Cristalino Jungle Lodge, Matto Grosso, Brazil

Donna Vitoria Da Riva Carvalho is a remarkable woman!  Since 1990, she has been responsible, almost single-handedly, for buying and preserving 26,000 acres of pristine Amazonian rainforest at its very vulnerable Southern edge.

Her creation, The Cristalino Private Forest Reserve, is of particular importance, both as a protective barrier against rainforest destruction pressure from south of the Teres Pires River – and because of its high habitat diversity, unusual in an Amazon Reserve.

Its value is further dramatically enhanced because it is contiguous with and surrounded by the 456,000 acre Cristalino State Park, itself part of a network of private and State Reserves totalling 5.5 million acres of primary forest.

Last night, before dinner, in the library at Cristalino Jungle Lodge, Donna Vitoria told us a little of her story, with the help of power point, pictures and videos.

It really started in 1975 when the town of Alta Floresta, some 30 kilometers south of the Cristalino Forest Reserve, was founded by Vitoria’s father.

Fourteen years later, with Vitoria in the thick of raising a family of five children, Brazil’s embryonic eco-movement started – and she was very soon in contact with its founders.  Through her new friends, she came into contact with Conservation International, the pioneering US organisation founded 20 years ago which focuses on helping local communities around the World to make conservation part of their livelihoods.

CI were trying to further their conservation objectives in Brazil by encouraging some of its citizens to set up eco-tourism projects.  They initially trained 40 Brazilians in the arts of eco-tourism (Vitoria with her sharp business brain was one of them), training consolidated by attending eco-tourism conferences outside Brazil.  The 40 Brazilian pioneers subsequently trained another 800.

By 1990, Vitoria knew what she wanted to do – and she wanted to do it close to Alta Floresta.  Her idea was to combine the preservation of rainforest and the running of a profitable business.

Her first move, that year,  was to buy the first 700 acres of the Cristalino Private Forest Reserve.  This was followed in 1992 by the setting up of the Cristalino Jungle Lodge.  Initially, the Lodge attracted scientists because it provided easy access to this diverse area of Southern Amazon rainforest for the first time.  Famous ornithologists like the late Ted Parker, Roger Tory Petersen and Robert Ridgeley came to research the Reserves spectacular birdlife and Dr Haffer did his pioneering research on the impact of rivers as barriers for species separation here.

In 1997, Vitoria set up house in Alta Floresta to devote all her energies to her project.  She achieved RPPN status for the Cristalino Private Forest Reserve, which is the Brazilian Government’s legal instrument allowing private individuals to create nature reserves in perpetuity with the aim of conserving biological diversity.  Significantly, if you own forest areas in Brazil but don’t use them in some way, you pay higher taxes than if you chop them down and cultivate them – and if you don’t cultivate them, you are required  to sell them after five years.  RPPN status for your forest exempts you from these land taxes and enables you to retain your right to tenure in perpetuity.

Vitoria told us that applications for RPPN status are now coming in thick and fast to the Brazilian Government and 400,000 hectares are now protected in the country in this way.

As the years went by, Vitoria steadily expanded the acreage of the Cristalino Private Forest reserve and attracted increasing numbers of visitors to Cristalino Jungle Lodge.  In 2003, she set up the Fundacao Ecologica Cristalino,  the aim of which is the preservation of more rainforest and, critically, the provision of a programme of environmental education for local people in the Alta Floresta area, including farmers and landowners – itself part of a series of efforts to promote environmental awareness in the wider region.  We were told that part of what we had paid for our visit to Cristalino was donated to the Fundacao to further its ends.

It is the Fundacao, working with the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew and Matto Grosso State University, that has put the unusually high habitat diversity of the Cristalino Private Forest Reserve on a scientific footing.  This far-flung trio have identified eight different types of forest and transitional forrest in the Reserve, identifying 1,200 species of plants along the way.

So came time for questions.  I recalled what Bill, my American interpreter had told me, on our drive to Cristalino Lodge on the first afternoon of my visit – that the State Government of Matto Grosso had recently decreed that in the Amazon region of the State, farmers would now only be allowed to cultivate 30 per cent of their land and must let the remainder revert to forest.

