greens of the canopy.
And then something else rather extraordinary happened! Oscar, on our relatively brief acquaintance with him, had seemed phlegmatic in the extreme. But now, suddenly, he erupted into a whooping war dance round and round the platform, shaking our hands, grinning from ear to ear and finally telling us that this was only the second ever sighting of a Harpy Eagle from the La Selva canopy tower.
So the Harpy Eagle is a rare, impressive and exciting bird of prey. It is one of the world’s largest and most powerful eagles, vying only with the Philippine Eagle for the top spot.
But, of course, the bigger they are the more room they need and a pair of Harpies needs up to 20 square miles of, preferably, pristine virgin lowland rainforest to survive and raise a family. They are found from South-eastern Mexico to Northern Argentina and Southern Brazil, a huge area taking in the whole of the Amazon basin but with this forest now being ferociously fragmented they are endangered birds indeed.

The Harpy stands over three feet tall, with massively thick legs and toes covered by wrinkled, pinkish yellow skin. It grips tree branches (and its hapless prey!) with wickedly curved grey talons up to the size of a grizzly bear’s claws. Its huge round owl-like face, a circular rosette of pale grey feathers is topped by a few long grey feathers sticking out at odd angles like an Indian brave’s headdress.
It’s built like a huge sparrowhawk – relatively short wings (but still spanning over six feet) and a relatively long tail – and like the sparrowhawk is adapted for hunting fast and large prey inside the canopy. Our monkey was a typical meal, along with sloths (not actually fast, of course, – there’s an exception to every rule), opossums, reptiles and birds.
For such a big bird, Harpies are highly maneuverable fliers and strike their (terrified!) prey after a (normally) rapid pursuit through the trees. They can fly with prey weighing up to about half of their own (10 – 20lb) body weight. If the victim is heavier, it will be carved up at the kill and brought in pieces to the nest if young are being fed. As with the sparrowhawk tribe generally, the female can be as much as twice as heavy as her mate.
I saw my second Harpy Eagle about mid-morning on the 4th March 2005 in the Imataca Forest in Eastern Venezuela, almost exactly ten years after the first one!
After a long trek along an active logging road, with an intrepid group of holidaying??? birdwatchers, we came to a huge emergent forest giant right by the side of the road – except it wasn’t emerging from anything any more because the trees surrounding it had all been cut down. These dominant forest trees like sabres, mahoganies and kapoks, frequently have a natural flat platform where the branches spread out from the main trunk at a height of anything from 80 to 180 feet. On such a platform our Imataca Harpies had chosen to nest.
And there, sitting calmly in its 5 feet wide eyrie was an enormous, pure white Harpy chick with its black and white Indian brave feathers waving around on the top of its head. It was photographed about 1,000 times while we waited for two hours for the thrilling possibility of an adult visiting the nest. Meanwhile, the logging wagons thundered past.
We waited in vain! The chick was over two months old and the female had already joined the male in hunting for prey to feed this giant baby. It was being fed every two to three days so it was hardly surprising that we were out of luck.
So what had happened in the previous four months or so. Well, first the female laid one or two eggs. After the first egg hatched 53 to 58 days later (the longest known incubation period amongst all birds of prey), the other egg was probably ignored and didn’t hatch. Our chick was then guarded by the female for just over two months and mother and baby were fed by dad during all this time. While brooding the eggs, the female got just one meal a week! (Even my old granny, keeping a family on 10 bob a week during the war would have thought this was a bit spartan!). After her chick hatched, mother and babe got a meal every three to four days.
Perhaps three months after we left (if nobody had cut its tree down) our chick made its first aerial sallies but would still be dependent on its parents for another 8 to 10 months after that. It would not start to breed itself for another 6 to 8 years. And its parents would only breed every two years or so.
Hence the Harpies survival problem in the modern world of mechanised logging and piecemeal slash and burn. Not only is its habitat being fragmented or decimated but it is not able to recover the losses because of its low reproduction rate. In the long run, it will only survive if it is possible to protect large tracts of lowland or foothill rainforest in the Neotropics.
But let us finish on a note of optimism. My third (and most recent) sighting of a Harpy Eagle was about midday on the 15th April 2006 as Tim and I were sailing down the romantically named Rio Madre de Dios on our way to the world famous Manu Wildlife Centre in Amazonian Peru. An adult, with its black breast band standing out against pure white lower underparts (with a few black spots), hung hugely only 30 feet above our little riverboat – far and away the closest view we had enjoyed of this magnificent bird. Long may it remain the King of the Canopy!

Next time: On November 4th, I am going to Rio Cristallino Lodge, on the southern edge of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil, with 200,000 hectares of undisturbed forest stretching to the north of it. I am hoping to record some experiences direct from there – but don’t hold your breath. Technical incompetence and/or lack of an Internet link might make it wait till my return.
After that, we must examine some massive rainforest preservation initiatives featuring the following cast: Norway, Guyana, the Republic of Congo and that well-known saviour of the whole world, Gordon Brown. Prince Charles might sneak in again somewhere as well.

We used the picture for the Harpy Eagle by kind permission from Ricardo Kuehn, here is his amazing Flickr photostream, prepared to be amazed.