General information
It is dry season here and it really is! Getting the experience of having no running water makes you think of how fortunate we are to always have water at home (e.g. carrying buckets for flushing the toilet). Luckily here we always have the big river, the stream at the house and the waterfall!
Monkeys
A new arrival: Ramona, a baby female woolly monkey. Olivia was contacted by a family in Pucallpa, about a sick monkey. The family bought her from the local market and had her for a month as a pet. When she became weak, they contacted a veterinarian and Ramona got treated for parasites, received antibiotics and vitamins. Unfortunately she did not get better, even got worse. When Olivia arrived at the family, Ramona was very weak. She has probably an age of about 4 months, very underweight, and a bit dehydrated. With some medicine and the right food, she started getting better, gaining some weight and no more diarrheas. Carrying her around, sitting with her and making her eat and drink is now one of the daily jobs. But she is still weak and sometimes has bad days. We really hope that we can say by the next update she is doing fine….a young baby like this is very sensitive. She did not receive the milk of her mother, with the necessary antidotes to give her protection, and a lot of care has to be taken to keep her healthy and warm.
Our ‘big momma’, Mica (female capuchin), has been falling in love in the last months with volunteers. She follows them, trying to touch or even jump them, and does not let him or her sleep at night, as she is banging the mesh of the window or the wooden posts. At first it seemed funny, but after being stalked some time the fun ends, especially when she started to bite, not really hard, but hard enough to break skin.
She seems to have her hormonal period, becoming of age. As she has been raised from very young with us, she sees us still too much as her group. Jordi, our male capuchin, is still too young to convince her she should go with him!
So Mica is enclosed for now. We hope we can let her out again after some time, when her hormonal period is over. We really would not like to have her closed in forever. She is a beautiful monkey and always takes really good care of new young monkeys, carrying them around, protecting them.
For the time being we will keep her busy in her cage, packing her food in packages, giving her challenges to find food or making other kind of toys.
Other Mammals
Rincay (male tapir), Quintisha (female peccary), and Elmo (male two-toed sloth) are all fine.
Elmo now leaves for some days and then comes back again. Quintisha is always happy when a volunteer comes to scratch her neck, and of course Rincay always loves some physical attention.
Birds
The last month was all about the parakeets!
The group of parakeets we already had could go (at least the ones which could fly again) to the new cage (now named Igor-cage, after a tamarin monkey we released 2 years ago). After adapting some days in the cage we opened a small door in the back upper corner.
In the first days about 90 went out, but also some came back in again.
There is a lot of sound at Esperanza Verde now, either from the cages of parakeets or from the ones hanging around outside. We hope most of them will adapt well again to living in the wild.
After this change we could move a lot of the parakeets (from the big group of about 700) out of the small cage and in bigger cages. The cages are still pretty full, but finally after all the moving, and treating each one of them, we got the group under control. We also found out that the first count (of the Ministry) was wrong, there were not around 700, the total had been 812 birds! For some days we did not have any deaths at all, so all efforts we made seemed to have worked. But still, knowing we had a total of 300 deaths is heavy on the heart.
We just have to keep focusing on the ones which survived! And they made it thanks to all the efforts and hard work of the volunteers!
Tupak (white-throated toucan) is doing great outside. He even sometimes visits the center of Esperanza Verde. He is not afraid of the monkeys, even likes to go after Willow (male woolly monkey). We just hope he will grow smart and gets to understand they could really harm him as well. But he generally just stay a bit and flies back towards Olivia´s and Douwe´s house (where his cage is), or stays nearby visiting Rincay.
One day Kayla came back home, with the news that some persons in Bello Horizonte cut down the last large and beautiful tree in the village, just to use the wood for some planks. This tree was the home for many birds, oropendolas and caciques which had their hanging nests in the tree, but as well as for many bats, which used the old nests.
They all went down. While adults could fly away, young nestlings could not and died, as well as many bats, which got literally squashed by the falling tree.
A very depressive sight, Kayla was crying of the fought of so many lives, ending just like it was nothing. Douwe and Kayla went collecting the nests next morning, checking each of them. They did not find any surviving birds, probably already taken out by people, or hopefully the nestlings were ready enough to fly to safety. They found many dead bats.
In that afternoon, Kayla was handed over the last surviving bird, a young oropendola with a broken leg. One of her friends had taken the nest and gave it in her care.
So for some weeks the oropendola (named Pauki) was in a small cage in Kaylas room (as no space was available anywhere else). It now is slowly learning to eat by itself and spends the day in Tupaks cage to learn to fly. In the night it goes back in the small cage as Tupak still sleeps in his cage. Paukis leg had healed, although crooked but he can use it. He already had some visits of wild oropendolas while he was in the outside cage.
Reptiles
Pothos, the injured yellow-footed tortoise, was brought to an outside cage. The wound is healing and he started to eat by himself again. Every time he got treated he got stronger. He did not like the handling one bit! Now he has some space to roam around and be in the sun when he wants to. He gets checked once in a while now.
Construction
We had several handy volunteers in the past months that helped a lot in the clinic. So the work has been progressing again. The river was very low again, so a lot of sand was available on the beaches at the big river.
At the moment we have less volunteers, and a lot of work with the animals, so it is mainly Douwe, Geiler and Machico working at the construction-site.
In the last month we also finished the new aviary (Igor-cage), and provided the spider-monkeys with a new door.
But of course always something new pops up here! We need water! It sometimes does not rain for weeks, although we are only in the beginning of the dry season. The family baths always in the nearby stream, to spare the little water they have at their house. Volunteers more often have to go to the waterfall for bathing, and even will have to wash most of the clothes in the stream. Basically there is water enough surrounding us, but we might have to start pumping it up from the stream again, like we did some years ago, to provide water enough for the cages, volunteer house and kitchen.
Volunteers
At the moment we have a small group of volunteers, all really dedicated to the work. Soon we will have more again, and hope to get more done in construction, as well as to do more forest walks, and another visit to the big waterfall Regalia.