Who better to ask about the impact this would have but Donna Vitoria?

‘Well, first of all’ said she ‘that percentage has gone up to 80 per cent. But the State Government has also said that the reforestation does not necessarily have to be with native species.  It can be oil palms or eucalyptus or other alien commercial tree species.’  To me that meant, two steps forward and one step back – or even one step forward and two steps back. Probably OK to help with greenhouse gas emissions and attendant climate change but not a lot of good for natural diversity.

But Vitoria added that the State Government was also requiring farmers to preserve the water catchment value of  the many hilly watersheds scattered throughout the region and that was likely to be by allowing regrowth or retention of natural forest.

The devil – or the angel – will, of course, be in the detail of how individual farmers respond to the new regulations – and indeed whether these regulations  become modified over time to achieve a balance between farm incomes and viability and the preservation of natural diversity.  And how the whole shooting match is monitored!

And so to the really big question.  What did she think about the future for the Amazon rainforest and its conservation?

To that she said quite simply ‘All conservationists have to be optimistic and something is changing here!’ She instanced an enormous project involving the Brazilian Federal Government, the various relevant State Governments and the World Wildlife Fund to preserve a 30 million hectare shield of rainforest aimed at protecting the Amazon basin’s Southern flank.  And proudly announced that the Cristalino Private Forest Reserve was a vital piece in this vast jigsaw!

I’ve got to get away from this screen now and pack to go back to Warwick Parkway and a welcome kiss but I plan to put some more flesh on the bones of  this scheme, itself part of ARPA – the Amazon Region Protected Areas Programme –  in a future blog.

Don’t think there isn’t a lot of bad news from the Amazon too!  There is! But I leave you with one statistic to put things into perspective for the holier than thou in the ‘developed world’.  It comes from Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the President of Brazil, in a statement made on June 6th of this year.

‘Brazil’s record of environmental preservation is equal to that of any country in the World.  Europe, for example, only has 0.3 percent of its native forest still standing.  Brazil still has 69 per cent!’

Stick that in your green credentials pipe and smoke it!

Cristalino Jungle Lodge, Matto Grosso, Brazil.  6th December, 2008

The Cristalino Lodge has a large thatched dining hall cum verandah, complete with rustic tables and chairs and – for the indolent – hammocks and old-fashioned deck chairs.  Gradually, in the evening,  as groups of guests with their guides and interpreters straggle back from the forest or the river (or the sun loungers),  beers are ordered and news of the day’s excitements is exchanged and the day’s digital pictures flashed up on camera screens.

But there is never a time here when you should be looking inwards – half an eye should always be kept on the lawns and the shrubs and the forest edge just yards away – even when it’s pitch dark.  Because this outdoor dining hall  is an excellent spot to catch intimate views of the World’s largest living rodent – the capybara – without walking a step or even standing up.

Dining Hall at Christalino Jungle Lodge

So as I sat here earlier this evening, looking at a huge Amazon flat fish being barbecued on an open fire in preparation for an alfresco supper, somebody with sharper eyes than me detected two large and two not so large shapes dimly lit up by the fire.

I flashed on my spotlight revealing two chunky adult capybaras with their offspring.  The family had come to graze the Cristalino lawns for their favourite food – grass.

Capybaras, restricted in their distribution to the New World, like densely vegetated areas adjacent to bodies of water.  They probably reach their greatest population densities in the famous Brazilian Pantanal – some 350 miles South of Cristalino – a region of natural open grassland and gallery forest with numerous lakes, ponds and swamps.  But they’re common here too.

They feed on aquatic vegetation as well as grass and are proficient swimmers, keeping all but nostrils, eyes and ears below the waterline.  With their partially webbed feet, they can swim underwater for long distances.  Adults grow up to 3 to 4 feet long and are a foot and a half at shoulder level.  I frit one in the shrubbery as I arrived at the verandah early yesterday morning – and it was certainly big enough and noisy enough to frit me back.

That encounter wasn’t planned but I had arrived early hoping to see another of Cristalino’s verandah specialities. First out onto the lawns, however, were a couple of agoutis, all energy and nerves, racing around in the early morning light.  Rodents again, relatives of the familiar guinea pig, but larger, longer-legged and slenderer.  These are true forest dwellers, adapted for life in the undergrowth with their special physique - head and front part of body quite slender and low to the ground for pushing through  dense vegetation, bulkier at the rear, but, for the moment, finding life easier on the lawn.

Five minutes later, I was facing the wrong way again.

‘Here they are’ said Bill.  And I turned round to see a bird (or rather two) which were right near the top of my Cristalino wish list.  Just emerging from the interior of the forest, but only yards away, were a stunning pair of Bare-faced Curassows, ground-dwelling birds the size of turkeys – and amongst the most vulnerable of all rainforest dwellers.  Stately, unsuspicious and slow-moving, these birds and other species in the family disappear from the forest under the slightest hunting pressure.  But this pair at Cristalino, Bill told me, had a nest site close to the Lodge and paraded the lawns on many an early sunlit morning, still truly wild but with no reason to fear.

The male is a formally attired bird, black with white trimmings and a curly crest but the female is a truly beautiful bird, lusciously and finely barred black and white on her uppers and tail and beautifully decorated in cinnamons and blacks below, her black curls tipped white.

And these were not the only curassows we saw, a testament to the pristine, undisturbed condition of the Cristalino Private Forest Reserve and its crucial wildlife value..  The day before yesterday on a trail (or rather off a trail) some kilometers from the Lodge, Jorge stopped me and pointed ahead.  Eventually some thirty yards further on, on the other side of a stream, I saw two large black shapes, heads hidden for the moment as they bent down to feed quietly on the forest floor.  Patience!  The shapes moved slowly and unconcernedly, still somehow keeping their heads out of view. Stand still, Rog! Be patient! Their camouflage is terrific considering how big they are, I thought.

And then,  finally one emerged into an opening in the understory.  Nearly 3 feet from bill to tail tip, resplendent in black and chestnut with a broad white tail tip and a spectacular red and yellow bill,  a birdwatcher’s dream!  A Razor-billed curassow! The pair fed quietly together, moving gently away from us before disappearing into the forest again.  We saw four more that day - a pair drinking at the edge of the Rio Cristalino and another pair deep in the forest.

They all belong to one of the most endangered bird families on the planet!

And in the next Cristalino blog, the mastermind behind this wonderful Reserve.

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.

In my previous blog, I introduced Prince Charles’s new Rainforest Project with its splendid objective of ‘making the rainforests worth more alive than dead’.  To outbid the loggers and developers who are destroying the rainforests to make a quick buck – by somehow paying more to the countries that are custodians of the rainforests than they get from the loggers and the cash crop conglomerates who exploit the destroyed forest lands.

There’s no flesh on the bones of the Prince’s Project yet so I thought I might try and supply some.  In the form, first, of a hydro-electric scheme that is up and running on the edge of the First Children’s Rainforest, which is owned and cared for by Costa Rica’s Monteverde Conservation League – and was largely purchased and preserved by the International Children’s Tropical Forests Network of which CTF UK is a member.

In the October 2000 edition of CTF News, we reported that ‘the Monteverde Conservation League is now receiving payments from the Inman Hydro-electricity Company for supplying the water that will drive Inman’s turbines’.

‘The forest clad 3,000 hectare Esperanza Watershed, part of the Children’s Rainforest,  collects and retains the rainwater that ensures the flow of the Esperanza River is maintained at a steady volume all year round.  In return for MCL’s agreement to conserve and protect the Esperanza forests, Inman agreed to pay for the environmental services which ensure its water supply’.

On October 28th, 1998, MCL and Inman signed a 99-year contract and we can now report that this agreement has been in operation for 10 years.

The touchstone for the contract was a land ownership dispute between MCL and Inman over an area of just half a hectare which was vital for the hydropower project as the dam and water intake were to be built there. The conflict arose because two different official land titles stated that both entities owned the parcel of land (a very common occurrence in Latin America).

But MCL proved to have the better title, Inman needed the surface rights to build their power station – and so a deal was struck with MCL retaining full ownership of the land.

The dam was built on the edge of the Children’s Rainforest and, during the construction period, the electricity company paid 3 dollars for each hectare of the protected watershed each year.  When energy production started this rose to 8 dollars per hectare in the first year, 9 dollars in the second and 10 dollars in the third and fourth year.

From the fifth year, the 10 dollar rate was multiplied by a factor that takes into account both the amount of energy being produced and the sales price per kilowatt, thus reflecting the increasing value of the environmental services provided.

Roge’s international news gathering team (of 1) is now in E-mail contact with MCL and we have received some outline information on the progress of the Project,with more to come in future Blogs.

MCL reports that payments are being received in accordance with the contract formulae and these payments go into their general fund.  ‘Most of the money from Inman goes towards our protection and monitoring program (park guards etc).’

So the money is being used to directly preserve the integrity of the forest on the Esperanza Watershed, which MCL  has contracted to do for Inman, but it is also preserving the magnificent web of wildlife in the forest, providing work for part of MCL’s local workforce and protection and monitoring for the much larger Children’s Eternal Forest.

We hope to have more details soon on just how much the Contract is contributing to MCL’s total administration expenses in preserving all of the 10,000 hectares (25,000 acres) of the First Children’s Rainforest.

So, here is something very close to the model that the Prince’s Rainforest Project is aiming for – ‘making the rainforests worth more alive than dead’.

Next time on Roge’s blog I go on a personal visit into the rainforest in search of the King of the Canopy, the Harpy Eagle.

The ‘blog’ plan (insofar as I have a plan) is not to talk exclusively about CTF UK and its fund-raising projects and conservation partners in the tropics – although there will be plenty of that. I shall try and bring news of other rainforest conservation initiatives from around the World, making links where I can with my own rainforest experiences to provide a flavour of what it’s like to be there – in the forest.

Sometimes, the focus will be on particular rainforest species, wherever possible with first hand accounts of actually seeing them.  And Rob Llewellyn is going to put life and colour into the whole thing from the huge picture library at his disposal ( I’m going to try and find one of me looking youthful in a rainforest setting many years ago). ‘Every picture tells a story’ my old Granny used to say, mostly when she was trying to get up from her chair. Better than words can ever do, I might add.

And throughout all this, the blog wants reactions and input from you.

What you think of particular conservation plans – or indeed of rainforest conservation in general – worthwhile or waste of time.

Whether you’re actually involved – as a professional or a volunteer – in any rainforest protection schemes.

Or just your own rainforest experiences on your travels to the tropics.

So lets start as we mean to go on. Off at a tangent! By welcoming HRH The Prince of Wales to the rainforest protection community!

As well as talking to little plants in his conservatory (only affectionate banter, you understand, Sir) HRH is now embracing the salvation of big plants in the rainforest. And that makes him the most well-known World figure to wholeheartedly back the critical need to preserve our rainforests.

On 15th July 2008, HRH launched the website for his Rainforest Project

The Project has a very clear objective, somewhat different from the traditional rainforest charities like CTF UK. And that is ‘to find innovative ways of paying the countries that are the custodians of the tropical rainforests an appropriate price for the eco-system services they provide and so out-compete the drivers of deforestation’. Rog interjects – these include the logging companies, developers, politicians and bureaucrats and the desperately poor squatters who follow the logging and development roads, clearing the forest and planting their meagre subsistence crops.

‘Put simply, our aim is to make the rainforests worth more alive than dead’ says the Prince’s Project. They’ve got it right, of course. As my old Granny used to say, ‘it all boils down to money, Roger!’). Finding more of it for the owners of the rainforest, private or public, than they get from the first logging crop and the subsequent sale or rent of the land for cash crops like palm oil, beef and soya to feed the ‘developed’ world.

‘It is worth remembering’ says the Project ‘that it has become accepted throughout the developed world that people pay for utilities such as gas, water and electricity. The rainforests are probably our greatest natural utility, providing huge and irreplaceable benefits. It is time we started to pay for them too.’

The problem is that most of these ‘great natural utilities’ are intangible (to most of us at the moment) or theoretical. Huge supplies of water is an obvious rainforest ‘product’ but while we are used to paying for our water and electricity from the utilities who harvest it – they themselves, mostly, don’t actually pay for it. And we take for granted the air we breath with its delicate balance of gases – one of which we need about every 5 seconds (or thirty if you really try and hold you breath, which I’ve just done!) and the beneficent climates  which make like comfortable for us, both of which owe much to the stabilising influence of the rainforest. At some time in the future, more forest plants may provide many more cures for man’s many ailments – and so on and so on.

So how is the Prince’s Project going to achieve its objectives. There is no real flesh on the bones at the moment but HRH says ‘I have set up my Rainforests Project with the support of some of the World’s biggest businesses and leading experts to work with countries around the World including the Coalition for Rainforest Nations.’  There is, interestingly, no mention of the involvement in the Project of National Governments in the developed world as yet.

When you start a rainforest blog by the way, you start to dig around and broaden the horizons of your knowledge. So, the Coalition for Rainforest Nations was completely new to me – and I shall come back to them in future blogs. If anybody knows anything about them now, blog in babies!

Anyway, having gone off at a tangent, I shall, in the next blog, come right back to CTF UK and its sister charities around the World – and more particularly to the First Children’s Rainforest in Monteverde, Costa Rica – which between us we have helped to conserve.

Because the Monteverde Conservation League, which owns and manages the First Children’s rainforest, already has a project, up and running, which pretty closely matches the Prince’s objectives. Whilst our approach to rainforest preservation – to purchase virgin forest for indigenous conservation organisations to own and manage – is quite different to the Prince’s Project, in the Monteverde Cloud Forest you have a clear example of both approaches.

So in the next blog, I will explain how the Esperanza Watershed Project works – and try and dig out some other working models from around the World as well..

In the meantime, we welcome your comments and ideas and hard information – particularly if you are involved in HRH’s project.

Roge

If you’re the person responsible for writing Roge’s Rainforest Blog, perhaps the first thing you ought to do is establish your rainforest conservation credentials. So, if you’ll bear with me for a couple of paragraphs or so, I’ll try and do just that.

Full name: Roger Littlewood. Principal activities for Children’s Tropical Forests UK – Trustee since 1995-ish and Editor and Author of CTF News since its first appearance in the Spring of 1996.

Charity begins at home, so my old Granny told me, and I cut my nature conservation teeth in Warwickshire in the late 1970′s. First, as Voluntary Warden for a little succession of Ancient Woodland Reserves purchased by Warwickshire Wildlife Trust; and then, together with the Trust and Warwick District Council, helping to establish a network of Local Nature Reserves in the County.

But at some time in the 1980′s, I decided I wanted to add a global dimension (very grand!) to my voluntary conservation work. So I started raising money at little charity do’s and sponsored thingies, first for another British rainforest charity, the World Land Trust – and then for Tina Jolliffe, who founded Children’s Tropical Forests UK in the late 1980′s after falling in love with rainforests following a trip with her husband Robin (now the Chairman of CTF UK) to Costa Rica.

After Tina’s sad and untimely death in the mid-1990′s, I contacted Robin, offering more help to CTF. I became a Trustee and at my first Trustees meeting in 1995-ish, offered to write and produce a fund-raising Newsletter, which I have done ever since.

Oh! And since 1987, I’ve spent about two years of my life, tramping round the World’s rainforests trying to see birds and animals which mostly didn’t want to be seen.

Now, a new young generation of rainforest enthusiasts is giving a fresh impetus to CTF UK led by Rob Jolliffe (Tina and Robin’s son) and Rob Llewellyn, my new blog boss. About six weeks ago, Rob (the Jolliffe one) rang me up and asked me if I would write a regular ‘blog’ for CTF’s brand new website. After a ten minute chat, I finally plucked up the courage to ask him what a ‘blog’ really was, and still in a slight fog of incomprehension, agreed to do it. So, at the age of sixty-six (clickety-click – appropriate, I suppose, for a born for the first time geek) here I go.